THOMAS CHATTERTON, PHILLIS WHEATLEY, GEORGE CRABBE
Thomas Warton wrote a judicious account of Thomas Chatterton in the decade of the “marvellous boy’s” death. It is a tribute to the success of the legendary forger that, though some critics believed they had rumbled him, others sat on the fence. In Thomas Rowley’s poems, Warton declares, the fifteenth century will be vindicated: “A want of genius will no longer be imputed to this period of our poetical history, if the poems lately discovered at Bristol, and said to have been written by Thomas Rowlie, a secular priest of that place, about the year one thousand four hundred and seventy, are genuine.” His indecision is on poetic rather than scholarly grounds; the poems “possess considerable merit,” he declares; there were still grounds for regarding them as genuine. In the end Warton, on the evidence of parchments and handwriting, and of spelling conventions, comes down on the side of the disbelievers. Yet he is reluctant to do so. He is enchanted: “This youth, who died at eighteen, was a prodigy of genius; and would have proved the first of English poets, had he reached a maturer age.” Which was more marvelous: that a fifteenth-century poet of real moment should be rediscovered, or that a teenager from the provinces should create so plausible and sustained a poetic work? In the end the spell Chatterton cast was broken. “He was an adventurer, a professional hireling in the trade of literature, full of projects and inventions, artful, enterprising, unprincipled, indigent, and compelled to subsist by expedients.”
Begin, my Muse, the imitative lay,
Aonian doxies sound the thrumming string;
Attempt no number of the plaintive Gray,
Let me like midnight cats, or Collins sing.
Chatterton survives for what he meant to the Romantics more than for anything he wrote. Much of his (false) work is outstanding, all of it provides evidence of genius that did not give itself time to mature fully, though mature it certainly is. His writings fill three volumes; there are longueurs. He was not Arthur Rimbaud. To the Romantics he symbolized genius untutored, misunderstood, misprized by “the ingrate world” (Keats). Keats used to intone the magnificent lines from the minstrels’ song in the play Aella:
Comme, wythe acorne-coppe and thorne,
Drayne mie hartys blodde awaie;
Lyfe and all yttes goode I scorne,
Daunce bie nete, or feaste by daie.
My love ys dedde,
Gon to hys death-bedde,
Al under the wyllowe tree.
To Chatterton’s memory Keats dedicated an indifferent sonnet, and then Endymion, the poem he described as “a feverish attempt, rather than a deed accomplished.” Keats sets his hero “among the stars / Of highest Heaven.” In a letter to Reynolds he confides, “I always somehow associate Chatterton with autumn. He is the purest writer in the English Language. He has no French idioms, or particles like Chaucer—’tis genuine English idiom in English words.” In a letter to his brother he adds, “Chatterton’s language is entirely northern. I prefer the native music of it to Milton’s cut by feet.” Chatterton’s “pure” English proved useful in Keats’s emancipation from Milton. He loved the “Rowley poems” in “Middle English,” not the precocious but otherwise unexceptional English poems.
Wordsworth refers to Chatterton in “Resolution and Independence” and carries the poet’s name further in time and space than any other tribute does: “I thought of Chatterton, the marvellous Boy, / The sleepless Soul that perished in his pride.” Coleridge was behindhand in his tribute. For over thirty years he tinkered with his “Monody on the Death of Chatterton,” spoken figuratively at the poet’s grave (as a pauper suicide, his grave was unmarked). The life and death of the poet detained him. The poems that he praises in passing are the “Rowley poems.” Coleridge’s significant poetic debt to Chatterton is in the metrical organization of “Christabel.”
What, apart from the life, was the appeal of Chatterton? Why do some claim him as “the first Romantic”? There are undeniably fine poems and stanzas, especially among the forgeries. Best are certain passages of Aella, “An Excelente Balade of Charitie (As wroten bie the goode Prieste Thomas Rowley 1464),” and “Eclogue the Third.” The authority of his “language” is felt in the amusing and, in tone at least, plausibly medieval quatrain:
Theere was a Broder of Orderys Blacke
In mynster of Brystowe Cittie:
He layd a Damoisell onne her Backe
So guess yee the Taile of mie Dittie.
