A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century Part 28

Whilst broken clouds the holy sight arrest; Till, as the nights grow old, I fly the light.

Oh! were I man again, to see the sight!"

Perhaps the most engaging of the Rowley poems are "An Excelente Balade of Charitie," written in the rhyme royal; and "The Bristowe Tragedie," in the common ballad stanza, and said by Tyrwhitt to be founded on an historical fact: the excecution at Bristol, in 1461, of Sir Baldwin Fulford, who fought on the Lancastrian side in the Wars of the Roses.

The best quality in Chatterton's verse is its unexpectedness,--sudden epithets or whole lines, of a wild and artless sweetness,--which goes far to explain the fascination that he exercised over Coleridge and Keats. I mean such touches as these:

"Once as I dozing in the witch-hour lay."

"Brown as the filbert dropping from the sh.e.l.l."

"My gorme emblanched with the comfreie plant."

"Where thou may'st here the sweete night-lark chant, Or with some mocking brooklet sweetly glide."

"Upon his b.l.o.o.d.y carnage-house he lay, Whilst his long shield did gleam with the sun's rising ray."

"The red y-painted oars from the black tide, Carved with devices rare, do shimmering rise."

"As elfin fairies, when the moon shines bright, In little circles dance upon the green; All living creatures fly far from their sight, Nor by the race of destiny be seen; For what he be that elfin fairies strike, Their souls will wander to King Offa's d.y.k.e."

The charming wildness of Chatterton's imagination--which attracted the notice of that strange, visionary genius William Blake[24]--is perhaps seen at its best in one of the minstrel songs in "Aella." This is obviously an echo of Ophelia's song in "Hamlet," but Chatterton gives it a weird turn of his own:

"Hark! the raven flaps his wing In the briared dell below; Hark! the death owl loud doth sing To the nightmares, as they go.

My love is dead.

Gone to his death-bed All under the willow tree.

"See the white moon shines on high,[25]

Whiter is my true-love's shroud, Whiter than the morning sky, Whiter than the evening cloud.

My love is dead," etc.

It remains to consider briefly the influence of Chatterton's life and writings upon his contemporaries and successors in the field of romantic poetry. The dramatic features of his personal career drew, naturally, quite as much if not more attention than his literary legacy to posterity. It was about nine years after his death that a clerical gentleman, Sir Herbert Croft, went to Bristol to gather materials for a biography. He talked with Barrett and Catcott, and with many of the poet's schoolmates and fellow-townsmen, and visited his mother and sister, who told him anecdotes of the marvelous boy's childhood and gave him some of his letters. Croft also traced Chatterton's footsteps in London, where he interviewed, among others, the coroner who had presided at the inquest over the suicide's body. The result of these inquiries he gave to the world in a book ent.i.tled "Love and Madness" (1780).[26]

Southey thought that Croft had treated Mrs. Chatterton shabbily, in making her no pecuniary return from the profits of his book; and arraigned him publicly for this in the edition of Chatterton's works which he and Joseph Cottle--both native Bristowans--published in three volumes in 1803. This was at first designed to be a subscription edition for the benefit of Chatterton's mother and sister, but, the subscriptions not being numerous enough, it was issued in the usual way, through "the trade."

It was in 1795, just a quarter of a century after Chatterton's death, that Southey and Coleridge were married in St. Mary Redcliffe's Church to the Misses Edith and Sara Fricker. Coleridge was greatly interested in Chatterton. In his "Lines on Observing a Blossom on the First of February, 1796," he compares the flower to

"Bristowa's bard, the wondrous boy, An amaranth which earth seemed scarce to own, Blooming 'mid poverty's drear wintry waste."

And a little earlier than this, when meditating his pantisocracy scheme with Southey and Lovell, he had addressed the dead poet in his indignant "Monody on the Death of Chatterton," a.s.sociating him in imagination with the abortive community on the Susquehannah:

"O Chatterton, that thou wert yet alive!

Sure thou would'st spread thy canvas to the gale, And love with us the tinkling team to drive O'er peaceful freedom's undivided dale; And we at sober eve would round thee throng, Hanging enraptured on thy stately song, And greet with smiles the young-eyed poesy All deftly masked as h.o.a.r antiquity. . .

Yet will I love to follow the sweet dream Where Susquehannah pours his untamed stream; And on some hill, whose forest-frowning side Waves o'er the murmurs of his calmer tide, Will raise a solemn cenotaph to thee, Sweet harper of time-shrouded ministrelsy."

