Chapter 2

Dodsley having failed him, Chatterton next took the bolder step of writing to Horace Walpole, who must have been much in his mind for some years before his sending the letter. Some one has made the ingenious suggestion that a consideration of Walpole's delicate connoisseurship sensibly coloured Chatterton's account of the life of Mastre William Canynge. More than this, his delight in the Mediæval--the Gothic--and his content with what may be termed a purely impressionistic view of the past, was singularly akin to the Bristol poet's own outlook on these matters. Walpole had further some three years before this time indulged in the very harmless literary fraud of publishing his _Castle of Otranto_ as a translation from a mediæval Italian MS., only confessing his own authorship upon the publication of the second edition. To Walpole then Chatterton addressed a short letter enclosing some verses by John à Iscam and a manuscript on the _Ryse of Peyncteyning yn Englande wroten by T. Rowleie 1469 for Mastre Canynge_[5] with the suggestion that it might be of service to Mr. Walpole 'in any future edition of his truly entertaining anecdotes of painting.' This drew from the connoisseur one of the politest letters[6] that have been written in English, in which the simple and elegant sentences expressed with a very charming courtesy the interest and curiosity of its author. He gave his correspondent 'a thousand thanks'; 'he would not be sorry to print' (at his private press) 'some of Rowley's poems'; and added--which reads strangely in the light of what follows--'I would by no means borrow and detain your MS.' Now Chatterton's _Peyncteyning yn Englande_ is the clumsiest fraud of all the Rowley compositions, with the single exception of a letter from the secular Priest which exhibits the exact style and language of de Foe's _Robinson Crusoe_.[7] Professor Skeat has pointed out that the Anglo-Saxon words, which occur with tolerable frequency in the _Ryse_, begin almost without exception with the letter _A_, and concludes that Chatterton had read in an old English glossary, probably Somners, no farther than _Ah_. Walpole however 'had not the happiness of understanding the Saxon language,' and it was not until after he had received a second letter from Chatterton, enclosing more Rowleian matter both prose and verse, that he consulted his friends Gray and Mason, who at once detected the forgery. If, as seems certain, _Elinoure and Juga_ was among the pieces sent, it was inevitable that Gray should recognize lines 22-25 of that poem as a striking if unconscious reminiscence of his own _Elegy in a Country Churchyard_. Now Walpole had some years before introduced Ossian's poems to the world and his reputation as a critic had suffered when their authenticity was generally disputed. Accordingly he wrote Chatterton a stiff letter suggesting that 'when he should have made a fortune he might unbend himself with the studies consonant to his inclination'; and in this one must suppose that he was actuated by a very natural irritation at having been duped a second time by an expositor of antique poetry, rather than by any snobbish contempt for his correspondent, who had frankly confessed himself an attorney's apprentice. Chatterton then wrote twice to have his MS. returned, asserting at the same time his confidence in the authenticity of the Rowley documents. Walpole for some reason returned no answer to either application, but left for Paris, where he stayed six weeks, returning to find another letter from Chatterton written with considerable dignity and restraint--a last formal demand to have his manuscript returned. Whereupon, amazed at the boy's 'singular impertinence,' the great man snapped up both letters and poems and returned them in a blank cover--that is to say without a word of apology or explanation. He might have acted otherwise if he had been a more generous spirit, but an attempt had been made to impose upon him which had in part succeeded, and he can hardly be blamed for showing his resentment by neglecting to return the forgeries. One may notice in passing that when Chatterton, more than a year later, committed suicide there were not wanting a great many persons absurd enough to accuse Walpole of having driven him to his death--a contemptible suggestion. Yet the connoisseur's credit certainly suffers from the fact that he gave currency to a false account of the transaction in the hope of concealing his first credulity.[8]