Remarkable for its oddity, such verse also has a separable quality. The best passages in Aella do not lose their imaginative force when translated back into modern English (Chatterton drafted them in English, then medievalized the language).
He remained popular until the middle of the nineteenth century as a Romantic legend, a lesson in resisting to the death literary and social convention. From his setting forth he was marginal. He was born in Bristol in 1752. His father, a schoolmaster and subchanter at the Church of St. Mary Redcliffe, died before the boy was born. Chatterton’s mother supported him, working as a seamstress and running a “dame school.” It was she who, one day disposing of some antique documents, aroused in the hitherto listless child an enthusiasm, first for the illuminated letters, then for the old words. She taught him to read. Later he busied himself studying at home and at St. Mary’s (where he claimed to have gained access to a mysterious box containing Rowley’s manuscripts).
When he was seven he was sent to a grim Bristol school, Colston’s Hospital. He kept himself to himself, writing occasional satirical poems about his schoolmate-tormentors to keep his spirits up—poems such as “Sly Dick,” “in arts of cunning skilled.” At the age of ten he began to write more earnest poems. “On the First Epiphany,” written when he was eleven, was published. He composed more satirical as well as religious verse, revealing a precociously informed (or cleverly imitative) skepticism in matters of public morality. In 1764 he presented a pupil-teacher with a forged medieval poem. His first gull was duped.
In 1767 he was apprenticed to an attorney. He composed further forgeries. Most of the “Rowley poems” were completed in 1768–69. He persuaded several Bristol burghers, some of his friends, and for a time he succeeded with the great Horace Walpole. Ambition to be a writer took him to London. Pride forbade him to return home a failure. In 1770, in his eighteenth year, starving and in despair, he poisoned himself with arsenic in a rented room in Holborn.
His ambition, talent and pride were frustrated at each endeavor, perhaps because he started off on the wrong, borrowed medieval foot: his own feet would have carried him far. He could find no peer in Bristol to converse with. There his forgeries were admired as antique manuscripts, not as poems. He could find no patron. Grub Street exploited his energy but not his genius. Yet he achieved the “Rowley poems.” Was he a “native,” or “born,” poet? Romantic writers needed to believe in such creatures. Coleridge pointed out in a note on “Resolution and Independence” that Wordsworth could name only two: Chatterton and Burns.
Chatterton’s invention of Sir Thomas Rowley, fifteenth-century “Secular Priest of St John,” was not perverse. His truly perverse forgeries consisted in providing “authentic” pedigrees for drab notables or convenient documents for local historians. Rowley by contrast was a serious enterprise. He has character and a tone of his own quite distinct from Chatterton’s in his modern English verse. He lives in an idealized medieval Bristol. Rowley’s rank, religious vocation (“The Church of Rome [some Tricks of Priestcraft excepted] is certainly the true Church,” Chatterton wrote in his “Articles of Belief”), his erudition, all extended Chatterton beyond the cramped, commercially evolving Bristol of the slave trade in which he existed without wealth, status or prospect, and was compelled to observe a faith he found colorless and hypocritical. Rowley was necessary to him; his best poems partake of that necessity.
“Forgery” was a device for escaping the conventions that checked the genius of Gray and disoriented the work of Smart and Cowper. Macpherson’s Ossian, and Walpole’s own The Castle of Otranto, which pretended to be translated from an Italian original, were two of the best-known forgeries. A harking back to pre-Renaissance culture, a hankering after “native” roots and styles kept writers such as Gray and Warton active. An interest in philology and earlier versions of the language was developing.
