A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century Part 26

[10] Article on "Celtic Literature" in the "Encyclopedia Britannica."

[11] "Aspects of Poetry," by J. C. Shairp, 1872, pp. 244-45 (American Edition).

[12] Appendix to the Preface to the Second Edition of "Lyrical Ballads."

Taine says that Ossian "with Oscar, Malvina, and his whole troop, made the tour of Europe; and, about 1830, ended by furnishing baptismal names for French _grisettes_ and _perruquiers_."--_English Literature_, Vol.

II. p. 220 (American Edition).

[13] The Committee found that Gaelic poems, and fragments of poems, which they had been able to obtain, contained often the substance, and sometimes the "literal expression (the _ipsissima verba_)" of pa.s.sages given by MacPherson. "But," continues the "Report," "the Committee has not been able to obtain any one poem the same in t.i.tle and tenor with the poems published by him. It is inclined to believe that he was in use to supply chasms and to give connection, by inserting pa.s.sages which he did not find; and to add what he conceived to be dignity and delicacy to the original composition, by striking out pa.s.sages, by softening incidents, by refining the language: in short, by changing what he considered as too simple or too rude for a modern ear."

[14] "Dissertation on the Authenticity of the Poems." See _ante_, p. 313.

[15] Clerk.

[16] "The Poems of Ossian in the Original Gaelic, with a Literal Translation into Latin by the late Robert Macfarland, etc., Published under the Sanction of the Highland Society of London," 3 vols., London, 1807. The work included dissertations on the authenticity of the poems by Sir Jno. Sinclair, and the Abbe Cesarotti (translated). Four hundred and twenty-three lines of Gaelic, being the alleged original of the seventh book of "Temora," had been published with that epic in 1763.

[17] "Popular Tales of the West Highlands," J. F. Campbell, Edinburgh, 1862. Vol. IV. P. 156.

[18] He suggests Lachlan MacPherson of Strathmashie, one of MacPherson's helpers. "Popular Tales of the West Highlands."

[19] "Fragments," etc.

[20] Seventh book of "Temora." See _ante_, p. 321.

[21] "Leabhar Na Feinne," p. xii.

[22] See _ante_, p. 313, note.

[23] "Encyclopaedia Britannica": "Celtic Literature."

[24] For a further account of the state of the "authenticity" question, see Archibald McNeil's "Notes on the Authenticity of Ossian's Poems,"

1868; and an article on "Ossian" in _Macmillan's Magazine_, XXIV. 113-25.

[25] "The sweet voice of Cona never sounds so sweetly as when it speaks of itself."

[26] "The Complaint of Ninathoma."

[27] For some MS. Notes of Byron in a copy of "Ossian," see Phelps'

"English Romantic Movement," pp. 153-54.

[28] "Sorrows of Werther," Letter lxviii.

[29] "Caledonia, or Ancient Scotland," book ii. chapter vii. part iv.

[30] "Childe Harold," canto iii.

[31] The same is true of Burns, though references to Cuthullin's dog Luath, in "The Twa Dogs"; to "Caric-thura" in "The Whistle"; and to "Cath-Loda" in the notes on "The Vision," show that Burns knew his Ossian.

[32] From Goethe's "Gotz von Berlichingen."

[33] See "Poems by Saml. Egerton Brydges," 4th ed., London, 1807. pp.

87-96.

[34] See _ante_, p. 117.

[35] There were French translations by Letourneur in 1777 and 1810: by Lacaussade in 1842; and an imitation by Baour-Lormian in 1801.

[36] See Perry's "Eighteenth Century Literature," p. 417.

[37] One suspects this translator to have been of Irish descent. He was born at Scharding, Bavaria, in 1729.

CHAPTER X.

Thomas Chatterton.

The history of English romanticism has its tragedy: the life and death of Thomas Chatterton--

"The marvelous boy, The sleepless soul that perished in his pride."[1]

The story has been often told, but it may be told again here; for, aside from its dramatic interest, and leaving out of question the absolute value of the Rowley poems, it is most instructive as to the conditions which brought about the romantic revival. It shows by what process antiquarianism became poetry.

