The Rowley Poems. Thomas Chatterton
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 all (see page 173 of his Chatterton: A Biographical Study), but this is disposed of by the fact that the Ryse of Peyncteyning is the only piece of Chatterton's which contains Saxon words.]
[Footnote 6: March 28th, 1769.]
[Footnote 7: An account of Master William Canynge written by Thos. Rowlie Priest in 1460. Skeat, Vol. III, p. 219; W. Southey's edition, Vol. III, p. 75. See especially the last paragraph.]
[Footnote 8: See Letters of Horace Walpole, edited by Mrs. Paget Toynbee (Clarendon Press), Vol. XIV, pp. 210, 229; Vol. XV, p. 123.]
[Footnote 9: But attorneys are seldom 'in regrate' with the friends of
Poetry.]
[Footnote 10: Masson's reconstruction of the scene between Chatterton and the editor of the Freeholder's Magazine is very convincing (see his Chatterton: a Biography, 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