Chatterton’s dramatic instinct allows him not only to describe but to enter the world of Rowley. He owes debts to Shakespeare, and Aella, his most sustained Rowley work, though unstageable, is dramatic. His language derives most from Chaucer, but his imagination is at home in the sixteenth century. The forgeries are not mosaics of philological plagiarism, any more than Gray’s poems are mosaics of poetic plagiarism. They make a solid structure of old- and new-baked bricks. Behind Chatterton’s English poems stand Pope, Gay and Swift. Without Rowley, Chatterton would have remained a minor Augustan, unless Grub Street had provided him more than crusts. With Rowley he became an original, a proto-Romantic, using the past as a way of apprehending the world and rejecting the conventions of a narrowed culture.
Keats in the preface to Endymion speaks of himself and of adolescence in terms applicable to Chatterton. “The imagination of a boy is healthy, and the mature imagination of a man is healthy; but there is a space of life between, in which the soul is in ferment, the character undecided, the way of life uncertain, the ambition thick-sighted.” It was in this space that Chatterton perished in a sordidness to which the Romantics imparted a tragic glamour.
A story stranger even than Chatterton’s, and in its ending sadder, is that of Phillis Wheatley, who—born around 1753 somewhere in Africa (perhaps Senegal) and under a name entirely lost—was transported into slavery in America. She was bought as a child on her arrival in Boston by a tailor, John Wheatley, and reared by him and his wife, whose servant she became. Phillis learned English quickly, then Latin. Her masters introduced her to the poetry of Pope and Gray and at the age of thirteen she was writing religious verse. Her first published poem was an elegy on the death of an evangelical minister, composed when she was seventeen. A prodigy of imitation rather than invention, she traveled to England in 1773, where her first book, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, was published, with a preface signed by various American men of substance, including John Hancock. The Countess of Huntingdon entertained and patronized her in London. In America she met with George Washington, to whom she addressed a poem. Her celebrity ended here: returning to Boston, she watched her masters die, and married a freed slave who succumbed to debtors’ prison. She had three children, one of whom survived. She drudged to support it and herself, then died in 1784; the last child followed soon after. Poetry abandoned her in her hardship or, it is safer to say, any poetry she wrote in her later, sketchily charted years has not survived. Those who supported and sponsored her in her early success lost sight of her or perhaps averted their eyes.
Her poems disappoint those seeking—in the first substantial black poet in English, and the first black woman writing in the language—evidence of her circumstances as a slave, as a woman, as a freed woman. Indeed the poems belong to a tradition more English than American: there is less of her world in her verse than of Anne Bradstreet’s in hers. She does refer to her origins, addressing a poem to another black artist, a painter; and a letter of thanks to the Earl of Dartmouth; an epigram on her origin affirming that “Negroes, black as Cain / May be refined and join the angelic strain”; but her heroic couplets march along in terms of such generality as to make them at most points indistinguishable from the conventional work of the day. Indeed her poem to George Washington, which concludes with the couplet “A crown, a mansion, and a throne that shine, / With gold unfading, WASHINGTON! be thine” shows how conventional language could betray an enthusiastic sensibility, how an ideology can inhere in imagery and form when they are not tested against the particulars of experience. Phillis Wheatley is a harbinger.
For particulars we turn to another Romantic precursor, glamourless George Crabbe, who, unlike Chatterton and Wheatley, survived well into the nineteenth century and, having influenced Wordsworth, lived to learn from him in turn. Wordsworth imitated him in The Excursion and Crabbe attempted Wordsworthian blank verse and explored his childhood (Infancy, A Fragment, 1816), though by then his best work was done. He very nearly attained the age of eighty. His remorseless vision of human nature and society makes Thomas Hardy seem almost cheerful. His poems chronicle the human condition—or predicament—mercilessly, like a sort of Suffolk Zola. His place in the genealogy of Romanticism is assured because of how he portrays that condition, and the landscapes through which his characters are led by their lives.
