There has been a great war of words regarding the conduct of Walpole to Chatterton. Almost every writer of the end of the last century, and the beginning of this, has written more or less respecting Chatterton and the Rowley poems; and all have gone largely into the merits or demerits of Walpole in the case. Some have declared him guilty of the fate of the poor youth; others have gone as far the other way, and exempted him from all blame. In my opinion, nothing can ever excuse the conduct of Walpole. If not to prevent the fate of Chatterton was, in his case, to accelerate it, then indeed Walpole must be pronounced guilty of the catastrophe which ensued; and what greatly aggravates the offense is, that he made that a crime in Chatterton of which he himself set the example. Chatterton gave out that his poems were written by Rowley, and Walpole had given out that his Castle of Otranto was the work of an old Italian, and that it had been found, not in Canynge's chest, but "in the library of an ancient Catholic family in the north of England." Nothing is more certain, then, that, brought into close communication with this extraordinary youth and his brilliant productions, he either did not or would not see, that if Rowley was nobody, Chatterton was a great poet, and as a boy, and a poor boy, was an extraordinary phenomenon; and that both patriotism and humanity demanded that he should be at once brought under the notice of the good and wise, and every thing possible done to develop his rare powers, and secure them to his country. Walpole coolly advised him to stick to his desk, and walked off! Sir Walter Scott has said that Walpole is not alone to blame; the whole country partakes the censure with him; and that he gave the boy good advice. This is not quite true. The whole country did not know of Chatterton, of his wonderful talents, and his peculiar situation; but all these were thrust upon the attention of Walpole, and he gave him advice. True, the advice in itself was good, but, unluckily, it was given when Walpole, by his conduct, had destroyed all its value with Chatterton; when the proud boy, on seeing the contemptible way in which the selfish aristocrat, wounded in his vanity, had turned round upon him, had torn his letters to atoms, and stamped them under his feet.
Had Walpole, when he discovered the real situation and genius of Chatterton, kindly taken him by the hand; had he, instead of deserting him on account of his poverty, and of his having put on him the pardonable trick of representing his own splendid productions as those of a nonentity. Thomas Rowley, then and there advised him to adhere to his profession as a certain source of fortune, and to cultivate his poetic powers in his leisure moments, promising to secure for him, as he so easily could, a full acknowledgment of his talents from the public, it is certain that he might have made of Chatterton, who was full of affection, what he would. He might have represented to him what a fair and legitimate field of poetry he had chosen, thus celebrating the historic glory of his nation, and what an injustice he was doing to himself by giving the fame of his own genius to Rowley. Had he done this, he would have assuredly saved a great mind to his country, and would have deserved of it all honor and gratitude. But to have expected this from Walpole was to expect warmth from an icicle.
Spite, therefore, of the advice of Walpole, "given with as much kindness and tenderness as if he had been his guardian," no argument or eloquence will ever be able to shield him from the utter contempt of posterity. There stands the fact—that he turned his back on a great poet when he stood before him blazing like a star of the first magnitude, and suffered him to perish. He did more. When that poet had perished, and the great soul of his country had awoke to its error and its loss, and acknowledged that "a prince had fallen in Israel," then, on the publication of Chatterton's letters to him in 1786, did this mean-souled man, in a canting letter to Hannah More, absolutely deny that he had ever received these letters! "letters pretended, to have been sent to me, and which never were sent."[28]
After this, let those defend Walpole who like; would that we could clear that rough, dogmatic, but noble fellow, Samuel Johnson, from a criminal indifference to the claims and fate of Chatterton; but with that unreflecting arbitrariness of will, which often led him into error, we learn from Boswell, who often urged him to read the poems of Rowley, that he long refused, saying, "Pho, child! don't talk to me of the powers of a vulgar, uneducated stripling! No man can coin guineas but in proportion as he has gold." When at length he was induced to read them, he confessed, "This is the most extraordinary young man that has encountered my knowledge. It is wonderful how the whelp has written such things." It had then been long too late to begin to admire; and the giant prejudices of Johnson had driven poor Chatterton as completely from him as the petit-maître vanity of Walpole repulsed him in that quarter.
Miss Seward, a woman who, with all her faults as a writer, had always the tact to discern true genius, and was one of the first to recognize that of Scott and Southey, would have dared to acknowledge the vast powers of Chatterton, had it been in her own day of popularity; but at the death of Chatterton she was a country girl of twenty-three. What she says of Johnson's conduct is very just: "Though Chatterton had long been dead when Johnson began his Lives of the Poets; though Chatterton's poems had long been before the world; though their contents had engaged the literati of the nation in controversy, yet would not Johnson allow Chatterton a place in those volumes into which Pomfret and Yalden were admitted. So invincible were his grudging and surly prejudices, enduring long-deceased genius but ill, and cotemporary genius not at all."
