Indeed, their position is curiously close to the exclusive aesthetic orthodoxy of criticism today.
Thus Dr Johnson is recorded in 1776 by Anna Seward in one of his inimitable peremptory outbursts: ‘Pho, child! Don’t talk to me of the powers of a vulgar uneducated stripling. He may be another Stephen Duck. It may be extraordinary to do such things as he did, with means so slender; – but what did Stephen Duck do, what could Chatterton do, which, abstracted from the recollection of his situation, can be worth the attention of Learning and Taste? Neither of them had opportunities of enlarging their stock of ideas. No man can coin guineas, but in proportion as he has gold.’ The last remark somehow makes one wince: it had a tragic and literal application to Chatterton’s case, and the droptic Doctor – who had himself started out as a local schoolmaster – should have had more feeling than to use it. The ideals of ‘Learning and Taste’ take on a sharply elitist and self-complacent quality in this context; though they are powerful enough elsewhere. Most important, however, is the underlying argument: that something called ‘genius’ cannot be produced out of a hat – it requires a special milieu and a special training in which the ‘stock of ideas’ can be enlarged. These Chatterton did not, in the Doctor’s opinion, have; and hence, gold could not be coined from air. Johnson did in fact visit Chatterton’s birthplace, and it would be fascinating to know just how large a range of ‘ideas’ he imagined could be absorbed there, and just what his impressions of the milieu were.
At any rate, worthy of the attention of Learning and Taste it emphatically was not. Johnson’s opinion is still a representative one.
The opinion of Thomas Warton, poet laureate and equally weighty judgement, also implicitly condemned Chatterton for his lack of maturity and of ‘correct’ training and situation. Nevertheless, Warton’s attitude in the second edition of his monumental History of English Poetry (1776) is strikingly different to Johnson’s in that he at least appreciated how remarkably Chatterton had broken the rules and dazzled normal expectation: ‘Chatterton’, he surmised, ‘will appear to have been a singular instance of prematurity of abilities: to have acquired a store of general information far exceeding his years, and to have possessed that comprehension of mind, and activity of understanding, which predominated over his situation in life and his opportunities of instruction.’ In fact this is a judgement of an altogether different calibre, for in that slightly nebulous phrase – ‘the comprehension of mind, and activity of understanding’ – Warton is genuinely trying to reach for some (ultimately Romantic) concept of innate imaginative ability by which Chatterton could have reached out beyond his immediate limitations. All the same, Warton was no Lakelander but had the moral bottom of his age. He disapproved. In his final summary, he says this: ‘He was an adventurer, a professed hireling in the trade of literature, full of projects and inventions, artful, enterprising, unprincipled, indigent, and compelled to subsist by expedients.’ This was the same Chatterton that Keats was to call a ‘flow’ret’, blasted by cruel winds.
But fundamentally these opinions lack any awareness of the extraordinary dual relationship that Chatterton developed and acted out with his surroundings and native city, Bristol. For Bristol, in the present, was the focus for all his outrage and contempt; while Bristol, in the late-medieval past, was the projection of everything he loved and desired and imagined.
Historically, Chatterton’s Bristol of the 1760s was the second city in the kingdom, renowned – as say Birmingham is today – for its raw mercantile spirit, seething with new commercial enterprises; it was a city dominated by the power of local trading interests, and famed for its street riots, its civic pageants, its rowdy bought elections. There was a continuous cycle of demolition and new building, and the population was around 45,000 and increasing. The first recorded lock-out in England occurred in Bristol in 1762; and guild festivals, burnings in effigy of politicians and prize-fighting were all popular pastimes. Many of the streets were still unnavigably narrow, and goods traffic was often restricted to the same horse-drawn sleds which pulled Sir Charles Bawdin to his execution; now, however, they moved at high and unceremonious pace. Many shop doors and windows were hung with offensive advertisement sheets and boards; and one visitor complained that every single shop-boy seemed to be wearing silk stockings. Pope described it distastefully as ‘if Wapping and Southwark were ten times as big, or all their people ran into London’. The poet Richard Savage – who died there in misery and penury – apotheosed it as a city of
Upstarts and mushrooms, proud relentless hearts,
Thou blank of Sciences, thou dearth of Arts!
Living in such a city, it seems even more remarkable that Chatterton should have spent his time engrossed in old documents, or mooning round the shadowy vaulted nave of St Mary Redcliff reading the brasses, or gazing vacantly at the then blunted spire from nearby Temple Meads. But that, we know, is what he did.
A particularly vivid account was taken by Dr Milles from William Smith, a Colston Hall friend, and brother of the Peter Smith who committed suicide. ‘Chatterton was very fond of walking in the fields,’ he recorded, ‘and particularly in Redcliffe meadows; of talking with (Smith) about these MSS and reading them to him: “You and I” (says he) “will take a walk in Redcliff meadow, I have got the cleverest thing for you that ever was: it is worth half a crown to have a sight of it only, and to hear me read it to you.” He would then produce and read the parchment. He used to fix his eyes in a kind of reverie on Redcliff church, and say “this steeple was once burnt by lightning; this was the place where they formerly acted plays” ‘ (Dr Milles, Rowley, 1782). Chatterton’s ability to bring to life and dramatize the inanimate remnants of the past, even to display them to his friends as something still magically active in the present, is an essential element in the imagination which dramatized itself as Thomas Rowley. In this, St Mary Redcliff is a central feature, a palpable proof of both historical and psychological continuity. In these last two stanzas of Rowley’s second poem ‘Onn Oure Ladies Chyrche’, one can see exactly how Chatterton brings the stone to life:
Thou seest this mastrie of a human hand,
The pride of Bristowe and the Westerne lande,
Yet is the Builders vertues much moe greate
Greater than can by Rowlies pen be scande.
Thou seest the saints and kinges in stonen state,
That seemd with breath and human soule dispande:
As pared to us enseem these men of slate,
Such is greate Conynge’s minde when pared to God elate.
[dispande – swelling, expanding
pared – compared]
and then, his anger at the cheap mercantile and mediocre ambitions of his contemporary Bristolians rises also to Rowley’s tongue and is there transformed:
Well mayest thou be astounde, but viewe it well;
Go not from hence before thou see thy fill
And learn the Builders vertues and his name;
Of this tall spire in every countye tell
And with thy tale the lazing rich men shame.
Showe how the glorious Canynge did excelle,
How he good man a friend for kinges became
And glorious paved at once the way to heaven and fame.
For this Chatterton has condensed a stanza from Spenser, but with a characteristic and brilliant addition of a final clarion alexandrine which gives
