BURKE AND HARE, MURDERERS* *Text from The King in the Golden Mask and other stories Carcenet 1985, Exeter, England Translation (c) 1982 Iain White
	Mr William Burke rose from the basest of beginnings to an eternal renown. Hew was born in Ireland, and began life as a shoemaker. For many years he plied this trade in Edinburgh; there he befriended Mr Hare, over whom he had a great influence. There is no doubt whatever that, in the collaboration between Messrs Burke and Hare, the inventive and simplifying faculty was Burke's. But their names remain as inseperable in the art as are those of Beaumont and Fletcher. They lived their lives together, worked together, and they were taken together. Hare never contested the popular favour that attached itself to the name of Burke. Such complete disinterest has never received its recompense. It is Burke who has bequeathed his name to the special procedure that honours both collaborators. The monosyllable burke will long survive on the lips of men to whom the person Hare will have vanished into the oblivion that unjustly swallows up obscure toilers.       Mr Burke would seem to have brought to his work the magical fantasy of the green isle of his birth. His mind must have been steeped in the tales of folklore. There is in what he did, as it were, a distant breath of the Thousand-and-One-Nights. Like a caliph wandering in the nocturnal gardens of Baghdad, he desired mysterious adventures, intrigued as he was by tales of the unknown and of men from foregin parts. Like a great black slave armed with a scimitar, for him there was no end more proper to his enjoyment than the death of others. But his Anglo-Saxon originality consisted in his being able to draw the greatest advantage from the play of his Celtic imagination. When his artistic pleasure was at an end, what, pray, did the black slave do with those whose head he had cut off? With a wholly Arabian barbarism, he carved them into quarters so as to preserve them, salted, in a cellar. What profit did he obtain of this? None. Mr Burke was infinitely superior.       In a sense, Mr Hare served as his Dinarzade. It would appear that Mr Burke's inventive power had been singularly excite by the presence of his friend. The illusion of their dreams permitted them to make do with a garret in which to lodge their grandiose visions. Mr Hare lived in a little room on the sixth floor of a teeming tenement in Edinburgh. A settee, a great chest and, doubtless, a few toilet-utensils, comprised all the furniture. On a small table a bottle of whisky and three glasses. As a rule, Mr Burke received only one person at a time; and never the same. His habit was to invite an unknown passer-by, at nightfall. He would roam the street to scan the faces that aroused his curiosity. Sometimes he chose at random. He woould address the stranger with all politeness of which Haroun-al-Rashid would have been capable. The stranger would climb the six stories to Mr Hare's garret. They would surrender the settee to him; they would offer him scotch whisky to drink; and Mr Burke would question him regarding the most unusual incidents inhis life. Mr Burke was a perfectly insatiable listerner. The narrative was always interrupted before daybreak by Mr Hare. The form Mr Hare's interruption took was always the same, and was most imperative. To cut short the recital, it was Mr Hare's custom to slip behind the settee and apply both his hands to the mouth of the storyteller. At the very same moment Mr Burke would seat himself on the man's chest. The pair would remain in this position, motionless, dreaming of the end of the story which they never heard. In this way Messrs Burke and Hare finished a great number of tales the world will never know.       When the narrative was definitively brought to an end, along with the breath of the narrator, Messrs Burke and Hare would unravel the mystery. They would undress the stranger, admire his jewellery, count his money and read his letters. Some of this correspondence was not without interest. Then they placed the corpse in Mr Hare's great chest to cool. And here Mr Burke demonstrated the powerful practicality of his mind.       In order to drain the last drops of pleasure from the adventure, it was necessary that the corpse be fresh, but not warm.       In those early days of the century, medical men were fervent students of anatomy; but because of the principles of religion, they experienced great difficulties in obtaining subjects for dissection. As a man of intelligence, Mr Burke was aware of this scientific gap. It is not known how he became acquainted with a venerable and learned practiciioner, Dr Knox, who held a chair in the Faculty of Edinburgh. Perhaps Mr Burke had attended courses of lectures, although his imagination must have inclined him rather towards artistic tastes. It is certain that he promised Dr Knox to aid him to the best of his abilities. Dr Knox, for his part, took it upon himself to pay him for his trouble. The tariff followed a descending scale, from the bodies of young persons to those of the aged. These were of small interest to Dr Knox.       This was also Mr Burke's opinion-for ordinarily they had less imagination. Dr Knox became famous among his colleagues for his anatomical knowledge. Messrs Burke and Hare profited from thier life as dilettantes. It is no doubt fitting to place at this time the classic period of their existence.       For the all-powerful genius of Mr Burke soon led him beyond the norms and rules of a tragedy in which there was still a story and a confidant. Mr Burke developed, quite on his own (it would be puerile to invoke the influence of Mr Hare) towards a kind of romanticism. The setting of Mr Hare's garret did not meet his needs; he invented the nocturnal procedure, in the fog. Mr Burke's numerous imitators have somewhat dulled the originality of his manner. But this is the original tradition of the master.       Mr Burke's fecund imagination grew tired of the endlessly similar narratives of human experience . The outcome had never lived up to his expectation. He came to be interested only in the real aspect, for him always different, of death. He localised the entire drama in the denouement. The quality of the actors no longer concerned him. It was a matter of chance. The one prop in Mr Burke's theatre was a linen mask, filled with pitch. On foggy nights Mr Burke would set out, carrying this mask in his hand. He was accompanied by Mr Hare. Mr Burke would wait for the first passer-by and walk before him; then, turning, he would apply the mask to his face, suddenly and firmly. Forthwith Messrs Burke and Hare would lay hold, each on his side, of the actor's arms. The linen mask, filled with pitch, introduced a simplification of genius in that it simultaneously stifled both cries and breath. What is more, it had an air of tragedy. The fog blurred the player's gestures. Some actors seemed to be miming drunkenness. At the end of this scene Messrs Burke and Hare took a cab, disrobed the player in their drama; Hare took charge of the costumes, and Mr Burke provided Dr Knox with a corpse, fresh and in good order.       Here, at varience with the majority of biographers, I shall leave Messrs Burke and Hare, haloed in their glory. Why destroy so fine an artistic effect by leading them languishingly to the end of their career, by exposing their failures and their disappointments. There is no call to see them otherwise than on foggy nights, their mask at the ready. For the end of their life was commonplace, amd like so many others. One of two seems to have been hanged, and Dr Knox had to quit the Faculty of Edinburgh. Mr Burke has left behind him no other works.
			(Above) Messrs Burke and Hare, in flagrante delicto.