Thus we have traced the course of Thomas Chatterton to that eventful crisis of his fate, when he found himself rejected, as it were, by the literary senate of his nation, and thrust down the few steps of the temple of fame which he had dared to ascend, as a forger and impostor. He was thrust away, in a manner, from the heart, and, what was more, from the intellect of his country; yet his proud spirit spurned the ignominious treatment, and he dared to make one grand effort, one great and final appeal against the fiat, in the face of the whole world, and in the heart of the British metropolis. Alas! it was a desperate enterprise, and our hearts bleed as we follow him in his course. There is nothing, in my opinion, so utterly melancholy in all the history of the calamities of authors as the four fatal months of Chatterton's sojourn in London. It was his great misfortune, from the hour of his birth till that moment, that he never had one suitable friend; one wise, generous, and sympathizing friend, who saw at once his splendid endowments and the faults of his character, and who could thus acquire a sound, and, at the same time, an inspiring influence over him. Born of poor people, who, however they might love him, did not and could not comprehend him; living in a town devoted to trade, and nailed to the desk of a pettifogging attorney, he went on his way alone, conscious of his own powers, and of the inferiority of those around him, till his pride and his passions kept pace with his genius, and he would have been a miracle had he not had great and many faults. If we, therefore, sigh over his religious skepticism, and regret the occasional symptoms of a sufficient want of truth and high principle in his literary hoaxes, especially in foisting fictitious matter into grave history, we are again compelled to acknowledge that it was because he had no adequate friend and counselor. He was like a young giant wandering solitarily over a wilderness without guide or guide-post; and if he did not go wrong in proportion to his unusual ardor, strength, and speed, it were a wonder. But from the moment that he sets foot in London, what is there in all biography so heart-breaking to contemplate? With a few borrowed guineas he sets out. Arrived in this great ocean of human life, where one living wave rushes past another as unrecognizant as the waves of the ordinary sea, his heart overflowing with domestic affections, he expends the few borrowed guineas in presents to his mother and sister, and sends them with flaming accounts of his prospect of honors for himself, and of wealth for them. If any one would make himself acquainted with the true pathetic, let him only read the few letters written home by Chatterton from Shoreditch and Holborn. He was to get four guineas a month by one magazine; was to write a history of England, and occasional essays for the daily papers. "What a glorious prospect!" He was acquainted with all the geniuses at the Chapter Coffee-house. "No author can be poor who understands the arts of booksellers; this knowledge I have pretty well dipped into!" Ah! poor Chatterton, one frog more gone to put himself under the protection of King Stork! Mr. Wilkes knew him by his writings; and he was going to visit him, and use his interest to secure the Trinity House for a Mrs. Ballance. He wrote to all his young men acquaintances. They were to send him up compositions, and he would have them inserted in all sorts of periodicals. Songs he was to write for a doctor in music; and such was the good fortune pouring in, that he could not help exclaiming, "Bravo, my boys! up we go!" One person would give him a recommendation as traveling companion to the young Duke of Northumberland, only he spoke nothing but English; another to Sir George Colebrook, an East India director, for a place of no despicable description, only he would not go to sea. He was about to wait on the Duke of Bedford, and had had a most polite interview with Beckford, the lord-mayor. In short, all, according to his poetic fancy, was going on most mountingly. "If," wrote he to his sister, "money flowed as fast upon me as honors, I would give you a portion of £5000."
But what was the stern reality? Amid all the flush of imaginary honors and success, or what he would have his family to think such, to tranquilize their minds, he was, in truth, almost from the first, in a state of starvation. His journey, and the presents so generously but so injudiciously purchased for his mother and sister—the little fund of borrowed guineas was gone. Of friends he does not appear to have had one in this huge human wilderness. Besides the booksellers for whom he did slave-work, not a single influential mortal seems to have put out a single finger of fellowship toward him. So far as the men of literary fame were concerned, it was one wide, dead, and desert silence. From the wretched region of Shoreditch, he flitted to the good-natured dress-maker's of Brook-street, Holborn. But starvation pursued him, and stared him every day more fearfully in the face. He was, with all his glorious talents and his indomitable pride, utterly alone in the world. Walpole, who had given him advice "as kindly as if he had been his guardian," was in great bodily comfort, penning smart letters, and compiling a "Catalogue of Royal and Noble Authors" at Strawberry Hill, while the noblest genius living was stalking on sternly through the streets of pitiless London to famine and despair. Sam Johnson, all his struggles now over, and at the annual price of £300 become, according to his own definition of Pensioner in his Dictionary, "A slave of state, hired by a stipend to obey his master," was comfortably lolling on the soft sofas of Mrs. Thrale, or acting the lion in the Literary Club, or in the saloon of some wealthy noble. Goldsmith was hastening to his end at fifty-three, and Chatterton to his at seventeen!
Of all the fine flourishes about the booksellers, whose arts he flattered himself that he understood, the following extract from his pocket-book, found after his death, will show the wretched result:
| "Received | to May 23, | for Middlesex | £1 | 11 | 6 |
| " | " | of B | 1 | 2 | 3 |
| " | " | of Fell, for the Consuliad | 0 | 10 | 6 |
| " | " | of Mr. Hamilton, for Candidus and Foreign Journal | 0 | 2 | 0 |
| " | " | of Mr. Fell | 0 | 10 | 6 |
| " | " | of Middlesex Journal | 0 | 8 | 6 |
| " | " | of Mr. Hamilton, for 16 songs | 0 | 10 | 6 |
| ———— | |||||
| £4 | 15 | 9 | |||
"In another part of this little book," says his biographer, "shortly before his death he had inserted a memorandum, intimating that the sum of eleven pounds was due to him from the London publishers. It was a cruel fate to be compelled to turn literary drudge, with four-and-twenty shillings a month for wages, and more cruel still to be doomed to suffer all the pains of hunger because those wages were not paid!"