Gabriel Pearson on the life and death of Chatterton
The Complete Works of Thomas Chatterton: A Bicentenary Edition edited by Donald S. Taylor in association with Benjamin B. Hoover (ot.IP 2 vols £12.50)
The actual, suffering, productive, fraudulent Chatterton has long been sublimed into 'the marvellous boy' and 'the sleepless soul' of Wordsworth's description. This massive bi- centenary edition brings us back usefully to the literary remains, if only to confirm the impression that his real existence was as a phenomenon and portent rather than poet. In the mass, his work rather dissipates the expectation of potential genius. The best poems remain the most anthologised. One greets with renewed pleasure 'The Excelente Balade of Charitee' from which Wordsworth swiped the stanza form for his own 'Resolu- tion and Independence' where Chatterton is mentioned. It is a surprise that 'the Excelente Balade' is a late poem. 'Late' has such a quizzical ring used of a poet dead before his eighteenth year. Again, the minstrel's song from 'Aella' remains im- pressive: Comme, wythe acorn-coppe and thorne, Drayne mie hartys blodde awaie; Lyfe and all its goode I scorne, Daunce hie nete, or feaste by daie . .
This represents an inspired use of Percy's ballad collection, but beyond that picks up echoes from the archaic folk-world of Ophelia's madness.
Very little new is added to the canon. The editors make available Chatterton's highly obscene paraphrase of a letter from an unknown girl .(for permissiveness is at work among the scholars too) and this illuminates, as does Burns's obscenity, the scatological verbal underworld that seems to have been a linguistic concomitant of Grub Street. How much did Wordsworth know about all this? He coupled Burns and Chat- terton as poetic predecessors who, through Poverty and neglect, succumbed to despon- dency and madness. Actually, these qualities are not the ones that strike you. The over- whelming impression is of Chatterton's manic productivity: he is full of wistful bravado, hectic, speeded-up, hysterically busy rather than despondent or mad. The combination is touchingly evident in the letters to the Bristol folk back home. One, superscribed Tom's Coffee-house', begins, 'There is such a noise of business and poli- ticks in the room, that my ,inaccuracy in writing here, is highly excusable. My present profession obliges me to frequent places of the best resort. To begin with, every female conversation begins with, dress.' That is tired . and jaunty and desperate and does, to my ear, open on to an authentic wretchedness.
Chatterton's sensibility already seems frac- tured into an acute linguistic schizophrenia, as though all the disconnected, unbodied voices of his century's false consciousness were babbling away in the sounding Chamber of his precociOus adolescence. In this he partakes, in exacerbated form, of a general condition. Burns remained psy- chically intact only by escaping Augustan Idiom into literary Scots which was nearer ,common life. Smart distilled vision from religious mania. Cowper was tossed between bouts of theological terror and a desperate clutching at mundane realities. This edition enhances the impression of manic self-dispersal by printing for the first time everything Chatterton wrote in as nearly as can be determined its correct chronological sequence. The result is a mas- sive jumble of letters, forgeries, trumped-am documents, Saxon epics, oratorios, bur- lesques, satires, sketches, essays. You name them and Chatterton could do you one. Some of the items are merely sad . . . the mock wills, the brave, uncommunicating letters home. The Rowley poems, allegedly written by a fifteenth-century monk, on which Chatterton staked his bid for fame and reputation are markedly his most achieved work. Most editions print them separately, but the context of hack work does emphasise his rather sinister command of all the available idioms. One moment he is forging, poker-faced, a Saxon epic in the manner of Ossian and in the next scribbling burlesque Ossianics for a friend. Much of this is the fizz of an adolescent preoccupa- tion with words as ciphers for anticipated experience. But it is also instructive about the psychic state of English letters in the period before the American arid French revolutions.
