Albion (53 page)

At the age of seventeen Chatterton travelled to London in order to find his fortune; he was noticeably successful, composing essays and satirical poetry on contemporary themes. Five months later, however, he was found dead in a Holborn attic with traces of arsenic poisoning in his teeth. It was necessary and inevitable that his death was deemed to be suicide, a last gesture to society from a doomed poet; more recent commentators have suggested that it was a botched effort to cure a bout of syphilis.

His apparent suicide added immeasurably to his stature, however, while his celebrity was maintained by the revelation that the “Rowley” poetry was an imposture. There were pamphlets, essays and tracts issued by various interested parties. Almost immediately after his death he had been considered to be akin only to Shakespeare in his prolificity; Horace Walpole had commended him as a “masterly genius” and Joseph Warton had described him as “a prodigy of genius.” In 1780, ten years after his death, an epistolary novel on his life was published under the title of
Love and Madness
; in the following year Jacob Bryant’s Observations Upon the Poems of Thomas Rowley: in
which the Authenticity of those Poems is Ascertained
were published in two volumes. Six hundred pages of scholarship and testimony led ineluctably to the conclusion that the poems were “written too much from the heart to be a forgery.” That conclusion may still stand, if we deem the heart to be a capacious organ which includes inspiration, invention and historical memory. Chatterton composed as many fine lines of medieval poetry as came out of the medieval period itself; the language instinctively propelled him to this restoration, whereby ancient words and images float naturally if unexpectedly to the surface of consciousness.

His career as a forger, whose work was eventually compared with a “forged note” presented to a banker, would certainly not be evident from the tributes lavished upon him by his romantic successors. Coleridge revised his poem “Monody on the Death of Chatterton” until his own surcease; he first began writing it at the age of thirteen, and the final text was not published until the year of his death. It began in Pindarics and ended in pentameters, all the while chanting in borrowed metres the fate of “that heaven-born Genius.” Coleridge compared himself explicitly to the young poet, dead in a garret at the age of eighteen; apparently unwanted and unhonoured, Coleridge laments his “kindred woes.” In his agonies he is possessed by “the Ghosts of Otway and Chatterton” (Otway another penurious and unsuccessful writer) as if to confirm his own sense of doomed genius. Yet can “Genius” subsist in forgery?

In his poem upon the death of Keats,
Adonais
, Shelley paid stately tribute to the “solemn agony” of Chatterton; he is one of the “inheritors of unfulfilled renown” who, in the unstated argument of the poem, will reach fruition by means of Shelley’s productive genius. At a later date a memorial of Shelley was sculpted by Onslow Ford in the manner of Henry Wallis’s
The Death
of Chatterton
. Whatever the circumstances of Chatterton’s compositions, that picturesque or theatrical pose survives as a token of romantic poetry itself. That is why Keats evinced the most effusive reaction to Chatterton’s unhappy fate. He composed a sonnet in 1815, “To Chatterton,” and lamented the “Dear child of sorrow—son of misery!” whose “Genius mildly flash’d.” Three years later he inscribed
Endymion
“to the memory of Thomas Chatterton” but, more significantly, in a letter of the following year he remarked that “the purest english I think—or what ought to be the purest—is Chatterton’s . . . Chatterton’s language is entirely northern” and free from “Chaucer’s gallicisms.” He went on to declare that “I prefer the native music of it to Milton’s cut by feet.” Keats was acquainted with the controversy surrounding Chatterton’s “medieval” poetry, but he considered it to be of little consequence beside the dead poet’s adoption and assimilation of a “native” or “northern” dialect—by which he means, in the context of Chaucer and Milton, an Anglo-Saxon cadence and vocabulary. In a letter of the same period he remarks that he has given up
Hyperion
because “there were too many Miltonic inversions in it,” but in the same paragraph he avers that Chatterton “is the purest writer in the English Language . . . ’tis genuine English Idiom in English words.” His abandonment of
Hyperion
suggests that he understood the dangers of imitation or plagiarism, but then how are we to estimate his praise of Chatterton’s forged verses as “genuine English Idiom”? Here lie mysteries which may or may not be resolved. It may be worth noting in this context that the poem in which Wordsworth celebrated the memory of Chatterton, “Resolution and Independence,” is written in the same metre as Chatterton’s fake medieval poem “An Excelente Balade of Charitie.” Wordsworth also owned a portrait of the dead poet, which was itself a forgery.