Hazlitt puzzled over his work. “Mr Crabbe’s style might be cited as an answer to Audrey’s question—‘Is poetry a true thing?’ There are here no ornaments, no flights of fancy, no illusions of sentiment, no tinsel of words. His song is one sad reality, one unraised, unvaried note of unavailing woe. Literal fidelity serves him in the place of invention; he assumes importance by a number of petty details; he rivets attention by being tedious.” He continues, with a degree of wry appreciation: “The world is one vast infirmary; the hill of Parnassus is a penitentiary, of which our author is the overseer: to read him is a penance, yet we read on! Mr Crabbe, it must be confessed, is a reclusive writer. He continues to ‘turn diseases to commodities,’ and make a virtue of necessity.” Then, again: “Mr Crabbe gives us one part of nature, the mean, the little, the disgusting, the distressing... He does this thoroughly and like a master, and we forgive him all the rest.” We do read on; once we develop a taste for his characters, his world and its somber tonalities, we do forgive him.
Doctor Johnson was able to admire him, even against the grain of his natural prejudice against plain style. Crabbe kept more or less to the style he devised early because it was admired: approbation atrophied and to an extent impeded him. But he could describe nature (not Nature) at every stage of his work with a minuteness and inwardness that set him above Thomson: “Even Thomson describes not so much the naked object as what he sees in his mind’s eye, surrounded and glowing with the mild, bland, genial vapours of his brain:—but the adept in Dutch interiors, hovels, and pig-styes must find in Mr Crabbe a man after his own heart.” And indeed Crabbe, given his Suffolk, given the Dutch trade, is the most Dutch of English poets in terms of depiction, with a rich palette of dark colors, intoxicating variegations on a small scale, the humble, the apparently trivial. His sourness and misanthropy we make allowance for. “The situation of a country clergyman is not necessarily favourable to the cultivation of the Muse. He is set down, perhaps, as he thinks, in a small curacy for life, and he takes his revenge by imprisoning the reader’s imagination in luckless verse.” So he says, “Lo! the gay lights of Youth are past—are dead, / But what still deepening clouds of Care survive!” In the twilight of Augustanism Crabbe was doomed to tend a parish remote from the metropolitan heart. He commanded a large readership. Byron declared him “Though nature’s sternest painter yet the best.”
“A provincial Pope” or “Pope in worsted stockings” are accepted versions that rouse F. R. Leavis to an extravagant defense of a writer who combines novelistic virtues with those of a poet. He praises Crabbe’s use of couplets in dialogue. They’re not evidence of “awkward elegance clothing an incongruous matter”: the couplet “represents, one might say, ‘reason’s self.’ ” Leavis goes further: “In the use of description, of nature, and the environment generally, for emotional purposes he surpasses any Romantic.” Here he goes too far. Crabbe is a master storyteller, and it is more useful to see him in the poetic narrative tradition of Chaucer than in the novel tradition of his century. In “Peter Grimes,” “Procrastination,” “The Frank Courtship,” “The Lover’s Journey” and elsewhere, the verse connects individual and communal experience, the weathers of the heart and of the world, mental and physical landscapes. There is humor if not wit in some of the portrayals. His originality is dramatic and psychological, accomplished not by formal or stylistic invention but by conventional skills.
He was born in Aldeburgh, Suffolk, in 1755, son of a collector of salt duties. His background was not privileged. For his early schooling he went to Bungay and Stowmarket, Suffolk. When he was thirteen he was apprenticed to an apothecary and farmer for three years, then for another three to a surgeon-apothecary. He started writing poems. When he was seventeen he became engaged to Sarah Elmy, but did not marry for eleven years. At the age of twenty-one, after working briefly as a laborer, he set up as an apothecary and was appointed surgeon to the poor in Aldeburgh. Inebriety, a moral poem modeled on Pope, was his anonymous debut. At twenty-two he went to London to advance his medical training, returning again in 1780 with £5 in his pocket, to make his way as a writer. It was a struggle, and in the unsettled years there he witnessed the antipapist Gordon Riots. He secured Edmund Burke’s patronage: Burke attempted to “civilize” or “Londonize” the poet but remodeled only the surface: Crabbe was not able to change his spots or willing to disguise his nature. The Library, another long poem in the manner of Pope, appeared. Burke introduced him to some of the great men of the day. He was ordained deacon and returned to Aldeburgh as curate in 1782. Shortly after, he was ordained priest and appointed chaplain to the Duke of Rutland at Belvoir Castle.
