Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination

by Peter Ackroyd

  The posthumous comparison of Chatterton with Shakespeare does suggest what all the evidence implies—the 687 pages of his extant poetry and prose, in the “Oxford” edition of his works, is astonishing evidence of his precocity but it also bears testimony to the fact that he was a thoroughly English poet. If it were otherwise, his fame and fate would not be so congenial to the English imagination. There is, for example, the salient matter of Chatterton’s reverence for the past. The influence of Percy’s Reliques upon the young poet’s burgeoning poetic imagination has already been suggested, but the antiquated diction and meter of Percy’s specimens may have been less important than Percy’s belief that there existed “a peculiarly English characteristic of cultural history and national identity that derived from the Ancient Goths . . . the English minstrels were the inheritors of a national poetry.”9 In this same spirit Chatterton declared in a letter to Horace Walpole, alas un-sent, that “However Barbarous the Saxons may be calld by our Modern Virtuosos; it is certain we are indebted to Alfred and other Saxon Kings for the wisest of our Laws and in part for the British Constitution.” He evinces all the antiquarianism of the English imagination, therefore, but out of it he fashioned works of genius; he wanted to re-create, rather than rescue, past time. Like Edmund Spenser he invented a language with which to restore the proximity as well as the mystery of the past. Or can we say that the language invented him?

  He dwelled in another life. There were many antiquarians willing to forge material objects and produce medieval coins, rings or chamberpots; but Chatterton spent the money, wore the ring, and shat into the pot. He restored the past, too, because he believed in its authority and efficacy. By the age of sixteen he had composed a long poem entitled “Bristowe Tragedie or the Dethe of Syr Charles Bawdin,” to which he appended a note claiming “the following little Poem wrote by Thomas Rowlie Priest, I shall insert the whole as a Specimen of the Poetry of those Days, being greatly superior to what we have been taught to believe.” It is indeed a vigorous ballad:

  How oft ynne battaile have I stoode When thousands dy’d arounde; Whan smokynge streemes of crimson bloode Imbrew’d the fatten’d grounde;

  How dydd I knowe thatt ev’ry darte That cutte the airie waie Myghte notte fynde passage toe my harte And close myne eyes for aie

  Such diction materially affected the work of both Coleridge and Keats, to name only the two most celebrated examples. Only the foolish would dismiss it as pastiche. It is a genuinely new creation and, if genius may be defined as one who changes the nature of expression, then Chatterton has some claim to that honorific.

  The question of plagiarism, however, presents itself. Chatterton was, in the native idiom, essentially a bookish writer who borrowed from a score of other English writers, most notably from Spenser, Pope, Dryden, Gay, Churchill and Collins. On occasions he seems to parody his own literary learning by indulging in exaggerated diction and over-elaborated tropes but, as one critic has maintained, “there was a consistent dynamic of plagiarism working beneath the veneer of forgery.”10 In one sense Chatterton was only doing that which all good English poets had previously done; he was stealing or lifting from great originals the material for his own verse. He cultivated a polyphonic personality. But as he was a great originator of the romantic myth, if not of the romantic sensibility, the accusation of plagiarism became a peculiarly sensitive one. We may discover, for example, how Coleridge and Keats themselves became preoccupied with just that charge.

  There are other aspects of Chatterton’s antiquarianism which are inevitably associated with the course of the English imagination. It has been noted that in “poetry, prose and letters Chatterton makes use of the legends of Arthur, or the ‘Matter of Britain’ ”11 so that in the process English history might then become “both mythical and real.”12 It is interesting in this context, therefore, that there are “startling similarities between the respective canonisations of Chatterton and King Arthur.”13 Both exist on the interstices of the invented and the authentic, and both embody the essential ebullition or presentness of the past. The assumption may be that, like Arthur who is not dead and will return, Chatterton lives on in the work of successive poets and novelists.

  Of course the “Rowley” poems are themselves set in the medieval rather than the Arthurian period, and provide a curious parallel with the “Gothic” revival of the nineteenth century. There was a “Gothick” style of the eighteenth century, but that was the work of connoisseurs and virtuosi. The medieval work of Chatterton was much more vigorous and invigorating, anticipating the strong and powerful Gothic of the Victorians. He believed in the presence of the past in part because it was the means of defining his own genius. This, again, is an abiding English preoccupation. The analogy with the master of early nineteenth-century Gothic, A. W. N. Pugin, is inescapable; it has been said that Pugin’s “knowledge of real medieval work was so profound that he could instinctively produce new designs . . . in a vivid Gothic detail, full of richness and variety.”14

  Pugin is the true child of Chatterton in more than one sense. The young poet had written that “the Motive that actuates me to do this, is, to convince the world that the Monks (of whom some have so despicable an Opinion) were not such Blockheads, as generally thought and that good Poetry might be wrote, in the days of Superstition as well as in these more inlightened Ages.” The letter, of 15 February 1769, was written in the same month as he composed a medieval eulogy on the churches of Bristol. It is as if the old religion were still very much in his head, as it was in that of Pugin. Chatterton’s own recourse to “Superstition” and to the supernatural in his poetry suggests that he had little respect for the “inlightened” learning of his own time. His principal character is a Catholic monk and bard, and one critic has noted “the religious atmosphere of Rowley’s world.”15 It allowed Chatterton to re-create in native fashion a world of visions and dreams, drawing material from the past in order to sustain his sense of the sacred; the antiquarians were the visionaries of the eighteenth century. It is appropriate that he should have appeared in vision to the nineteenth-century poet Francis Thompson, and dissuaded him from self-murder. “I recognised him from the pictures of him,” Thompson said later. “Besides I knew that it was he before I saw him.” Chatterton attained a kind of psychic or psychological reality, as a token of all that the eighteenth century had lost or abandoned; he was the wraith of faith.

