[CHAPTER XXIX.]
GEORGIAN POETRY.
II.
Thomas Chatterton.
The name of Thomas Chatterton, the youngest and most short-lived of English poets, is curiously connected with that of Horace Walpole. Born, at Bristol, on 20 November, 1752, under the shadow of the beautiful old church of St. Mary Redcliffe, Chatterton from infancy became, as it were, possessed by the charm of the edifice and of the Middle Ages. Members of Chatterton's family had for more than a century been associated with the church as sextons; probably they had never given a thought to its beauty and historical associations, but these haunted their descendant, and the story of his childhood reads like a fantasy by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Among the clergy and people of Bristol the spirit of the eighteenth century, indeed the natural, usual contempt for things old, beautiful, and not understood, was complacently active. The chests which contained the archives of the church had been broken into by the Vestry, and quantities of old parchment documents, some of them illuminated, had been thrown about. Chatterton's father (died 1752), a schoolmaster, had taken as much of the stuff as he chose, and manuscripts in the house of the boy's mother were used for domestic purposes. The little boy, till the age of 6, had been curiously lethargic (and far from truthful); the sight of the illuminated parchments awakened his intellect; he stored all that he could find in a den of his own, and became a voracious reader. In 1760 he was sent to Colston's Hospital, a school resembling Christ's Hospital in London. He was soon, at the age of 10, a versifier, his Muse was first the sacred, then the satiric; but already, by the age of 11, he had made for himself, as some children do, a society of "invisible playmates," notably "T. Rowlie, a secular priest," of the age of Henry VI and Edward IV, and already he was writing, in a kind of old English made up out of glossaries, poems which he passed off as Rowlie's, found by himself in the derelict archives of the church.
In short, Chatterton might have seemed to be a victim of "split personality," and to be now Rowlie, and a number of other secondary selves, now the actual Chatterton, apprentice to an attorney. His conduct was almost as abnormal as his genius was precocious, and his passion for fame or notoriety was not quite sane. But, in fact, he knew very well what he was about, and, in December, 1768, attempted to dispose of "Rowley's ancient poems," including "The Tragedy of Aella," to Dodsley, the publisher. The success of Percy's ballads from the Old Folio (1765) may have suggested his scheme to the boy, but Dodsley was not tempted. Horace Walpole had published the first edition of "The Castle of Otranto" at the end of 1764. He used the conventional device (already familiar to the Greek romancers in the third century a.d.) of pretending to have found the tale in an ancient manuscript. Chatterton had proclaimed his discoveries in manuscripts in the summer of 1764, when he was 12 years old; in Horace Walpole he recognized, in 1769, a kindred spirit, and offered to show Walpole not only poems by Rowlie, but a history of English painters by the same learned divine. Walpole replied very courteously and gratefully, but "I have not the happiness of understanding the Saxon language". In a reply Chatterton explained his circumstances; his youth and position; and Gray had assured Walpole that the manuscripts sent were forgeries. Walpole therefore advised Chatterton to adhere to his profession, adding that experts were not convinced of the genuineness of the papers. He took no notice of several letters from Chatterton, and, after receiving a curt and angry note (24 July, 1769), sent back the manuscripts without further comment, and thought no more of the matter till he heard from Goldsmith, at a dinner of the Royal Academy, that Chatterton had committed suicide in London. After an attempt to support himself by hackwork, political and other, the poor boy, whose pride could not stoop to soliciting charity, had poisoned himself on the night of 24 August, 1770. Six weeks earlier he had been buying and sending presents of porcelain, fans, and snuff, to his mother and sister; twelve days before his death he had written that he intended to go abroad as a surgeon's mate.
Even when he wrote in ordinary English, Chatterton showed rare precocity. When he wrote in "Rowleian," in an invented dialect as remote from real English of any day as the language of the planet Mars, evolved by Mlle. Hélène Smith, is remote from French, Chatterton often produced lyrics of great charm as in "The Tragedy of Aella," and he invented a curious form of the Spenserian stanza. His touches in descriptions of Nature are sometimes charming. But he never quite escapes, as is natural, from the conventions of the eighteenth century; and his best inspiration is derived from Percy's "Reliques". What he might have been and might have done, in happier circumstances, it is impossible to conjecture. Genius he had, with more than the wonted abnormality of genius.
William Cowper.