The Village, his first major work, appeared in 1783. Doctor Johnson read, corrected and praised it. It reveals a skilled poet with broadly social concerns and a documentary technique. It’s no surprise that Henry Fielding was Crabbe’s favorite novelist—a moralist teaching through laughter, his moral categories corresponding to psychological types. Crabbe is a literalist, a portrayer and interpreter rather than a visionary. He does not conceal rural ills “in tinsel trappings of poetic pride.” His poetry is richer in social detail than Cowper’s because his range of experience and human involvement was greater. A conservative when faced with needless change, he was radical in one respect: he showed what was, before suggesting what ought to be. What was being destroyed—by individuals and by political and commercial interests in the life of the community—was of greater value than what was replacing it. Social issues interested him less than social verities:
...cast by fortune on a frowning coast,
Which neither groves nor happy valleys boast;
Where other cares than those the Muse relates,
And other shepherds dwell with other mates;
By such example taught, I paint the cot
As Truth will paint it, and as Bards will not...
Of the poor he asks, “Can poets soothe you, when you pine for bread, / By winding myrtles round your ruined shed?” In the first book of The Village he expresses firmly, if repetitiously, a poetic commitment to which he remained true, by and large, in his later work. His craft improved, his concerns became more profound as they became more particular, but his orientation was constant. He can be “old fashioned” but seldom nostalgic.
In 1785 he became curate of Strathern, Leicestershire, was doctor to the poor of the parish, and studied botany and entomology, work useful in his later poetry. In 1789 he moved to the living of Muston, Leicestershire, where he stayed for three years before moving back to Suffolk; he kept the Muston living until 1814, returning in 1805, when laws against absentee clergy were passed. About 1790 he began taking opium on doctor’s orders to control vertigo and continued the practice for the rest of his life, whose length and general health he attributed to the virtues of the “medicine.” His wife’s manic-depressive illness, the death of his third son and other troubles afflicted him. He went through a period of abortive activity, wrote and destroyed three novels, began work on The Parish Register (1807) and The Borough (1810). In The Parish Register he found the voice that distinguishes his best work. In The Borough he went further, writing twenty-four “letter” poems about the life of a country town. The twenty-two-year gap in poetic publication was not time wasted. After so many false starts he found his pace and manner: Tales (1812), including twenty-one stories in various tones on various subjects, is his masterpiece.
After the death of his wife (1813) and with the growing success of his books, his remaining years were active but not fruitful. He met other writers, including Wordsworth (to whom Francis Jeffrey had preferred him in the Edinburgh Review), Southey and Scott. He traveled, he wrote further poems and tales, but even the once-popular Tales of the Hall (1819) is inferior to Tales (1812). In 1832 he died in Trowbridge. His son George was his excellent biographer, his account now unaccountably neglected.
Crabbe’s final years were passed in a world remote from the one that had shaped his imagination. Leavis declares he was “hardly at the fine point of consciousness in his time.” C. H. Sisson responded, “What an excellent thing not to have been! How many false hopes did this solid and pertinacious observer decline to share!” Thomson was the sort of poet who kept “at the fine point of consciousness” doggedly and forgettably. Crabbe’s provincial conservatism no longer requires apology. The ills he recognized have worked themselves into human consequences that writers “at the fine point” fail to register. Crabbe was no prophet, but in Suffolk he could see before his eyes depopulation, enclosure, grinding poverty, corruption among the gentry and by the gentry of the poor, mental illness, breakdown in community, the triumph of Methodism (which ate into his own congregation). It was a world against which John Clare contended, at a different level. Crabbe was a witness, honest and uncompromised.