The posthumous comparison of Chatterton with Shakespeare does suggest what all the evidence implies—the 687 pages of his extant poetry and prose, in the “Oxford” edition of his works, is astonishing evidence of his precocity but it also bears testimony to the fact that he was a thoroughly English poet. If it were otherwise, his fame and fate would not be so congenial to the English imagination. There is, for example, the salient matter of Chatterton’s reverence for the past. The influence of Percy’s
Reliques
upon the young poet’s burgeoning poetic imagination has already been suggested, but the antiquated diction and meter of Percy’s specimens may have been less important than Percy’s belief that there existed “a peculiarly English characteristic of cultural history and national identity that derived from the Ancient Goths . . . the English minstrels were the inheritors of a national poetry.”
⁹
In this same spirit Chatterton declared in a letter to Horace Walpole, alas un-sent, that “However Barbarous the Saxons may be calld by our Modern Virtuosos; it is certain we are indebted to Alfred and other Saxon Kings for the wisest of our Laws and in part for the British Constitution.” He evinces all the antiquarianism of the English imagination, therefore, but out of it he fashioned works of genius; he wanted to re-create, rather than rescue, past time. Like Edmund Spenser he invented a language with which to restore the proximity as well as the mystery of the past. Or can we say that the language invented him?

He dwelled in another life. There were many antiquarians willing to forge material objects and produce medieval coins, rings or chamberpots; but Chatterton spent the money, wore the ring, and shat into the pot. He restored the past, too, because he believed in its authority and efficacy. By the age of sixteen he had composed a long poem entitled “Bristowe Tragedie or the Dethe of Syr Charles Bawdin,” to which he appended a note claiming “the following little Poem wrote by Thomas Rowlie Priest, I shall insert the whole as a Specimen of the Poetry of those Days, being greatly superior to what we have been taught to believe.” It is indeed a vigorous ballad:

How oft ynne battaile have I stoode When thousands dy’d arounde; Whan smokynge streemes of crimson bloode Imbrew’d the fatten’d grounde;

How dydd I knowe thatt ev’ry darte That cutte the airie waie Myghte notte fynde passage toe my harte And close myne eyes for aie

Such diction materially affected the work of both Coleridge and Keats, to name only the two most celebrated examples. Only the foolish would dismiss it as pastiche. It is a genuinely new creation and, if genius may be defined as one who changes the nature of expression, then Chatterton has some claim to that honorific.

The question of plagiarism, however, presents itself. Chatterton was, in the native idiom, essentially a bookish writer who borrowed from a score of other English writers, most notably from Spenser, Pope, Dryden, Gay, Churchill and Collins. On occasions he seems to parody his own literary learning by indulging in exaggerated diction and over-elaborated tropes but, as one critic has maintained, “there was a consistent dynamic of plagiarism working beneath the veneer of forgery.”
¹⁰
In one sense Chatterton was only doing that which all good English poets had previously done; he was stealing or lifting from great originals the material for his own verse. He cultivated a polyphonic personality. But as he was a great originator of the romantic myth, if not of the romantic sensibility, the accusation of plagiarism became a peculiarly sensitive one. We may discover, for example, how Coleridge and Keats themselves became preoccupied with just that charge.

There are other aspects of Chatterton’s antiquarianism which are inevitably associated with the course of the English imagination. It has been noted that in “poetry, prose and letters Chatterton makes use of the legends of Arthur, or the ‘Matter of Britain’ ”
¹¹
so that in the process English history might then become “both mythical and real.”
¹²
It is interesting in this context, therefore, that there are “startling similarities between the respective canonisations of Chatterton and King Arthur.”
¹³
Both exist on the interstices of the invented and the authentic, and both embody the essential ebullition or presentness of the past. The assumption may be that, like Arthur who is not dead and will return, Chatterton lives on in the work of successive poets and novelists.