It might be hard to prove that the Rowley poems had very much to do with giving shape to Coleridge's own poetic output. Doubtless, without them, "Christabel," and "The Ancient Mariner," and "The Darke Ladye" would still have been; and yet it is possible that they might not have been just what they are. In "The Ancient Mariner" there is the ballad strain of the "Reliques," but _plus_ something of Chatterton's. In such lines as these:

"The bride hath paced into the hall Red as a rose is she: Nodding their heads before her, goes The merry minstrelsy;"

or as these:

"The wedding guest here beat his breast For he heard the loud ba.s.soon:"

one catches a far-away reverberation from certain stanzas of "The Bristowe Tragedie:" this, _e.g._,

"Before him went the council-men In scarlet robes and gold, And ta.s.sels spangling in the sun, Much glorious to behold;"

and this:

"In different parts a G.o.dly psalm Most sweetly they did chant: Behind their backs six minstrels came, Who tuned the strung bataunt."[27]

Among all the young poets of the generation that succeeded Chatterton, there was a tender feeling of comradeship with the proud and pa.s.sionate boy, and a longing to admit him of their crew. Byron, indeed, said that he was insane; but Sh.e.l.ley, in "Adonais," cla.s.ses him with Keats among "the inheritors of unfulfilled renown." Lord Houghton testifies that Keats had a prescient sympathy with Chatterton in his early death. He dedicated "Endymion" to his memory. In his epistle "To George Felton Mathew," he asks him to help him find a place

"Where we may soft humanity put on, And sit, and rhyme, and think on Chatterton."[28]

Keats said that he always a.s.sociated the season of autumn with the memory of Chatterton. He a.s.serted, somewhat oddly, that he was the purest writer in the English language and used "no French idiom or particles, like Chaucer." In a letter from Jane Porter to Keats about the reviews of his "Endymion," she wrote: "Had Chatterton possessed sufficient manliness of mind to know the magnanimity of patience, and been aware that great talents have a commission from Heaven, he would not have deserted his post, and his name might have been paged with Milton."

Keats was the poetic child of Spenser, but some traits of manner--hard to define, though not to feel--he inherited from Chatterton. In his unfinished poem, "The Eve of St. Mark," there is a Rowleian accent in the pa.s.sage imitative of early English, and in the loving description of the old volume of saints' legends whence it is taken, with its

"--pious poesies Written in smallest crow-quill size Beneath the text."

And we cannot but think of the shadow of St. Mary Redcliffe falling across another young life, as we read how

"Bertha was a maiden fair Dwelling in th' old Minster-square; From her fireside she could see, Sidelong, its rich antiquity, Far as the Bishop's garden-wall";

and of the footfalls that pa.s.s the echoing minster-gate, and of the clamorous daws that fall asleep in the ancient belfry to the sound of the drowsy chimes. Rossetti, in so many ways a continuator of Keats'

artistry, devoted to Chatterton the first of his sonnet-group, "Five English Poets,"[29] of which the sestet runs thus:

"Thy nested home-loves, n.o.ble Chatterton; The angel-trodden stair thy soul could trace Up Redcliffe's spire; and in the world's armed s.p.a.ce Thy gallant sword-play:--these to many an one Are sweet for ever; as thy grave unknown And love-dream of thine unrecorded face."

The story of Chatterton's life found its way into fiction and upon the stage. Afred de Vigny, one of the French romanticists, translator of "Oth.e.l.lo" and "The Merchant of Venice," introduced it as an episode into his romance, "Stello ou les Diables Bleus," afterward dramatized as "Chatterton," and first played at Paris on February 12, 1835, with great success. De Vigny made a love tragedy out of it, inventing a sweetheart for his hero, in the person of Kitty Bell, a role which became one of Madame Dorval's chief triumphs. On the occasion of the revival of De Vigny's drama in December, 1857, Theophile Gautier gave, in the _Moniteur_,[30] some reminiscences of its first performance, twenty-two years before.

"The parterre before which Chatterton declaimed was full of pale, long-haired youths, who firmly believed that there was no other worthy occupation on earth but the making of verses or of pictures--art, as they called it; and who looked upon the bourgeois with a disdain to which the disdain of the Heidelberg or Jena 'fox' for the 'philistine' hardly approaches. . . As to money, no one thought of it. More than one, as in that a.s.sembly of impossible professions which Theodore de Banville describes with so resigned an irony, could have cried without falsehood 'I am a lyric poet and I live by my profession.' One who has not pa.s.sed through that mad, ardent, over-excited but generous epoch, cannot imagine to what a forgetfulness of material existence the intoxication, or, if you prefer, infatuation of art pushed the obscure and fragile victims who would rather have died than renounce their dream. One actually heard in the night the crack of solitary pistols. Judge of the effect produced in such an environment by M. Afred Vigney's 'Chatterton'; to which, if you would comprehend it, you must restore the contemporary atmosphere."[31]

[1] Wordsworth, "Resolution and Independence."

[2] January 1, 1753.

[3] "The Poetical Works of Thos. Chatterton. With an Essay on the Rowley Poems by the Rev. Walter W. Skeat and a Memoir by Edward Bell"; in two volumes. London, 1871, Vol. I. p. xv.

[4] Willc.o.x's edition of "Chatterton's Poetical Works," Cambridge, 1842, Vol. I. p. xxi.

[5] "Memoir by Edward Bell," p. xxiv.

[6] _Cf._ ("Battle of Hastings," i. xx)

"The grey-goose pinion, that theron was set, Eftsoons with smoking crimson blood was wet"

With the lines from "Chevy Chase" (_ante_, p. 295). To be sure the ballad was widely current before the publication of the "Reliques."