We now come to the circumstance which procured Chatterton's release from his irksome apprenticeship--his threat of suicide. He had often been heard to speak approvingly of suicide, and there is a story, which has, however, little authority, that once in a company of friends he drew a pistol from his pocket, put it to his head, and exclaimed 'Now if one had but the courage to pull the trigger!' This anecdote--if not in fact true--illustrates very well the gloomy depression of spirit which alternated with those outbursts of feverish energy in which his poems were composed. And he had much to make him miserable when with a change of mood he lost his buoyancy and confidence of ultimate fame and success. His ambition was boundless and his audience was as limited in numbers as in understanding. He was as proud as the poor Spaniard who on a bitter day rejected the friendly offer of a cloak with the words 'A gentleman does not feel the cold,' and his pride was continually fretted. He was keenly conscious of the indignity of his position in Lambert's kitchen; he seems to have been pressed for money, and though he 'did not owe five pounds altogether' he probably smarted under the thought that all his hard work, all the long nights of study and composition in the moonlight which helped his thought, could not earn him even this comparatively small sum. Again, he was not restrained from a contemplation of suicide by any scruples of religion--for he has left his views expressed in an article written some few days before his death. He believed in a daemon or conscience which prompted every man to follow good and avoid evil; but--different men different daemons--his held self-slaughter justified when life became intolerable; with him therefore it would be no crime. Wilson suggests too that the boy who had read theology, orthodox and the reverse, held to the common eighteenth century view that death was annihilation; and this may well have been the case. One thing at any rate is certain, that Chatterton on the 14th of April 1770 left on his desk a number of pieces of paper filled with a jumble of satiric verse, mocking prose, and directions for the construction of a mediæval tomb to cover the remains of his father and himself. Part of this strange document was headed in legal form--'This is the last Will and Testament of me Thomas Chatterton,' and contained the declaration that the Testator would be dead on the evening of the following day--'being the feast of the resurrection.' The bundle was dated and endorsed 'All this wrote between 11 and 2 o'clock Saturday in the utmost distress of mind.' Now while one need not doubt that the distress was perfectly genuine, it is tolerably certain that Chatterton intended his master to find what he had written and draw his own conclusions as to the desirability of dismissing his apprentice. The attorney (who is represented as timid, irritable and narrow-minded)[9] did in fact find the document, was thoroughly frightened, and gave the boy his release. He was now free to starve or earn a living by his pen--so no doubt he represented the alternative to his mother. He must go to London, where he would certainly make his fortune. He had been supplying four or five London journals of good standing with free contributions for some time past, and had received it appears great encouragement from their editors. He gained his point and started out for the great city.

His letters show that he called upon four editors the very day he arrived. These were Edmunds of the _Middlesex Journal_; Fell of the _Freeholders Magazine_; Hamilton of the _Town and Country Magazine_; and Dodsley--the same to whom he had sent a portion of _Ælla_--of the _Annual Register_. He had received, he wrote, 'great encouragement from them all'; 'all approved of his design; he should soon be settled.' Fell told him later that the great and notorious Wilkes 'affirmed that his writings could not be the work of a youth and expressed a desire to know the author.' This may or may not have been true, but it is certain that Fell was not the only newspaper proprietor who was ready to exchange a little cheap flattery for articles by Chatterton that would never be paid for.[10]

We know very little about Chatterton's life in London--but that little presents some extraordinarily vivid pictures. He lodged at first with an aunt, Mrs. Ballance, in Shoreditch, where he refused to allow his room to be swept, as he said 'poets hated brooms.' He objected to being called Tommy, and asked his aunt 'If she had ever heard of a poet's being called Tommy' (you see he was still a boy). 'But she assured him that she knew nothing about poets and only wished he would not set up for being a gentleman.' He had the appearance of being much older than he was, (though one who knew him when he was at Colston's Hospital described him as having light curly hair and a face round as an apple; his eyes were grey and sparkled when he was interested or moved). He was 'very much himself--an admirably expressive phrase. He had the same fits of absentmindedness which characterized him as a child. 'He would often look stedfastly in a person's face without speaking or seeming to see the person for a quarter of an hour or more till it was quite frightful.' We have accounts of his sitting up writing nearly the whole of the night, and his cousin was almost afraid to share a room with him 'for to be sure he was a spirit and never slept.'[11]

He wrote political letters in the style of Junius--generally signing them Decimus or Probus--that kind of vague libellous ranting which will always serve to voice the discontent of the inarticulate. He wrote essays--moral, antiquarian, or burlesque; he furbished up his old satires on the worthies of Bristol; he wrote songs and a comic opera, and was miserably paid when he was paid at all. None of his work written in these veins has any value as literature; but the skill with which this mere lad not eighteen years old gauged the taste of the town and imitated all branches of popular literature would probably have no parallel in the history of journalism should such a history ever come to be written.

