No More Learning

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. It may be said that these problems were not
conclusively and finally solved till Professor Skeat brought out his
edition of Chatterton in 1871.

Then again there are the various lives of the poet; for the most part
mere random aggregations of such facts, true or imagined, as fell
in the editor's way, filled out with pulpit commonplaces and easy
paragraphs beginning 'But it is ever the way of Genius . . . ' Professor
Wilson's _Chatterton: a Biographical Study_ is as final in its own way
as Professor Skeat's two volumes. It is a scholarly compilation of
all previous accounts, very well digested and arranged. Moreover,
the Professor has for the most part left the facts to tell their
own story; and thus his book is free from such absurdities as the
sentimental regrets of Gregory and Professor Masson that Chatterton
was led into a course of folly ending in suicide through being
deprived of a father's care. Such a father as Chatterton's was!

While premising that any one who wishes to learn the facts of the
boy-poet's life--his circumstances and surroundings--can find them
all set forth in Professor Wilson's book: while equally if he is
interested in the pseudo-Rowley's language, philologically considered,
he will find this elaborately examined in Professor Skeat's second
volume; it has been thought that the following bibliography of books
dealing with various aspects of the poet which were read and valued in
their day may be found of interest to students of literary history.

1598. Speght's edition of Chaucer, the glossary of which Chatterton
used in the compilation of his Rowley Dictionary.