It is now orthodox to find Wordsworth's condemnation of 'gaudy and inane phrase- ology' in contemporary poetry exaggerated. Hosts of heavyweight American professors and lighter flotillas of English eighteenth- century specialists are eager to explain to undergraduates misled by Wordsworth the rationale, the majestic civilised order behind the conventions of late Augustan verse. The case of Chatterton certainly tells for Words- worth. In fact, later eighteenth-century poetry does strike one as throttled by con- vention; poets have feelings to express which the linguistic conventions obstruct. En the best poets this gives rise to a characteristic pathos: the inexpressibility of feeling be- comes what their poetry is about.
The connection between this verbal and emotional log-jam and the gathering impetus towards social revolt is hard not to feel but difficult to demonstrate. Certainly, the des- perate brevity of Chatterton's career, his wild struggle to escape provincial obscurity, his overwhelming defeat by metropolitan indifference. the stoic pride of self-elected death (Wordsworth's 'sleepless soul who perished in his pride') all seem to entail sym- bolic connections with the spiritual vortex in which the century was spinning towards its great social upheavals. Chatterton's for- geries attempted to cater for the fresh appetite for the exotic. on the part of the new rich far whom Horace Walpole was the arbiter. It is not surprising that Walpole should have been the object of Chatterton's fraudulent attempts. The fact of forgery seems to blend a secret derision of its victim with a hankering for some form of social acceptability. As it turned out, his death made him a really marketable commodity.
But deeper still, the Rowley poems imply a change of tempo which amounts to an alternative organisation of sensibility. Almost any line from 'An Excelente Balade' conveys as much. Take The Gatherd Storm is rype: the big drops falle'. The metaphor in `gatherd' and 'type' is no longer just rhetorical counter. It points towards an entirely new, direct order of experience. Chatterton tragically depended upon a pat ronage, a market, a debilitated public taste that ran completely counter to what hardly had the chance to become his true inner life, which he could only process as day-dream or exotic commodity. The dream lay in the idealised mediaeval world of ritual violence and devotion. The only alternative to this dream was Grub Street, an automated battery system for the production of clock- work love-lyrics, carelessly rabid satires and a pervasive, soul-deadening inclination to burlesque. No wonder Wordsworth so In- sisted on his opting for resolution and independence.
That Chatterton amazingly could shift from poetry of the quality of 'An Exeelente Balade' to couplets like 'Hail Resignation hail ambiguous Dame/Thou Parthian Archer in the fight for fame' or almost aggressively awful rhapsodies like 'Sighing,/Dying,/Lying, /Frying/In the Furnace of Desire' indicates a pretty acute cultural disorder, 'An Ex- celente Balade' on the other hand, does seem to have been directly self-expressive, unencumbered by fraudulent intent: As the editors point out, it is Chatterton's most Chaucerian piece. Significantly, he could only ambush his true feelings" behind a highly aboriginal mask. Its last line sums up trenchantly not only Chatterton's predica- ment but the sentiment that inspires social revolt : 'Or give the mitee (mighty) will (i.e. to do good), or give the gode man power.'
Chatterton's suicide seems a purposeful accident promoted by an unconscious in- tuition that only self-destruction could pro- vide him with an adequate utterance and release from bondage in life to the post- humous freedom of myth. His destiny was to become Wordsworth's 'marvellous boy', the hero of de Vigny's tragedy, the self-im- molated Adonis of Henry Wallis's famous painting. Rossetti's opinion 'that he might, had he lived . . . have traded parts with Shakespeare' represents the final apotheosis of lost potentiality as somehow comparable, perhaps in a mystical way superior to, achieved genius. It required the explosive instance of another boy genius, Arthur Rim- baud, exactly a century later, haloed in the fire of revolution, like Blake's Ore, to eclipse his legend with a lived reality. Another cen- tury on and the bicentenary edition—an absolute model of dedicated. impeccable scholarship—closes the story and erects the final monument.
Gabriel Pearson is Lecturer in English at the University of Essex, and editor (with John Gross) of 'Dickens and the Twentieth Century'
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