His letters to his mother and sister were always gay and contained glowing accounts of his progress; but in reality he must have been miserably poor and ill-fed.

In July he changed his lodgings to the house of a Mrs. Angel, a sacque maker in Brook Street, Holborn; the dead season of August was coming on and probably he wanted to conceal his growing embarrassment from his aunt, who might have sent word of it to his mother at Bristol.

His opera was accepted--it is a spirited and well written piece--and for this he was paid five pounds, which enabled him to send a box of presents to his mother and sister bought with money he had earned. He had dreamed of this since he was eight. But his _Balade of Charitie_--the most finished of all the Rowley poems--was refused by the _Town and Country Magazine_ about a month before the end; which came on August 24th. He was starving and still too proud to accept the invitations of his landlady and of a friendly chemist to take various meals with them. He was offended at the good landlady's suggestion that he should dine with her; for 'her expressions seemed to hint' (to _hint_) 'that he was in want'--no cloak for Thomas Chatterton! He could have borrowed money and gone back to Bristol, but there are many precedents for beaten generalissimos falling on their swords rather than return home defeated and disgraced. How could he return? He had set out so confidently; had boasted not a little of his powers, and had satirized all the good people in Bristol _de haut en bas_. Think of the jokes and commiserations of Burgum, Catcott, and the rest! 'Well, here you are again, boy; but of course _we_ knew it would come to this!' He could not endure to hear that.

Accordingly on Friday the 24th August 1770 he tore up his manuscripts, locked his door, and poisoned himself with arsenic.

Southey, Byron, and others have supposed that Chatterton was mad; it has been suggested that he was the victim of a suicidal mania. All the evidence that there is goes to show that he was not. He was very far-sighted, shrewd, hard-working, and practical, for all his imaginative dreaming of a non-existent past; and this at least may be said, that Chatterton's suicide was the logical end to a very remarkably consistent life.

Chatterton's character has suffered a good deal from three accusations vehemently urged by Maitland and his eighteenth-century predecessors. The first is that the boy was a 'forger'; the second that he was a freethinker; the third that he was a free-liver.

To examine these in turn: the first admits of no denial as a question of fact, but justification may be pleaded which some will accept as a complete exculpation and others perhaps will hardly comprehend.

Chatterton could only produce poetry in his fifteenth-century vein; his imagination failed him in modern English. No one who has any appreciation of Rowley's poems will consider that the _African Eclogues_ are for a moment comparable with them. If he was to write at all he must produce antiques, and, as it happened, interest had been aroused in ancient poetry, largely by the publication of Percy's _Reliques_ and of the spurious Ossian. Appearing at this juncture, then, as ancient writings taken from an old chest, his poems would be read and their value appreciated; while no one would trouble to make out the professed imitations--not by any means easy reading--of an attorney's apprentice. Probably if an adequate audience had been secured in his lifetime, Chatterton would have revealed the secret when it had served its purpose--just as Walpole confessed to the authorship of _Otranto_ only when that book had run into a second edition.

To the second count of the indictment no defence is urged. Chatterton was too honest and too intelligent to accept traditional dogmatics without examination.

Finally, he was no free-liver in the sense in which that objectionable expression is used. Rather he was an ascetic who studied and wrote poetry half through the night, who ate as little as he slept, and would make his dinner off 'a tart and a glass of water.' He was devoted to his mother and sister and to his poetry; and what spare time was not occupied with the latter he seems to have spent largely with the former. The attempt to represent him as a sort of provincial Don Juan--though in the precocious licence of a few of his acknowledged writings he has even given it some colour himself--cannot be reconciled with the recorded facts of his life.

