BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES

authoritative measures from the Court, the aspirant pamphleteer had promptly to resort to more profitable business than writing (even for both sides, as he did at one time) clever imitations in Junius's or in Churchill's style. Then, he wrote brilliantly, and in a wonderfully short time, a most spirited burletta, for which he duly received five guineas, the greatest sum of money ever granted him. But, whatever other work he did, whether hack-work, or genuine poetry, was either indefinitely detained or shamefully paid, or even, in spite of fallacious promises, not paid for at ail ; merciless publishers unquestionably took advantage of his youthful inexpérience ; one of his best poems, The Balade of Charitiey was even bluntly rejected. Soon the scanty fées earned by indefatigable industry and prodigious versatility, * his vigour and fire of youth,' were squandered either on kind gifts to his mother and his sister, or on fashionable dress meant for * frequenting places of the best resort ' or on less advisable pleasures, *the wild expenses of a poet's brain.*

Thus, in spite of ail his buoyancy, the poor * fatherless, friendless, forlorn ' lad had not been three months in his mistaken * élément ' when, however abstemious he was, only indulging at times in drinking tea, he fell a victim to the pangs of hunger. Vainly did he try, like Smollett, to go to sea as a surgeon's mate; vainly did his relative advise him to get into some office : * he stormed about the room like a madman and frightened her not a little by telling her he hoped with the blessing of God very soon to be sent to the Tower, which would make his fortune.' After the sudden death of Beckford, whom he had been led to regard in the light of a future patron, 'he was perfectly frantic and out of his mind, and said he was ruined.' Nevertheless, * as proud as Lucifer,' he refused to partake of meals to which his relative kindly invited him. Indeed he had not eaten anything for two or three days, when, on his non-appearance on a certain morning (Aug. 25, 1770), they broke open his bedroom door; on the bare floor, ail strewn with the scraps of his torn-up manuscripts, his emaciated corpse was found distorted by the writhing pains of arsenic poisoning.

* Farewell, my mother ! ' (he had lately written)

' Cease, my anguished soûl, Nor let Distraction's billows o'er me roU! Hâve mercy, Heaven! when hère I cease to live. And this last act of wretchedness forgive ! '

Se died in his eighteenth year ' the Mad Genius of Bristol,' as

ICX) CHATTERTON

he styled himself. ' If I do a mad action,' he had foretold, * it is conformable to every action of niy life, which ail savoured of insanity.' Thus he proved true to his chosen motto : * Alas ! poor Chatterton ! ' for he has remained, in spite of ail moral blemishes,

the marvellous boy, The sleepless soûl that perished in his pride.

The most prédominant feature in his composition seems to hâve been, between the occasional fits of slothful melancholy, that wonderful activity we hâve already spoken of. From beginning to end Chatterton vvas always busy, bustling, restlessly engaged on some sort of literary work, whether in prose or in verse, whether genuine or spurious ; but, at the same time, he was ever, and almost unavoidably, shallow, desultory, inconsistent (save in his systematic forgery), and, of course, unsincere. Does not indeed mental versatility usually verge on moral fickleness ?

Besides the whole volume of the Rowley poems and other pseudo-antique prose-pieces, he produced in his five or six years' steady work a still bulkier book of modem verse ; in this are strangely jumbled together fables and satires, eclogues and élégies, didactic epistles and amorous lyrics, a mock heroic poem and the smart but lewd burletta ; there he imitâtes alternately or ail together, and even at times boldly plagiarizes, the most fashionable writers of the day : Gay and Gray, Young and Pope, Collins, and, true to provincial taste, Butler. Yet, even in this bewildering medley of ail styles an accurate observer may easily detect the two chief sources of his Personal inspiration, i.e. his likes and dislikes; hence the satirical and the sentimental currents of his poetry.

Whether they are literary or political, or even merely Personal, the satires truly deserve the hard judgement passed by a Bristol paper on the most famous one, Ke<w Gardens : The poet rambles mercilessly from London to Bristol, — from the Ministry to our Corporation, — from our national affairs to our domestic and civic tittle-tattle ; one while abusing the bench of Bishops, and then condescending to throw his ink at the clergy of this diocèse, abusing one after another, ail without discrimination.' He even so relentlessly indulged in scurrilous abuse that a whole poem, The Exhibition^ has not yet found an editor bold enough to launch it in print ; what else indeed could be expected from such a disciple of Savage (who had died in Bristol in 1743) ^^^ of Churchill, as plainly acknowledges : * When raving in the lunacy of ink, I catch the

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES lOI

pen and publish what I think ; . . . when the strong fit of satire is upon me, I spare neither friend nor foe. ... I value neither the praise nor the censure of the multitude. ... AU orders of inankind are fools or knaves.* Unfortunately, through some unlucky lack of more benevolent feelings, when he had some praise or some condolence to bestow on a friend's or on a patron's death, the former satirist's vvild sincerity proved to be singularly tamed down into the most frigid style of lavish bombast.

