The Rowley Poems | Page 8

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