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

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:

 

  See! the whyte moone sheenes onne hie;

  Whyterre ys mie true loves shroude;

  Whyterre yanne the mornynge skie,

  Whyterre yanne the evenynge cloude.

(_Ælla_, 872.)

 

and, from the _Songe bie a Manne and Womanne_,

 

  I heare them from eche grene wode tree,

  Chauntynge owte so blatauntlie,

  Tellynge lecturnyes to mee,

  Myscheefe ys whanne you are nygh.

(_Ælla_, 107.)

 

  Did ever shepherd's pipe play a prettier tune?

    He has some fine martial sounds, as for instance:

        Howel ap Jevah came from Matraval

(_Battle of Hastings_, I, 181.)

 

He rarely employs personifications, but no poet used the figure more

convincingly. The third Mynstrelle's description of Autumn is a

lovely thing, and one will not easily forget his Winter's frozen blue

eyes--though unfortunately that is not in Rowley.

 

His art was essentially dramatic, and he has some fine dramatic

moments, as for example when the Usurer soliloquizing miserably on his

certain ultimate damnation suddenly cries out

 

  O storthe unto mie mynde! I goe to helle.

(_Gouler's Requiem_.)

 

The word 'storthe' is a good example of Chatterton's use of strange

words. The effect of a sudden outcry which it produces would be lost

in a modernized version which rendered it 'death'.

 

Mr. Watts-Dunton in his article on Chatterton in Ward's _English

Poets_ speaks of his extraordinary metrical inventiveness and of his

ultimate responsibility for such lines as these--

 

  And Christabel saw the lady's eye

  And nothing else she saw thereby

  Save the boss of the shield of Sir Leoline tall

  Which hung in a murky old niche in the wall--

 

the anapaestic dance of which breaks in upon the normal iambic

movement of the poem with a natural dramatic propriety. He compares

too _The Eve of St. Agnes_ with the _Excelente Balade of Charitie_,

remarking that it was only in his latest work that Keats attained

to that dramatic objectivity which was 'the very core and centre of

Chatterton's genius.'

 

Another writer, Mr. Thomas Seccombe, speaks of his 'genuine lyric

fire, a poetic energy, and above all an intensity remote from his

contemporaries and suggestive (as Cimabue in his antique and primitive

manner is suggestive of Giotto and Angelico) of Shelley and Keats.'

 

Chatterton's influence on the great body of poets of the generation

succeeding his own was very considerable--Mr. Watts-Dunton indeed

declares him to have been the father of the New Romantic School--and

the affection with which Keats, Coleridge, Wordsworth and many others

regarded him was extraordinary. He was their pioneer, who had lost

his life in a heroic attempt to penetrate the dull crassness of the

mid-eighteenth century.

 

He had great originality and the gift of an intense imagination. If

he is sometimes crude and immature in thought and expression--if his

images sometimes weary by their monotony--it is accepted that a poet

is to be judged by his highest and not his lowest; and Chatterton's

best work has an inspiration, a singular and unique charm both of

thought and of music that is of the first order of English poetry.

III. (BIBLIOGRAPHY.)

 

 

A great deal more has been written about Chatterton than it is worth

anybody's while to read. To begin with, there are all the volumes and

pamphlets concerning themselves with the question whether the Rowley

poems were written by Chatterton or by Rowley, or by both (Chatterton

adding matter of his own to existing poems written in the fifteenth

century), or by neither. It may be said that these problems were not

conclusively and finally solved till Professor Skeat brought out his

edition of Chatterton in 1871.

 

Then again there are the various lives of the poet; for the most part

mere random aggregations of such facts, true or imagined, as fell

in the editor's way, filled out with pulpit commonplaces and easy

paragraphs beginning 'But it is ever the way of Genius ...' Professor

Wilson's _Chatterton: a Biographical Study_ is as final in its own way

as Professor Skeat's two volumes. It is a scholarly compilation of

all previous accounts, very well digested and arranged. Moreover,

the Professor has for the most part left the facts to tell their

own story; and thus his book is free from such absurdities as the

sentimental regrets of Gregory and Professor Masson that Chatterton

was led into a course of folly ending in suicide through being

deprived of a father's care. Such a father as Chatterton's was!

 

While premising that any one who wishes to learn the facts of the

boy-poet's life--his circumstances and surroundings--can find them

all set forth in Professor Wilson's book: while equally if he is

interested in the pseudo-Rowley's language, philologically considered,

he will find this elaborately examined in Professor Skeat's second

volume; it has been thought that the following bibliography of books

dealing with various aspects of the poet which were read and valued in

their day may be found of interest to students of literary history.

 

Speght's edition of Chaucer,