No More Learning

In July he changed his lodgings to the house of a Mrs. Angel, a sacque
maker in Brook Street, Holborn; the dead season of August was coming
on and probably he wanted to conceal his growing embarrassment from
his aunt, who might have sent word of it to his mother at Bristol.

His opera was accepted--it is a spirited and well written piece--and
for this he was paid five pounds, which enabled him to send a box of
presents to his mother and sister bought with money he had earned.
He had dreamed of this since he was eight. But his _Balade of
Charitie_--the most finished of all the Rowley poems--was refused by
the _Town and Country Magazine_ about a month before the end; which
came on August 24th. He was starving and still too proud to accept the
invitations of his landlady and of a friendly chemist to take various
meals with them. He was offended at the good landlady's suggestion
that he should dine with her; for 'her expressions seemed to hint'
(to _hint_) 'that he was in want'--no cloak for Thomas Chatterton! He
could have borrowed money and gone back to Bristol, but there are many
precedents for beaten generalissimos falling on their swords rather
than return home defeated and disgraced. How could he return? He had
set out so confidently; had boasted not a little of his powers, and
had satirized all the good people in Bristol _de haut en bas_. Think
of the jokes and commiserations of Burgum, Catcott, and the rest!
'Well, here you are again, boy; but of course _we_ knew it would come
to this! ' He could not endure to hear that.

Accordingly on Friday the 24th August 1770 he tore up his manuscripts,
locked his door, and poisoned himself with arsenic.

Southey, Byron, and others have supposed that Chatterton was mad; it
has been suggested that he was the victim of a suicidal mania.
All
the evidence that there is goes to show that he was not. He was
very far-sighted, shrewd, hard-working, and practical, for all his
imaginative dreaming of a non-existent past; and this at least may
be said, that Chatterton's suicide was the logical end to a very
remarkably consistent life.

Chatterton's character has suffered a good deal from three accusations
vehemently urged by Maitland and his eighteenth-century predecessors.
The first is that the boy was a 'forger'; the second that he was a
freethinker; the third that he was a free-liver.

To examine these in turn: the first admits of no denial as a question
of fact, but justification may be pleaded which some will accept as a
complete exculpation and others perhaps will hardly comprehend.

Chatterton could only produce poetry in his fifteenth-century vein;
his imagination failed him in modern English. No one who has any
appreciation of Rowley's poems will consider that the _African
Eclogues_ are for a moment comparable with them. If he was to write at
all he must produce antiques, and, as it happened, interest had been
aroused in ancient poetry, largely by the publication of Percy's
_Reliques_ and of the spurious Ossian. Appearing at this juncture,
then, as ancient writings taken from an old chest, his poems would be
read and their value appreciated; while no one would trouble to make
out the professed imitations--not by any means easy reading--of an
attorney's apprentice. Probably if an adequate audience had been
secured in his lifetime, Chatterton would have revealed the secret
when it had served its purpose--just as Walpole confessed to the
authorship of _Otranto_ only when that book had run into a second
edition.

To the second count of the indictment no defence is urged. Chatterton
was too honest and too intelligent to accept traditional dogmatics
without examination.

Finally, he was no free-liver in the sense in which that objectionable
expression is used. Rather he was an ascetic who studied and wrote
poetry half through the night, who ate as little as he slept, and
would make his dinner off 'a tart and a glass of water. ' He was
devoted to his mother and sister and to his poetry; and what spare
time was not occupied with the latter he seems to have spent largely
with the former. The attempt to represent him as a sort of
provincial Don Juan--though in the precocious licence of a few of his
acknowledged writings he has even given it some colour himself--cannot
be reconciled with the recorded facts of his life.