Equally ill judged is that picture which is presented by Professor Masson and other writers less important--of a truant schoolboy, a pathetic figure, who had petulantly cast away from him the consolations of religion. Monsieur Callet, his French biographer, knew better than this: 'Il fallait l'admirer, lui, non le plaindre,' is the last word on Chatterton.

[Footnote 1: An extraordinary production for a boy of twelve, but we need not suppose that if 'Elenoure and Juga' were written in 1764 and not published until 1769 no alterations and improvements were made by its author in the period between these dates.]

[Footnote 2: From the engraving in Tyrwhitt's edition.]

[Footnote 3: See Southey and Cottle's edition, quoted in Skeat, ii, p. 123.]

[Footnote 4: Dean Milles has a delightful account of the reception accorded to Rowley in the Chatterton household. Neither mother nor sister would appear to have understood a line of the poems, but Mary Chatterton (afterwards Mrs. Newton) remembered she had been particularly wearied with a 'Battle of Hastings' of which her brother would continually and enthusiastically recite portions.]

[Footnote 5: Wilson believed that Chatterton never sent the _Ryse_, &c., at all (see page 173 of his _Chatterton: A Biographical Study_), but this is disposed of by the fact that the _Ryse of Peyncteyning_ is the only piece of Chatterton's which contains _Saxon_ words.]

[Footnote 6: March 28th, 1769.]

[Footnote 7: _An account of Master William Canynge written by Thos. Rowlie Priest in_ 1460. Skeat, Vol. III, p. 219; W. Southey's edition, Vol. III, p. 75. See especially the last paragraph.]

[Footnote 8: See _Letters of Horace Walpole_, edited by Mrs. Paget Toynbee (Clarendon Press), Vol. XIV, pp. 210, 229; Vol. XV, p. 123.]

[Footnote 9: But attorneys are seldom 'in regrate' with the friends of Poetry.]

[Footnote 10: Masson's reconstruction of the scene between Chatterton and the editor of the _Freeholder's Magazine_ is very convincing (see his _Chatterton: a Biography_, p. 160).]

[Footnote 11: Almost everything that we know of Chatterton in London was ascertained by Sir H. Croft and printed in his _Love and Madness_ (see Bibliography).]

II. THE VALUE OF ROWLEY'S POEMS--PHILOLOGICAL AND LITERARY

As imitations of fifteenth-century composition it must be confessed the Rowley poems have very little value. Of Chatterton's method of antiquating something has already been said. He made himself an antique lexicon out of the glossary to Speght's _Chaucer_, and such words as were marked with a capital O, standing for 'obsolete' in the Dictionaries of Kersey and Bailey. Now even had his authorities been well informed, which they were not by any means, and had Chatterton never misread or misunderstood them, which he very frequently did, it was impossible that his work should have been anything better than a mosaic of curious old words of every period and any dialect. Old English, Middle English, and Elizabethan English, South of England folk-words or Scots phrases taken from the border ballads--all were grist for Rowley's mill. It is only fair to say that he seldom invented a word outright, but he altered and modified with a free hand. Professor Skeat indeed estimates that of the words contained in Milles' Glossary to the Rowley Poems only seven percent are genuine old words correctly used. The Professor in his modernized edition is continually pointing out with kindly reluctance that such and such a word never bore the meaning ascribed to it--that because, for instance, Bailey had explained _Teres major_ as a smooth muscle of the arm it was not therefore any legitimate inference of Chatterton's that _tere_ (singular form) meant a muscle and could be translated 'health'. Only occasionally does one find the note (written with an obviously sincere pleasure) 'This word is correctly used.' Of course it was impossible that Chatterton should have produced even a colourable imitation of fifteenth-century poetry at a time when even Malone--for all his acknowledged reputation as an English Scholar--could not quote Chaucer so as to make his lines scan. The _Rowley Poems_ and Percy's _Reliques_ mark the beginning of that renascence of our older poetry so conspicuous in the time of Lamb and Hazlitt. Before this epoch was the Augustan age, much too well satisfied with its own literature to concern itself with an unfashionable past.

