No More Learning

In fine, there is no poet, one may boldly declare,
whose pages are so filled with battle, murder and sudden death, as
Chatterton's are; and this is perhaps the clearest indication he gives
of immaturity.

But if his ideas were sometimes crude and boyish they were not by any
means always so; he has flashes of genius, sudden beauties that take
away the breath. A better example than this of what is called the
sublime could not be found:

See! the whyte moone sheenes onne hie;
Whyterre ys mie true loves shroude;
Whyterre yanne the mornynge skie,
Whyterre yanne the evenynge cloude.
(_AElla_, 872. )

and, from the _Songe bie a Manne and Womanne_,

I heare them from eche grene wode tree,
Chauntynge owte so blatauntlie,
Tellynge lecturnyes to mee,
Myscheefe ys whanne you are nygh.
(_AElla_, 107. )

Did ever shepherd's pipe play a prettier tune?
He has some fine martial sounds, as for instance:
Howel ap Jevah came from Matraval
(_Battle of Hastings_, I, 181. )

He rarely employs personifications, but no poet used the figure more
convincingly. The third Mynstrelle's description of Autumn is a
lovely thing, and one will not easily forget his Winter's frozen blue
eyes--though unfortunately that is not in Rowley.

His art was essentially dramatic, and he has some fine dramatic
moments, as for example when the Usurer soliloquizing miserably on his
certain ultimate damnation suddenly cries out

O storthe unto mie mynde! I goe to helle.
(_Gouler's Requiem_. )

The word 'storthe' is a good example of Chatterton's use of strange
words.
The effect of a sudden outcry which it produces would be lost
in a modernized version which rendered it 'death'.

Mr. Watts-Dunton in his article on Chatterton in Ward's _English
Poets_ speaks of his extraordinary metrical inventiveness and of his
ultimate responsibility for such lines as these--

And Christabel saw the lady's eye
And nothing else she saw thereby
Save the boss of the shield of Sir Leoline tall
Which hung in a murky old niche in the wall--

the anapaestic dance of which breaks in upon the normal iambic
movement of the poem with a natural dramatic propriety. He compares
too _The Eve of St. Agnes_ with the _Excelente Balade of Charitie_,
remarking that it was only in his latest work that Keats attained
to that dramatic objectivity which was 'the very core and centre of
Chatterton's genius. '

Another writer, Mr. Thomas Seccombe, speaks of his 'genuine lyric
fire, a poetic energy, and above all an intensity remote from his
contemporaries and suggestive (as Cimabue in his antique and primitive
manner is suggestive of Giotto and Angelico) of Shelley and Keats. '

Chatterton's influence on the great body of poets of the generation
succeeding his own was very considerable--Mr. Watts-Dunton indeed
declares him to have been the father of the New Romantic School--and
the affection with which Keats, Coleridge, Wordsworth and many others
regarded him was extraordinary. He was their pioneer, who had lost
his life in a heroic attempt to penetrate the dull crassness of the
mid-eighteenth century.

He had great originality and the gift of an intense imagination. If
he is sometimes crude and immature in thought and expression--if his
images sometimes weary by their monotony--it is accepted that a poet
is to be judged by his highest and not his lowest; and Chatterton's
best work has an inspiration, a singular and unique charm both of
thought and of music that is of the first order of English poetry.




III. BIBLIOGRAPHY.


A great deal more has been written about Chatterton than it is worth
anybody's while to read. To begin with, there are all the volumes and
pamphlets concerning themselves with the question whether the Rowley
poems were written by Chatterton or by Rowley, or by both (Chatterton
adding matter of his own to existing poems written in the fifteenth
century), or by neither.