(1752-1770)
[Illustration: THOMAS CHATTERTON]
To the third quarter of the eighteenth century belongs the tragedy of
the life of Thomas Chatterton, who, misunderstood and neglected during
his brief seventeen years of poetic revery, has by the force of his
genius and by his actual achievement compelled the nineteenth century,
through one of its best critics, to acknowledge him as the father of the
New Romantic school, and to accord him thereby a place unique among his
contemporaries. His family and early surroundings serve in a way to
explain his development. He was born at Bristol, a town rich in the
traditions and monuments of bygone times. For nearly two hundred years
the office of sexton to the church of St. Mary Redcliffe had been handed
down in the family. At the time of the poet's birth it was held by a
maternal uncle; for his father, a "musical genius, somewhat of a poet,
an antiquary and dabbler in occult arts," was the first to aspire to a
position above the hereditary one, and had taken charge of the Pyle free
schools in Bristol. He died before his son's birth, and left his widow
to support her two children by keeping a little school and by
needlework. The boy, reserved and given to revery from his earliest
years, was at first considered dull, but finally learned to spell by
means of the illuminated capitals of an old musical folio and a
black-letter Bible. He spent much of his time with his uncle, in and
about the church. St. Mary Redcliffe, one of the finest specimens of
mediaeval church architecture in England, is especially rich in altar
tombs with recumbent carved figures of knights, and ecclesiastic and
civic dignitaries of bygone days. These became the boy's familiar
associates, and he amused himself on his lonely visits by spelling out
the old inscriptions on their monuments. There he got hold of some
quaint oaken chests in the muniment room over the porch, filled with
parchments old as the Wars of the Roses, and these deeds and charters of
the Henrys and Edwards became his primers. In 1760 he entered Colston's
"Blue-Coat" charity school, located in a fine old building of the Tudor
times. The rules of the institution provided for the training of its
inmates "in the principles of the Christian religion as laid down in the
Church catechism," and in fitting them to be apprenticed in due course
to some trade. During the six years of his stay, Chatterton received
only the rudiments of a common-school education, and found little to
nourish his genius. But being a voracious reader, he went on his small
allowance through three circulating libraries, and became acquainted
with the older English poets, and also read history and antiquities. He
very early entertained dreams of ambition, without however finding any
sympathy; so he lived in a world of his own, conceiving before the age
of twelve the romance of Thomas Rowley, an imaginary clerk of the
fifteenth century, and his patron Master William Canynge, a former mayor
of Bristol whose effigy was familiar to him from the tomb in the church.
This fiction, which after his death gave rise to the celebrated
controversy of the 'Rowley Poems,' matured at this early age as a boy's
life-dream, he fashioned into a consistent romance, and wove into it
among the prose fragments the ballads and lyrics on which his fame as
poet now rests. His earliest literary forgery was a practical joke
played on a credulous pewterer at Bristol, for whom he fabricated a
pedigree dating back to the time of the Norman Conquest, which he
professed to have collected from ancient manuscripts. It is remarkable
as the work of a boy not yet fourteen. He was rewarded with a crown
piece, and the success of this hoax encouraged him further to play upon
the credulity of his townspeople, and to continue writing prose and
verse in pseudo-antique style.
In 1767 he was bound apprentice to John Lambert, attorney. The office
duties were light. He spent his spare time in poetizing, and sent
anonymously transcripts from professedly old poems to the local papers.
Their authorship being traced to him, he now claimed that his father had
found numerous old poems and other manuscripts in a coffer of the
muniment room at Redcliffe, and that he had transcribed them. Under
guise of this fiction he produced, within the two years of his
apprenticeship, a mass of pseudo-antique dramatic, lyric, and
descriptive poems, and fragments of local and general history, connected
all with his romance of the clerk of Bristol. A scholarly knowledge of
Middle English was rare one hundred and thirty years ago, and the
self-taught boy easily gulled the local antiquaries. He even deceived
Horace Walpole, who, dabbling in mediaevalism, had opened the way for
prose romances with his 'Castle of Otranto,' a spurious antique of the
same time in which Chatterton had placed his fiction. Walpole at first
treated him courteously, even offering to print some of the poems. But
when Gray and Mason pronounced them modern, he at once gave Chatterton
the cold shoulder, entirely forgetting his own imposition on a credulous
public.
