For this became the city where Coleridge and Robert Southey planned the Panti-socratic society on the banks of the Susquehanna; and from where Southey wrote back to his London publishers – ‘Bristol deserves panegyric instead of satire. I know of no mercantile place so literary.’ It is bitterly ironic that Chatterton should be so largely responsible for Bristol’s salvation in the eyes of the metropolis. He himself had written from London in May 1770: ‘Bristol’s mercenary walls were never destined to hold me – there, I was out of my element. Now I am in it – London! Good God! How superior is London to that despicable place Bristol – here is none of your little meannesses, none of your mercenary securities, which disgrace that miserable hamlet.’
Alone among Chatterton’s Bristolians, perhaps one man perceived any of the poet’s true qualities. We know little enough about him except that Chatterton thought him an irredeemable bigot. He was Catgut’s elder brother, the Rev. Alexander Catcott. When the scholar-investigator, Michael Lort, first began to comb Bristol for evidence in the 1770s, the Rev. Catcott alone suspected the true authorship of Rowley. His penetrating comment is recorded by Lort: ‘A. Catcott told me that, his suspicions being awakened, Chatterton was aware of this, and much on his guard; he had a large full grey eye, the most penetrating Mr (sic) Catcott had ever seen, and the eye of his understanding seemed no less penetrating. He would catch hints and intelligence from short conversations, which he would afterwards work up, and improve, and cover up in such a manner that an attentive and suspicious person only could trace them back to the source from whence he derived them.’
Later, Keats would call a process, very similar to this one, Negative Capability. The anvil and smithy of his brain.
5 ‘The pale children of the feeble sun’
In the only fragment of his last letter from London in August 1770 that has survived, Chatterton said: ‘I am about to quit my ungrateful country. I shall exchange it for the deserts of Africa, where tigers are a thousand times more merciful than man’ (quoted by Winslow, The Anatomy of Suicide, 1840). One thinks of Rimbaud.
Yet in these last four months, it becomes increasingly difficult to take any of Chatterton’s own words literally. His letters home are full of successes that never materialized. The sweltering heat of the narrow streets in summer along which he plodded, from editor to editor, seems to have filled his head with strange delusions and tropical visions. Africa, its heat and violence and beauty, is a continual theme with him, and produces the two magnificent ‘African Eclogues’:
On Tiber’s banks where scarlet jasmines bloom
And purple aloes shed a rich perfume; Where, when the sun is melting in his heat The reeking tygers find a cool retreat, Bask in the sedges, lose the sultry beam And wanton with their shadows in the stream. On Tiber’s banks, by sacred priests rever’d Where in the days of old a god appear’d – ‘Twas in the dead of night, at Chalma’s feast The tribe of Alta slept around the priest …
(‘The Death of Nicou’, June 1770)
Here, with phrases like ‘reeking tygers’ he reaches a new, exotic precision; one is tempted to call it a hallucinogenic power. It is probable that Chatterton began taking opium at this time, at first as an antidote to his ‘Cold’, and later perhaps as an antidote to reality. One of his last friends was Mr Cross, the chemist on the corner of Brooke Street; he once shared a barrel of oysters with him. Cross supplied him with a number of medicaments, and almost certainly opium. This is not in itself surprising. In the eighteenth century, and indeed well on into the nineteenth century, opium was used as a regular adult pain-killer and stimulant, usually taken in solution as laudanum. Toothaches, head-colds, stomach diseases, gout, rheumatism all yielded to the poppy; it was the exact equivalent of the modern barbiturate. Nevertheless, it seems as if Chatterton was in the end taking opium doses in direct powder or stick form – and that is hardly medicinal. A deep stain running through nineteen leaves of Chatterton’s London notebook was finally analysed in 1947. Dr Walls of South-Western Forensic Laboratory reported conclusive evidence: ‘I cut a piece out of the stain on the back page and tested this. It gives a positive reaction for opium alkaloid (i.e. morphine etc.).’
The relationship between drugs and artistic creativity is still obscure and has always been in dispute; the argument ranges from ‘Kubla Khan’ and ‘The English Stage Coach’ (De Quincey) to The Naked Lunch and Kerouac’s peyote poems. In the ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, a classic Romantic text in this respect, Keats classes drugs – ‘the dull opiates’ – with alcohol – ‘Bacchus and his pards’ – and Poesy as one of the three primary mediums of fantasy. While Rimbaud, making a fierce literal reading of Baudelaire, classes drugs with alcohol and sexual experience (preferably perverse, or at least exotic) as one of the primary means of the poet’s systematic and prolonged derangement of the senses. This is, however, literary and theoretical. In practice, drugs with their expense, their destruction of social relationships, their attendant physical diseases, and their inherent tendency to expand, distort and dissipate the senses into passivity of outlook (whereas all artistic effort requires concentration, sensual intensity and tremendous activity) – drugs make at best only a short-term partnership with creativity. Moreover they occupy the passive, or female, side of that partnership, providing relief rather than direct stimulus, providing the unconscious pool of images rather than the conscious netting and binding of images into actual artistic forms. (Some of these issues are discussed in Alethea Hayter’s book, Opium and the Romantic Imagination, 1968.)
All the same, in poetry the drug-supported and drug-fed imagination does produce quite characteristic and brilliant effects. Most notably, there is a combination of very bright, very minute, highdefinition images with a completely contrasting sense of entirely vague sweeping movements, undefined expanses and landscapes, and massive blurred shiftings of light and shade. In Chatterton’s earliest ‘African Eclogue’, which is dated Shoreditch May 2nd 1770, about a week or ten days after he had arrived in London, these characteristics are already recognizable. The poem is called ‘Narva and Mored’, the names of two young African lovers. The central passage begins:
Three times the virgin, swimming on the breeze,
Danc’d in the shadow of the mystic trees: When, like a dark cloud spreading to the view The first-born sons of War and Blood pursue. Swift as the elk they pour along the plain Swift as the flying clouds distilling rain Swift as the boundings of the youthful roe They course around and lengthen as they go. Like the long chain of rocks, whose summits rise Far in the sacred regions of the skies Upon whose top the black’ning tempest lours, Whilst down its side the gushing torrent pours, Like the long cliffy mountains which extend From Lorbar’s cave, to where the nations end, Which sink in darkness, thick’ning and obscure Impenetrable, mystic, and impure, The flying terrors of the war advance And round the sacred oak, repeat the dance.
The most extraordinary thing is the almost total dissolution of the formal eighteenth-century couplets into a rushing, shapeless, undirected torrent of images which gives free expression to the wildness and passion of the African tribal dance, as Chatterton understood and imagined it. The dance is both a dance of war by the tribesmen, and a dance of ecstatic sexual expectancy by the young virgin Mored (‘Black was her face, as Togla’s hidden cell, / Soft as the moss where hissing adders dwell’). It is so typical of Chatterton that Lorbar’s cave is impenetrable, mystic and impure. The love of Narva and Mored ends in simultaneous union and destruction: ‘Lock’d in each other’s arms, from Hyga’s cave, / They plunged relentless to a wat’ry grave’. If the passage reminds one of something else, it will turn out to be the opening section of Coleridge’s opium dream-poem ‘Kubla Khan’, written some thirty years later.
In these ‘African Eclogues’, as in the journalistic prose tales and articles Chatterton dashed off for money, and indeed in everything else he wrote during these last four months, one is continually coming across lines or whole passages which recall the reader –