The scene of the story was the ancient city of Bristol--old Saxon _Bricgestowe_, "place of the bridge"--bridge, namely, over the Avon stream, not far above its confluence with the Severn. Here Chatterton was born in 1752, the posthumous son of a dissipated schoolmaster, whose ancestors for a hundred and fifty years had been, in unbroken succession, s.e.xtons to the church of St. Mary Redcliffe. Perhaps it may be more than an idle fancy to attribute to heredity the bent which Chatterton's genius took spontaneously and almost from infancy; to guess that some mysterious ante-natal influence--"striking the electric chain wherewith we are darkly bound"--may have set vibrating links of unconscious a.s.sociation running back through the centuries. Be this as it may, Chatterton was the child of Redcliffe Church. St. Mary stood by his cradle and rocked it; and if he did not inherit with his blood, or draw in with his mother's milk a veneration for her ancient pile; at least the waters of her baptismal font[2] seemed to have signed him with the token of her service. Just as truly as "The Castle of Otranto" was sprung from Strawberry Hill, the Rowley poems were born of St. Mary's Church.

Chatterton's father had not succeeded to the s.e.xtonship, but he was a sub-chanter in Bristol Cathedral, and his house and school in Pile Street were only a few yards from Redcliffe Church. In this house Chatterton was born, under the eaves almost of the sanctuary; and when his mother removed soon after to another house, where she maintained herself by keeping a little dame's school and doing needle work, it was still on Redcliffe Hill and in close neighborhood to St. Mary's. The church itself--"the pride of Bristowe and the western land"--is described as "one of the finest parish churches in England,"[3] a rich specimen of late Gothic or "decorated" style; its building or restoration dating from the middle of the fifteenth century. Chatterton's uncle by marriage, Richard Phillips, had become s.e.xton in 1748, and the boy had the run of the aisles and transepts. The stone effigies of knights, priests, magistrates, and other ancient civic worthies stirred into life under his intense and brooding imagination; his mind took color from the red and blue patterns thrown on the pavement by the stained gla.s.s of the windows; and he may well have spelled out much of the little Latin that he knew from "the knightly bra.s.ses of the tombs" and "cold _hic jacets_ of the dead."

It is curious how early his education was self-determined to its peculiar ends. A dreamy, silent, solitary child, given to fits of moodiness, he was accounted dull and even stupid. He would not, or could not, learn his letters until, in his seventh year, his eye was caught by the illuminated capitals in an old music folio. From these his mother taught him the alphabet, and a little later he learned to read from a black-letter Bible. "Paint me an angel with wings and a trumpet," he answered, when asked what device he would choose for the little earthenware bowl that had been promised him as a gift.[4] Colston's Hospital, where he was put to school, was built on the site of a demolished monastery of Carmelite Friars; the scholars wore blue coats, with metal plates on their b.r.e.a.s.t.s stamped with the image of a dolphin, the armorial crest of the founder, and had their hair cropped short in imitation of the monkish tonsure. As the boy grew into a youth, there were numbered among his near acquaintances, along with the vintners, sugar-bakers, pipe-makers, apothecaries, and other tradesmen of the Bristol _bourgeoisie_, two church organists, a miniature painter, and an engraver of coats-of-arms--figures quaintly suggestive of that mingling of munic.i.p.al life and ecclesiastical-mediaeval art which is reproduced in the Rowley poems.

"Chatterton," testifies one of his early acquaintances, "was fond of walking in the fields, particularly in Redcliffe meadows, and of talking of his ma.n.u.scripts, and sometimes reading them there. There was one spot in particular, full in view of the church, in which he seemed to take a peculiar delight. He would frequently lay himself down, fix his eyes upon the church, and seem as if he were in a kind of trance. Then on a sudden he would tell me: 'That steeple was burnt down by lightning: that was the place where they formerly acted plays.'" "Among his early studies," we are told, "antiquities, and especially the surroundings of medieval life, were the favorite subjects; heraldry seems especially to have had a fascination for him. He supplied himself with charcoal, black-lead, ochre, and other colors; and with these it was his delight to delineate, in rough and quaint figures, churches, castles, tombs of mailed warriors, heraldic emblazonments, and other like belongings of the old world."[5]

Is there not a breath of the cloister in all this, reminding one of the child martyr in Chaucer's "Prioresse Tale," the "litel clergeon, seven yeer of age"?

"This litel child his litel book lerninge, As he sat in the scole at his prymer, He 'Alma redemptoris' herde singe, As children lerned hir antiphoner."