Chatterton now turned to periodical literature and the politics of the
day, and began to contribute to various London magazines. In the spring
of 1770 he finally came up to London, to start on the life of a literary
adventurer on a capital of less than five pounds. He lived abstemiously
and worked incessantly, literally day and night. He had a wonderful
versatility; he would write in the manner of any one he chose to
imitate, and he tried his hand at every species of book-work. But even
under the strain of this incessant productivity he found time to turn
back to his boyhood dreams, and produced one of his finest poems, the
'Ballad of Charity.' At first his contributions were freely accepted,
but he was poorly paid, and sometimes not at all. Yet out of his scanty
earnings he bought costly presents for his mother and sister, as tokens
of affection and an earnest of what he hoped to do for them. After
scarcely two months in London he was at the end of his resources. He
made an attempt to gain a position as surgeon's assistant on board of an
African trader, but was unsuccessful. He now found himself face to face
with famine; and, too proud to ask for assistance or to accept even the
hospitality of a single meal, he on the night of August 25th, 1770,
locked himself into his garret, destroyed all his note-books and papers,
and swallowed a dose of arsenic. It is believed that he was privately
buried in the churchyard of St. Mary Redcliffe. There a monument has
been erected, with an inscription from his poem 'Will':--
"To the memory of Thomas Chatterton. Reader! judge not. If thou
art a Christian, believe that he shall be judged by a superior
power. To that power alone is he now answerable."
His death attracted little notice, for he was regarded merely as the
transcriber of the 'Rowley' poems. They were collected after his death,
from the various persons to whom he had given the manuscripts, and
occasioned a controversy that has lasted almost down to the present
generation. But only an age untrained in philological research could
ever have received them as genuine productions of the fifteenth century:
for Chatterton, who knew little of the old authors antedating Spenser,
constructed with the help of Bailey's and Kersey's English dictionaries
a lingo of his own; he strung together old words of all periods and
dialects, and even coined words himself to suit the metre. His lingo
resembles anything rather than Middle English. It is supposed that he
wrote first in modern English, and then translated into his own dialect;
for the poems do not suffer by retranslation,--on the contrary, they are
more intelligible and often more rhythmical. Chatterton had a wonderful
memory, and having read enormously, there are frequent though perhaps
unconscious plagiarisms from Spenser, Shakespeare, Dryden, Pope, Gray,
and others.
Yet after all has been said against the spurious character of the
'Rowley' poems, Chatterton's two volumes of collected writings, produced
under the most adverse circumstances, are a record of youthful precocity
unparalleled in literary history. He wrote spirited satires at ten, and
some of his best old verse before sixteen. 'AElla' is a dramatic poem of
sustained power and originality, and its songs have the true lyric ring;
the 'Ode to Liberty,' a fragment from the tragedy of 'Goddwyn,' is with
its bold imagery one of the finest martial lyrics in the language; the
'Ballad of Charity,' almost the last poem he wrote, comes in its
objectivity and artistic completeness near to some of Keats's best
ballad work. But more wonderful perhaps than this early blossoming of
his genius is its absolute originality. At a time when Johnson was the
literary dictator of London, and Pope's manner still paramount,
Chatterton, unmindful of their conventionalities and the current French
influence, instinctively turned to earlier models, and sought his
inspiration at the true source of English song. Bishop Percy's 'Reliques
of Old English Poetry,' published in 1765, first made the people
acquainted with their fine old ballads; but by that year Chatterton had
already planned the story of the monk of Bristol and written some of the
poems. Gifted with a rich vein of romance, he heralded the coming
revival of mediaeval literature. But he not only divined the new
movements of poetry--he was also responsible for one side of its
development. He had a poet's ear for metrical effects, and transmitted
this gift to the romantic poets through Coleridge; for the latter,
deeply interested in the tragedy of the life of the Bristol boy, studied
his work; and traces of this study, resulting in freer rhythm and new
harmonies, are found in Coleridge's own verse. The influence of the
author of 'Christabel' on his brother poets is indisputable; hence his
indebtedness to Chatterton gives to the latter at once his rightful
position as the father of the New Romantic school. Keats also shows
signs of close acquaintance with Chatterton; and he proves moreover by
the dedication of his 'Endymion' that he cherished the memory of the
unfortunate young poet, with whom he had, as far as the romantic temper
on its objective side goes, perhaps the closest spiritual kinship of any
poet of his time.
But quite apart from his youthful precocity and his influence on later
poets, Chatterton holds no mean place in English literature because of
the intrinsic value of his performance. His work, on the one hand, aside
from the 'Rowley' poems, shows him a true poet of the eighteenth
century, and the best of it entitles him to a fair place among his
contemporaries; but on the other hand he stands almost alone in his
generation in possessing the highest poetic endowments,--originality of
thought, a quick eye to see and note, the gift of expression, sustained
power of composition, and a fire and intensity of imagination. In how
far he would have fulfilled his early promise it is idle to surmise; yet
what poet, in the whole range of English, nay of _all_ literature, at
seventeen years and nine months of age, has produced work of such
excellence as this "marvelous boy," who, unrecognized and driven by
famine, took his own life in a London garret?