The amorous poems, sad to say, are hardly better than the satirical ones. Chatterton's love is neither refined by tender sensibility, nor ennobled by lofty aspirations, nor enlarged by mystical glimpses, nor enhanced by dramatic passion ; it is a mère sensual enjoyment, cynically selfish and avowedly vainglorious. * This vanity,' he himself says, ' this impudence, is ail the merit, ail the sensé, through which to famé I tread.' True, he is no more ' a bestial buck ' than ' a coward lover ' ; but he is, or at any rate prétends to be, * a rake,' * flattering, impudent and free,' * who with the soûl the body gains, and shares love's pleasures, not his pains.' * So I, a humble-dumble drone,' he goes on, * anxious and restless when alone, seek comfort in the fair.' ' My puise beats high ; my throbbing breast's on fire in sad variety of wild désire.' Of course, marriage is in his opinion * of ail states the worst, a stagnant pool of life . . . and love, without the purse, will soon grow cold.' At best, ' love is the blossom, the spring of the soûl, . . . the only fixed means of improving the mind.' Yet, such as it is, though not yet purified by misfortune, this crude feeling turns out to be somewhat pathetic when, a few weeks before his death, the starving boy, pining for human solace no less than for bread, writes : —

Let mercy plead my cause ; and think, oh ! think !

A love like mine but ill deserves thy hâte : Remember, I am tottering on the brink,

Thy smile or censure seals my final fate.

It becomes even tragic when in an African eclogue he depicts two desperate lovers plunging ' to a watery grave ' with the cry : ' God ! take our lives, unless we live to love.' Truly he could describe himself: ' Whilst noxious vapours rise around, I sigh my taie of love.'

Religion had been to him scarcely a comfort or a guide during his life-time, but rather, according to the sceptical spirit of the âge, a mère butt, the most inexhaustible laughing-stock. * I am no Christian,' he would say ; ' Opinion is

the only guide, the only God we know; Religion 's but Opinion's bastard son ; Reason 's a thorn in Revelation's side *. . . . At most, he would coldly grant : ' I own a God, immortal, boundless, wise/ soon adding : * In natural religion free, I to no other bow the knee : Nature 's the God I own.' But, ' when Melancholy's silent power was gliding through the shade, with raging Madness by her side,' then he began to surmise more : ' to live, then die,* he musingly thought with Young, * man was not only made. There 's yet an awful something else remains, either to lessen or increase our pains.' At last, when Suicide was pressing him close in his solitude, when inborn Pride was gradually leading him to Despair, then he wrote, if not the most perfect, yet the most pathetic lines he ever penned, the ones most deserving to be preserved from oblivion, for they worthily seal his fate :—

The mystic mazes of Thy will Are past the power of human skill.

O teach me in the trying hour To still my sorrows, own Thy power.

But yet, with fortitude resigned, ru thank th' inflictor of the blow; Forbid the sigh, compose my mind, Nor let the gush of misery flow.

As to the famous Rowley poems, we think they hâve been greatly overrated ; they are, though the most important, the least interesting of Chatterton's works. The two rambling,though unfinished, versions of^he Battle of HasttngSj the welldevised but childish tragedy jElla, the fragmentary Goddivynn, the doleful ballad Bristoive Tragédie, together with the more perfect one. Balade of Charitie, African E dogues, and other would-be archaic pièces, imply, notwithstanding the unfair means employed, stupendous labour from a poor, self-taught and ill-advised office-boy in his teens, miserably drudging from morn till night. Yet no less stupendous than such a labour is the ever-ready facility with which the chief types of mediaeval Society are usually impersonated, and their varions feelings vented. Unquestionably, too, spontaneous fluency of speech often expands into overflowing strains of harmonious verse, or occasionally, though more rarely, is couched in félicitons phrasing and lofty thought. Unfortunately, and in spite of such qualities, whether on account of the very excess of that fluent facility, or because of the imperfect disguise of the motley garb, there is not a single pièce, not even The Balade