He was born in the same decade as Blake and Burns; his first writings appeared five years after the publication of Goldsmith’s The Deserted Village; his verses were adjusted and blotted by Johnson; he met, influenced, and was influenced by Wordsworth; he survived Keats by eleven years. The only other English poet who provides so impressive a time bridge is Michael Drayton (1563–1631). Drayton remade his art with each change of fashion. Crabbe did not.
Novelists admired Crabbe. Jane Austen and E. M. Forster championed him. But the connection between his and a novelist’s art is tenuous. The general scope of the Tales is novelistic but the individual scope of each tale is not. Each is different in manner and intention; they share a landscape, but that landscape alters from tale to tale. In the mature tales, morality is explored through plot, and in several it is less morality than psychology that interests him. The consequences of action are social or personal, in any event moral, tending to particular rather than general resolutions. In his compressed style, his affinity with Chaucer and his distance from the novelists of his time clearly emerges. Lovers pass through a landscape that smiles, each detail illuminating an aspect of their happiness; when love founders, they return through the same landscape as through another world, altered, frowning. Crabbe’s precise correspondences are the essence of his originality. In “Procrastination,” the objects with which people surround themselves define their characters; moral abstraction acquires physical weight:
Within that fair apartment, guests might see
The comforts culled for wealth by vanity:
Around the room an Indian paper blazed,
With lively tint and figures boldly raised;
Silky and soft upon the floor below,
Th’ elastic carpet rose with crimson glow...
The objects blaze, rise, glow—animated, as in Keats’s “The Eve of St Agnes”—while the inhabitants, surrounded by the spoils of empire, are almost inanimate. Most vivid is the timepiece above the heiress’s head:
A stag’s-head crest adorned the pictured case,
Through the pure crystal shone th’ enamelled face;
And while on brilliants moved the hands of steel,
It click’d from prayer to prayer, from meal to meal.
The device in the final line recalls Pope, but the effect is purely Crabbe’s. Elsewhere a hostess of the new breed (though “a pale old hag”—Crabbe does not mince words) “carves the meat, as if the flesh could feel.” Such observation lays character bare. In one of the best poems in The Borough, “Peter Grimes,” on which Benjamin Britten based his opera, changing seascapes figure the changes in the protagonist’s troubled mind, without ever ceasing to correspond to the actual world. In a tale such as this, motive is always clear: Peter Grimes’s cruelty to the boys he kills is his vicarious attempt to punish the waywardness of his own youth. His actions are not abstract sadism: they have a psychological source. Crabbe’s is a poetry of consequences.
He did not achieve the best tales easily. He advanced from an early Popelike rigidity of narrative and description to a more relaxed, comprehensive manner. His concerns, at first documentary, became social and then individual—a movement toward character, but always from a firm apprehension of a given, common world. The moralizer becomes a moralist as the tales learn to contain, in a single statement, morality and psychology. Sequence gives way to careful parallelisms, and within a single tale verbal, syntactical and rhythmic repetitions prepare the way for climaxes, reversals and conclusions as in “Peter Grimes”: “And hoped to find in some propitious hour / A feeling creature subject to his power,” or, “He’d now the power he ever loved to show, / A feeling creature subject to his blow.”
Crabbe’s Tales are described by Howard Mills as a “mixture of inertia and originality.” The language is at times off the peg. We do not look for purple passages or honed couplets. We look through, rather than at, the language, which is efficient, not flashy. We see a Suffolk world through its transparency, not heightened with Augustan decorum but very nearly literal in its drizzle, or dust, or simple twilight.