The Rowley Poems by Thomas Chatterton (inspirational books to read .txt) 📖

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_,