Of course the “Rowley” poems are themselves set in the medieval rather than the Arthurian period, and provide a curious parallel with the “Gothic” revival of the nineteenth century. There was a “Gothick” style of the eighteenth century, but that was the work of connoisseurs and virtuosi. The medieval work of Chatterton was much more vigorous and invigorating, anticipating the strong and powerful Gothic of the Victorians. He believed in the presence of the past in part because it was the means of defining his own genius. This, again, is an abiding English preoccupation. The analogy with the master of early nineteenth-century Gothic, A. W. N. Pugin, is inescapable; it has been said that Pugin’s “knowledge of real medieval work was so profound that he could instinctively produce new designs . . . in a vivid Gothic detail, full of richness and variety.”
¹⁴

Pugin is the true child of Chatterton in more than one sense. The young poet had written that “the Motive that actuates me to do this, is, to convince the world that the Monks (of whom some have so despicable an Opinion) were not such Blockheads, as generally thought and that good Poetry might be wrote, in the days of Superstition as well as in these more inlightened Ages.” The letter, of 15 February 1769, was written in the same month as he composed a medieval eulogy on the churches of Bristol. It is as if the old religion were still very much in his head, as it was in that of Pugin. Chatterton’s own recourse to “Superstition” and to the supernatural in his poetry suggests that he had little respect for the “inlightened” learning of his own time. His principal character is a Catholic monk and bard, and one critic has noted “the religious atmosphere of Rowley’s world.”
¹⁵
It allowed Chatterton to re-create in native fashion a world of visions and dreams, drawing material from the past in order to sustain his sense of the sacred; the antiquarians were the visionaries of the eighteenth century. It is appropriate that he should have appeared in vision to the nineteenth-century poet Francis Thompson, and dissuaded him from self-murder. “I recognised him from the pictures of him,” Thompson said later. “Besides I knew that it was he before I saw him.” Chatterton attained a kind of psychic or psychological reality, as a token of all that the eighteenth century had lost or abandoned; he was the wraith of faith.

It is not surprising, therefore, that Chatterton had a very powerful sense of place and of the
genius loci
. Certain spots were still holy. A posthumous account reveals how he stared at the church of St. Mary Redcliffe, memorial of an earlier age, and said, “This steeple was once burnt by lightning; this was the place where they formerly acted plays”; theatricality and supernatural visitation are in his imagination twinned. This intuitive sense of territory has been one of the objects of study in this volume, and the sole matter of the “Rowley” poems is the city of Bristol itself—the medieval city, at least, which rises like a vision all around him. It is part of his patrimony. His father had once been singing-master in St. Mary Redcliffe; Chatterton had never seen him, but in entering the old church he was also entering the house of his father. The establishment which Chatterton had attended as a boy, Colston’s School, was erected on the site of an old Carmelite convent. So all the forces of his own past, and those of his territory, are aligned. This is the source of his historical mission. To restore a lost past and, at the same time, to restore a lost selfhood—here, once more, we may see how he impinged upon the romantic movement to which he bequeathed so much.

I
f
we now draw
the outlines of Chatterton and Macpherson together and see them as a compound figure, we glimpse the sublime and the fantastical mixed; the ancient and medieval landscapes of their imagination haunt their successors. Macpherson created “Ossian,” the inspired bard who sang of his own especial soil in tones of plangency and woe; Chatterton embodied the “marvellous Boy” whose apparent suicide provoked contemplations of a solitary genius despised and neglected by contemporaneous society. These two poets, more than any others, created the romantic image. But it was of crucial significance to their literary successors that it should be deeply imbued with forgery and fakery, pastiche and plagiarism.

It might even be said that the recognition or detection of plagiarism and pastiche, in particular, began with the romantic movement itself. In previous centuries, as Walter Ong noted in his
The Art of Logic
, “no one hesitated to use lines of thought or even quite specific wordings from another person without crediting the other person, for these were all taken to be—and most often were—part of a common tradition.” But when that tradition was broken or discontinued in the rise of the private and personal voice, then apparent originality of expression became of paramount importance. As a result, as if they were intense shadows created by a sudden light, the dangers of plagiarism and pastiche became evident in the first generation of the romantic movement. In one prefatory epistle Milton wrote: “I have striven to cram my pages even to overflowing, with quotations drawn from all parts of the Bible and to leave as little space as possible for my own words.”
¹⁶
Wordsworth or Coleridge could never admit so much even if, in Coleridge’s case, a similar confession might have been appropriate. The introduction to an important volume of essays upon English romanticism,
Romanticism and Language
, poses an interesting question: “Is it pure coincidence, for example, that several of the essays [here] fix on the metaphor of theft?”
¹⁷
Romanticism and plagiarism occupy the same area of the English imagination.