A choir boy bred in cathedral closes, catching his glimpses of the sky not through green boughs, but through the treetops of the Episcopal gardens discolored by the lancet windows of the clear-stories; dreaming in the organ loft in the pauses of the music, when

"The choristers, sitting with faces aslant, Feel the silence to consecrate more than the chant."

Thus Chatterton's sensitive genius was taking the impress of its environment. As he pored upon the antiquities of his native city, the idea of its life did sweetly creep into his study of imagination; and he gradually constructed for himself a picture of fifteenth-century Bristol, including a group of figures, partly historical and partly fabulous, all centering about Master William Canynge. Canynge was the rich Bristol merchant who founded or restored St. Mary Redcliffe's; was several times mayor of the city in the reigns of Henry VI. and Edward IV., and once represented the borough in Parliament. Chatterton found or fabled that he at length took holy orders and became dean of Westbury College. About Canynge Chatterton arranged a number of _dramatis personae_, some of whose names he discovered in old records and doc.u.ments, such as Carpenter, Bishop of Worcester, and Sir Theobald Gorges, a knight of Wraxhall, near Bristol; together with others entirely of his own invention--as John a Iscam, whom he represents to have been a canon of St. Augustine's Abbey in Bristol; and especially one Thomas Rowley, parish priest of St. John's, employed by Canynge to collect ma.n.u.scripts and antiquities. He was his poet laureate and father confessor, and to him Chatterton ascribed most of the verses which pa.s.s under the general name of the Rowley poems. But Iscam was also a poet and Master Canynge himself sometimes burst into song. Samples of the Iscam and the Canynge muse diversify the collection. The great Bristol merchant was a mediaeval Maecenas, and at his house, "nempned the Red Lodge," were played interludes--"Aella," "G.o.ddwyn," and "The Parliament of Sprites"--composed by Rowley, or by Rowley and Iscam collaborating.

Canynge sometimes wrote the prologues; and Rowley fed his patron with soft dedication and complimentary verses: "On Our Lady's Church," "Letter to the dygne Master Canynge," "The Account of W. Canynges Feast," etc.

The well-known fifteenth-century poet Lydgate is also introduced into this literary _cenacle_, as John Ladgate, and made to exchange verse epistles with Rowley in eighteenth-century fashion. Such is the remarkable fiction which the marvelous boy erected, as a scaffolding for the fabric of sham-antique poetry and prose, which he build up during the years 1767 to 1770, _i.e._, from the fifteenth to the eighteenth year of his age.

There is a wide distance between the achievements of this untaught lad of humble birth and narrow opportunities, and the works of the great Sir Walter, with his matured powers and his stores of solid antiquarian lore.

But the impulse that conducted them to their not dissimilar tasks was the same. In "Yarrow Revisited," Wordsworth uses, _a propos_ of Scott, the expression "localized romance." It was, indeed, the absorbing local feeling of Scott, his patriotism, his family pride, his attachment to the soil, that brought pa.s.sion and poetry into his historical pursuits. With Chatterton, too, this absorption in the past derived its intensity from his love of place. Bristol was his world; in "The Battle of Hastings,"

he did not forget to introduce a Bristowan contingent, led by a certain fabulous Alfwold, and performing prodigies of valor upon the Normans.

The image of mediaeval life which he succeeded in creating was, of course, a poor, faint _simulacrum_, compared with Scott's. He lacked knowledge, leisure, friends, long life--everything that was needed to give his work solidity. All that he had was a creative, though undisciplined imagination, together with an astonishing industry, persistence, and secretiveness. Yet with all his disadvantages, his work, with all its imperfections, is far more striking than the imitative verse of the Wartons, or the thin, diffused medievalism of Walpole and Clara Reeve. It is the product of a more original mind and a more intense conception.

In the muniment room over the north porch of St. Mary Redcliffe's were several old chests filled with parchments: architectural memoranda, church-wardens' accounts, inventories of vestments, and similar parish doc.u.ments. One of these chests, known as Master Canynge's coffer, had been broken open some years before, and whatever was of value among its contents removed to a place of safety. The remainder of the parchments had been left scattered about, and Chatterton's father had carried a number of them home and used them to cover copy-books. The boy's eye was attracted by these yellow sheep-skins, with their antique script; he appropriated them and kept them locked up in his room.