last stress of the completed poem falls, and settles.
These qualities of pride, nostalgia and hard ambitious anger probably find their finest expression in Rowley’s ‘Ælla: A Tragycal Enterlude’ with its high chivalric story-line and firmly localized Bristol setting. In the ‘Song to Ælla’ which forms a Prologue, Chatterton suddenly creates a beautiful and haunting melodic cadence of differing line-lengths, surging outwards and falling softly back, which is so far from the automated verse-movements of the eighteenth century, and so completely and richly Romantic in its uncircumscribed flux of emotions, that one begins to see why Keats and Rossetti held him in such special reverence. The bold Gothic effect of coloured violence is uniquely Chatterton’s.
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.
When Dacia’s sons, whose haires of bloode redde hue
Like kinge-cuppes brastinge withe the morning dew
Arrang’d in dreare array
Upon the lethale day
Spred far and wide on Watchets shore;
Then dydst thou furiouse stande
And by thy valiante hande
Beesprengedd all the mees withe gore.
The best comment ever made on Rowley’s curious language and spelling is by the modernist Irish poet, Austin Clarke. How often only a poet understands how another poet has worked. Clarke said: ‘To Chatterton, these bristling consonants and double vowels were like the harness and martial gear of medieval days. Plain words, mailed in strange spellings, might move like knights in full armour amid the resounding panoply of war.’
But for Chatterton in the other mercantile Bristol, the war was bitterly direct, and the weaponry of style was brittle and contemporary. There he did not summon up the gentle imaginative influence of Spenser, but instead he turned to radical political figures like Robert Wilkes and to Wilkes’ comrade in letters, the coarse and fluent satirist, Charles Churchill. So it came about that the poet who could lie gazing in Redcliff meadows and produce the hymn to ‘Oure Ladies Chyrche’, could also within a few months produce ‘The Whore of Babylon’. This is perhaps the liveliest of his many satirical sorties, clubbing right and left with his blunt-ended couplets. The formal subject is an attack on the Bishop of Bristol, on Lord Bute, and a good selection of King George III’s more obnoxious ministers; it is packed with names and slanders and scurrilities, and lasts unflaggingly for 500 lines. Towards the end Chatterton makes a decisive attack on the attitudes he abhorred – (Rowley nodding appreciatively in the background):
The Muses have no Credit here, and Fame
Confines itself to the Mercantile Name; Then clip Imagination’s wings, be wise, And great in Wealth, to real Greatness rise. Or if you must persist to sing and dream, Let only Panegyric be your theme: Make North a Chatham, cannonize his Grace, And get a Pension or procure a Place.
Damn’d narrow Notions! tending to disgrace
The boasted Reason of the Human Race. Bristol may keep her prudent Maxims still, But know, my saving Friends, I never will. The Composition of my Soul is made Too great for servile avaricious Trade – When raving in the Lunacy of Ink I catch the pen and publish what I think.
The final couplet gives a memorable picture, although the scholar E. H. Meyerstein discovered in 1930 how extremely closely Chatterton sometimes imitated Churchill, and that the couplet in question is a rather neat summary of three lines from Churchill’s poem ‘Gotham’. Just such a scholarly point brings us back to Dr Johnson’s ‘uneducated stripling’. It demonstrates that Chatterton had always been enlarging his stock of ideas on his own. Colston Hall or Lambert’s attorney office did not really touch him. Instead, Chatterton performed his own intellectual odyssey in the circulating libraries of the town, and in the imaginative life of Thomas Rowley. ‘The dead live there and move like winds of light on dark and stormy air.’ His education was an intense and personal drama in which he entered as the major actor. Chatterton faced the idea of all passively received knowledge with gestures of derision that, from a sixteen-year-old, sting with a wholly modern arrogance:
O Education, ever in the wrong,
To thee the curses of mankind belong; Thou first great author of our future state, Chief source of our religion, passions, fate … Priestcraft, thou universal blind of all, Thou idol, at whose feet all nations fall, Father of misery, origin of sin, Whose first existence did with Fear begin …
That particular attack on priestcraft was probably picked up from the seventeenth-century radical political poet, Fulke Greville; another proof of Chatterton’s range, for he must have read Greville’s play Mustapha.
James Thistlethwaite, who has already had much to say on his school-friend’s ‘inordinate vanity’, had even more to say on the fantastic range of Chatterton’s obscure researches. (This was also to be an outstanding trait in Rimbaud, who turned to alchemy.)
In the course of the year 1768 and 1769 – Chatterton being between 15 and 16 years old – wherein I frequently saw and conversed with C., the eccentricity of his mind, and the versatility of his disposition, seem to have been singularly displayed. One day he might be found busily employed in the study of Heraldry and English Antiquities, both of which are numbered amongst the most favourite of his pursuits; the next, discovered him deeply engaged, confounded, and perplexed, amidst the subtleties of metaphysical disquisition, or lost bewildered in the abstruse labyrinth of mathematical researches; and these in an instant again neglected and thrown aside to make room for astronomy and music, of both which sciences his knowledge was entirely confined to theory. Even physics was not without a charm to allure his imagination, and he would talk of Galen, Hippocrates, and Paracelsus, with all the confidence and familiarity of a modern empirick.
Thistlethwaite, it should be pointed out, considered himself to be something of a bard at this time, and was renowned for striding around Bristol with a pair of pistol-butts sticking out of his pockets. But allowing for his love of flourish – perfectly displayed in the peacock struttings of these sentences – the picture of Chatterton in his jackdaw enthusiasm, his frantic and undaunted explorations into whatever caught his fancy and then perhaps his imagination, is tremendously compelling. It is also recognizably provincial and oddly unbalanced. It is not what Matthew Arnold, a hundred years later, would confidently describe as ‘of the centre’. It is peculiar. It contains the essential dissenting element, the waywardness, the impatience, the somehow attractive pigheadedness, of the radical innovator. It also contains the delinquent, the social outcast.
There would be something about the eyes; they would be over-bright, incalculable.
4 ‘This group of dirty-faced wits’
Chatterton was solitary in Bristol and in London, but he was never alone. In fact all his life he had the gift of striking up acquaintances; people were fascinated by him, although in the long run one gains the strong impression that most people were uneasy with him and disliked him. His letters from London to Bristol often include a positive confetti of greetings to old school-friends and ladies of the green. But they contain as well this telling aside: ‘My youthful acquaintances will not take it in dudgeon that I do not write oftener to them, than I believe I shall: but as I had the happy art of pleasing in conversation, my company was often liked, where I did not like: and to continue a correspondence under
