Appreciations 
299 
man was better fitted than he to " study those agencies under social control that 
may improve or impair the racial qualities of future generations, either physically 
or mentally " ; none we had come across was so well suited to make knowledge 
reached by scientific research a factor of social progress. He knew how to clothe 
scientific results in a garb which captivated the mental eye of him who listened to 
his spoken or read his written words. Goring was intended by nature for a master- 
craftsman of exposition. His sceptical spirit demanding a rigid foundation for 
truth was combined with an unlimited enthusiasm that truth when known should 
be proclaimed to the many. Yet in his own life, " Thi'ones, powers, dominions 
blocked the view, with episodes and underlings." 
What then is the outcome of Goring's work ? Has he decreased crime or 
bettered the lot of the criminal ? Not directly, the solitary individual can achieve 
little in this sense ; he has moved stones from the path of the outcast, and we can 
picture many a criminal who would have wished to stand by his graveside. Has 
he pointed out the lines upon which the state in future should deal with its 
defaulters ? Again not directly, but only indirectly. What then has he achieved ? 
He has given us a portrait of the criminal as he really exists ; he has painted 
in the nature of his physique, he has indicated his facial and underlying mental 
traits, his hereditary tendencies and his home associations. And he has made for 
ever atypical the criminal of current drama and novelistic literature. Here it is 
that literature owes a deep debt to Goring. It cannot survive without its villains 
but the individual writer will never be as intimate as Goring was with poisoner, 
murderer and spy. Yet if that writer approaches with intuition not the masses 
of statistical data, but the text of Goring's life-work, even in its recently issued 
abridgement*, he will learn to see the criminal as Goring saw him, he will learn to 
know the real man and his attitude to crime. He will learn that Goring was a 
creator in the literary sense f, and with imagination stirred he will feel the 
impulse to adopt and adapt that realistic portrait of the criminal as only true art 
can do. Through literature the world at large will know at last what crime and 
the criminal really are. Not only will literature profit, but the world which 
easily grasps truth when depicted by art will understand and gain something of 
the spirit of the man whose life's work alas ! is embraced within the livid wrappers 
of a government publication. 
" En mands gerning er bans sjael, og sin gerning skal blive ved at leve pS, 
jorden." — The work of a man is his soul, and on earth his work shall not perish. 
* " The English Convict " (Abridgement), Wymans & Co., 1915. 
t The present writer has many sins to atone for, but perhaps none he regrets now more than the 
stringency with which he docked the original MS. of Charles Goring of many of its literary qualities as 
unsuited to a scientific and government publication. 