But, after all, however absurd from any historical point of view the language and metres of the boy-poet may be, at least he invented a practicable language which admirably conveyed his impression of the latest period of the middle ages--that after-glow which began with the death of Chaucer. Chatterton's poetry is a pageant staged by an impressionist. It cannot be submitted to a close examination, and it is all wrong historically, yet it presents a complete picture with an artistic charm that must be judged on its own merits. An illusion is successfully conveyed of a dim remote age when an idle-strenuous people lived only to be picturesque, to kill one another in tourneys, to rear with painful labour beautiful elaborate cathedrals, and yet had so much time on their hands that they could pass half their lives cracking unhallowed sconces in the Holy Land and, in that part of their ample leisure which they devoted to study, spell 'flourishes' as 'Florryschethe'. But if any one still anxious for literal truth should insist--'Is not the impression as false as the medium that conveys it? Were the middle ages really like that? Is it not a fact that the average baron stayed at home in his castle devising abominable schemes to wring money or its equivalent from miserable and half-starved peasants?'--such a one can only be answered with another question: 'Is Pierrot like a man, and has it been put beyond question that Pontius Pilate was hanged for beating his wife?' The Rowley writings are--properly considered--entirely fanciful and unreal. They have many faults, but are seen at their worst when Chatterton is trying to exhibit some eternal truth. There is a horrible (but perfectly natural) didacticism--the inevitable priggishness of a clever boy--which occasionally intrudes itself on his best work. Thus that charming fanciful fragment which begins--

As onn a hylle one eve fittynge At oure Ladie's Chyrche mouche wonderynge

embodies this truism fit for a bread-platter--or to be the 'Posy of a ring'--'Do your best.'

Canynges and Gaunts culde doe ne moe.

And the poet's boyishness demands still further consideration. He has a crude violence of expression which is apt to shock the mature person--some of the descriptions of wounds in the two Battles of Hastings would sicken a butcher; while in another vein such a phrase as

Hee thoughte ytt proper for to cheese a wyfe, And use the sexes for the purpose gevene. (_Storie of William Canynge_)

has an absurd affectation of straightforward good sense divested of sentiment which could not appeal to any one on a higher plane of civilization than a medical student.

And this is easily explicable if only it is borne in mind that the Rowley poems were written by a boy, and that such lovely things as the Dirge in _Ælla_ suggest a maturity that Chatterton did not by any means perfectly possess. In some respects he was as childish (to use the word in no contemptuous sense) as in others he was precocious. And it is a thousand pities that the difficulties of Chatterton's language and the peculiar charm and invention of his metrical technique cannot be appreciated till the boyish love of adventure, delight in imagined bloodshed, and ignorance of sentimental love, have generally been left behind. Nothing--to give an example--could be more frigid than the description of Kennewalcha--

White as the chaulkie clyffes of Brittaines isle, Red as the highest colour'd Gallic wine

(an unthinkable study in burgundy and whitewash, _Battle of Hastings_, II, 401); nothing, on the other hand, more vivid, more obviously written with a pen that shook with excitement, than

The Sarasen lokes _owte_: he doethe feere, &c. (_Eclogue the Second_, 23.)

Soe wylle wee beere the Dacyanne armie downe, And throughe a storme of blodde wyll reache the champyon crowne. (_Ælla_, 631.)

Loverdes, how doughtilie the tylterrs joyne! (_Tournament_, 92.).

In fine, there is no poet, one may boldly declare, whose pages are so filled with battle, murder and sudden death, as Chatterton's are; and this is perhaps the clearest indication he gives of immaturity.

But if his ideas were sometimes crude and boyish they were not by any means always so; he has flashes of genius, sudden beauties that take away the breath. A better example than this of what is called the sublime could not be found: