which were to become most dazzlingly alive for me.
The Case Reopened
‘For had I never known the antique lore I ne’er had ventur’d from my peaceful shore, To be the wreck of promises and hopes, A Boy of Learning, and a Bard of Tropes …’
CHATTERTON
‘Oh thou, or what remaines of thee, Ælla, the darlynge of futurity, Lett this mie songe bolde as thy courage be, As everlastynge to posteritie.’
ROWLEY
1 ‘The brazen slippers alone remain’
IN THE HIGH SUMMER of 1770, while most of genteel and literary London was refreshing itself at continental spas, picnicking on country house lawns or promenading at the seaside resorts, in an angular third-floor attic above a Holborn side-street, in a locked room littered with minutely shredded pieces of manuscript, Thomas Chatterton died in acute pain from arsenic poisoning. He did not appear to have eaten for several days, but there were traces of opium in his mouth and between his teeth. He was not yet eighteen.
In his short lifetime Chatterton had written some six hundred pages of verse, one finished and one unfinished tragedy, a burletta, and so much freelance satirical journalism that it was still being published by London editors a year after his death. His name became the centre of the most fashionable literary controversy of the decade, in which many eminent scholars, writers and littérateurs fought tempestuously to establish that Chatterton was either a prodigy of poetical genius or a cheap, adolescent forger with the habits of a delinquent. When the immediate heat of this discussion had died down, it emerged that Chatterton’s achievement had been compared by many critics as second only to Shakespeare’s. Coleridge drafted a long Monody to him at the age of sixteen, and spent another thirty years of his life adding to it and making corrections. The Victorians went on to dedicate wildly partisan poetry and criticism on both sides of his reputation. David Masson published a warm melodramatic novel based on his life in 1874, and Rossetti became deeply obsessed with the figure of Chatterton in the closing years of his old age. The young Meredith posed as the model of Chatterton in puce silk pantaloons for the famous painting by Henry Wallis and while the work was being executed in Chatterton’s original attic room (later destroyed by fire) Meredith took the opportunity to open an affair with the painter’s wife. In France Alfred de Vigny produced a High Romantic play; and this in turn became a bad Italian opera by Leoncavallo. Chatterton’s works were translated into French and German, while new English editions followed each other steadily: in 1803, 1810, 1842, 1871, 1885, 1906 and 1911.
Then suddenly after the First World War the flow stopped. There have been no new editions; and with the exception of one faithful scholar, E. H. Meyerstein, there has been, until very recently indeed, almost no further critical interest. Even the Penguin Book of English Verse does not now acknowledge the existence of Chatterton, Thomas, in its index. Perhaps only a few lines of his remain current, with their curious haunting bitterness and their unstable dying rhythms:
Come, with acorne-cuppe and thorne
Drain my hertes blood away;
Lyfe and all its good I scorn
Daunce by night, or feast by day.
My love is dead
Gone to his death-bed
All under the wyllow-tree
In all this, in the mixture of strange, contradictory, challenging and sometimes oddly depressing circumstances, Chatterton is the great example of the prodigy-figure in English poetry. Prodigy has as its root meaning something out of the run of natural affairs and occurrences, something directly counter to natural processes themselves – a wonder, an exhilaration of the spirit. There is something particularly valuable about such a figure. He is like a precedent. He is like a guarantee for the wildest human hopes, and at the same time a talisman against failure or limitation or the pressures of mediocrity. He is an outpost of the imagination. With Chatterton, it has always tended to be the completed gesture of life which produced the writing, and not the writing alone, that has exercised the deepest fascination and influence on others. Only one generation after Chatterton’s death, this was already clear to William Hazlitt who gave his opinion in a long aside during his public lectures at the Surrey Institute on ‘The English Poets’ (1818).
‘As to those who are really capable of admiring Chatterton’s genius,’ said Hazlitt, who knew very well that Keats was in his audience, ‘I would only say that I never heard anyone speak of any of his works as if it were an old well-known favourite, and had become a faith and a religion in his mind. It is his name, his youth, and what he might have lived to have done, that excite our wonder and admiration. He has the same sort of posthumous fame that an actor of the last age has – an abstracted reputation which is independent of anything we know of his works’ (Lecture VII). The comparison with the actor is good, although with fifty years of film behind us now it loses some of its force. It is also rather an intriguing comparison. Hazlitt had no illusions about the true nature of Chatterton’s ‘forgeries’, but he still appears to have thought, unconsciously at least, in terms of the young prodigy playing out someone else’s part. In a literary and in a psychological sense this has a deep relevance to the life that Chatterton lived, and perhaps also to the death that he is reputed to have died.
Keats, incidentally, was disappointed with Hazlitt’s views, although it was almost certainly a previous lecture which kindled some real resentment against Hazlitt’s treatment of the poet to whom Keats had dedicated Endymion. The passage was probably this one, the closing peroration from Lecture VI; it is an important attitude and seems to express an element of jealousy, that essential but honest jealousy of the critic for the poet:
I cannot find in Chatterton’s works anything so extraordinary as the age at which they were written. They have a facility, vigour, and knowledge, which were prodigious in a boy of sixteen, but which would not have been so in a man of twenty. He did not show extraordinary powers of genius, but extraordinary precocity. Nor do I believe he would have written better, had he lived. Great geniuses, like great kings, have too much to think of to kill themselves; for their mind to them also ‘a kingdom is’. With an unaccountable power coming over him at an unusual age, and with the youthful confidence it inspired, he performed wonders, and was willing to set a seal on his reputation by a tragic catastrophe. He had done his best; and, like another Empedocles, threw himself into Aetna, to ensure immortality. The brazen slippers alone remain!
It is curious how the flourish, the joy with which Hazlitt the great Romantic critic flings off that last magnificent image to his Surrey Institute audience, effectively undermines his own case. He is responding, in spite of himself, in spite of his rational and deliberated critical strictures, to the quality of magnificence, of exhilaration, achieved by Chatterton’s life and work as a complete entity.
But by Lecture VII Hazlitt had altered his position, or at least his tone. ‘I am sorry that what I said in conclusion of the last Lecture respecting Chatterton, should have given dissatisfaction to some persons, with whom I would willingly agree on all such matters. What I meant was less to call in question Chatterton’s genius, than to object to the common mode of estimating its magnitude by prematureness.’ He then delicately delivers one of those republican bombshells that delighted Keats. ‘Had Chatterton really done more, we should have thought less of him … who knows but he might have lived to be poet-laureate?’ Yet overall his attitude remains the same, and his judgement on the prodigy-figure has a lasting and representative force, many times repeated, and especially sympathetic to the more sceptical and technical quality of appreciation almost universal today.
There is an anecdote retold in the diaries of the poet W. S. Blunt which may help to suggest the pitch, the emotional frequency, which the phenomenon of the youthful prodigy, in this case of Chatterton, is capable of reaching in the