  It is not surprising, therefore, that Chatterton had a very powerful sense of place and of the genius loci. Certain spots were still holy. A posthumous account reveals how he stared at the church of St. Mary Redcliffe, memorial of an earlier age, and said, “This steeple was once burnt by lightning; this was the place where they formerly acted plays”; theatricality and supernatural visitation are in his imagination twinned. This intuitive sense of territory has been one of the objects of study in this volume, and the sole matter of the “Rowley” poems is the city of Bristol itself—the medieval city, at least, which rises like a vision all around him. It is part of his patrimony. His father had once been singing-master in St. Mary Redcliffe; Chatterton had never seen him, but in entering the old church he was also entering the house of his father. The establishment which Chatterton had attended as a boy, Colston’s School, was erected on the site of an old Carmelite convent. So all the forces of his own past, and those of his territory, are aligned. This is the source of his historical mission. To restore a lost past and, at the same time, to restore a lost selfhood—here, once more, we may see how he impinged upon the romantic movement to which he bequeathed so much.

  If we now draw the outlines of Chatterton and Macpherson together and see them as a compound figure, we glimpse the sublime and the fantastical mixed; the ancient and medieval landscapes of their imagination haunt their successors. Macpherson created “Ossian,” the inspired bard who sang of his own especial soil in tones of plangency and woe; Chatterton embodied the “marvellous Boy” whose apparent suicide provoked contemplations of a solitary genius despised and
neglected by contemporaneous society. These two poets, more than any others, created the romantic image. But it was of crucial significance to their literary successors that it should be deeply imbued with forgery and fakery, pastiche and plagiarism.

  It might even be said that the recognition or detection of plagiarism and pastiche, in particular, began with the romantic movement itself. In previous centuries, as Walter Ong noted in his The Art of Logic, “no one hesitated to use lines of thought or even quite specific wordings from another person without crediting the other person, for these were all taken to be—and most often were—part of a common tradition.” But when that tradition was broken or discontinued in the rise of the private and personal voice, then apparent originality of expression became of paramount importance. As a result, as if they were intense shadows created by a sudden light, the dangers of plagiarism and pastiche became evident in the first generation of the romantic movement. In one prefatory epistle Milton wrote: “I have striven to cram my pages even to overflowing, with quotations drawn from all parts of the Bible and to leave as little space as possible for my own words.”16 Wordsworth or Coleridge could never admit so much even if, in Coleridge’s case, a similar confession might have been appropriate. The introduction to an important volume of essays upon English romanticism, Romanticism and Language, poses an interesting question: “Is it pure coincidence, for example, that several of the essays [here] fix on the metaphor of theft?”17 Romanticism and plagiarism occupy the same area of the English imagination.

  CHAPTER 52

  The Romantic Fallacy

  English romanticism has no readily identifiable provenance. It has, of course, been traced back to the ancient sources of the native imagination. In particular the melancholy of the anonymous Anglo-Saxon poets may have been transmitted by indirect means to the poets of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Certainly the interest in an ancient national poetry, in England no less than in Germany or Russia, was deemed to be at the expense of the classical tradition derived from Greece and Rome. Hence the division between the classic and the romantic. The romantics, unlike such predecessors as Pope and Dryden, were believed to be returning to some native source of eloquence. There are cultural historians who will then wish to establish their connection with the national Church which emerged after the Reformation. It is argued that the doctrinal emphasis upon individual conscience and private moral duty materially influenced the development of the romantic “I”; Wordsworth is then the direct heir of those religious enthusiasts who were moved by the “inner spirit.” The romantic movement in Catholic Europe took on a very different aspect. It became elaborate and symbolic, clothed in allegory and invaded by intimations of strange sins; it became, in other words, intensely Catholic. The image of Wordsworth striding across the rocks and vales of the Lake District is quite another thing. He epitomises that strain of moral earnestness, of right thinking and right feeling, which characterises the Dissenting Protestant tradition.

  If we look for earlier and perhaps less orthodox intimations of the romantic sensibility, however, we are sure to find them. The plight of the solitary poet, whose genius is akin to madness, can be witnessed in the unhappy experience of John Clare, Christopher Smart and William Cowper, whose respective lunacies offer a disquieting footnote to the literary history of the eighteenth century. The cult of sentiment, the passion for antiquity, the attention to “Gothick” and supernatural effects, the vogue for the ballad—all have their origins in that century, even if they found their apotheosis in the works of Wordsworth and his successors. The fixed production of generic verse upon classical models was replaced by an organic process of human transference and sympathy; poetic diction itself became “less precise, more generally suggestive.”1

  The retreat from statement and sententiousness, and the eighteenth-century movement towards a romantic sensibility, were marked by the fashion for sentimental feeling as exemplified by such novels as Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling; sensitive sentimentality became known as “the English malady.” The man of feeling dies because he is too good for this cruel world, and Mackenzie’s novel was published just a year after the death of Chatterton. The harsh laughter of Congreve and Wycherley is replaced by the gentler amusement of Sheridan and Goldsmith.

  Yet the lineaments of the romantic image were most decisively executed in the nineteenth century. The artist is then one surrounded by invisible powers, which by an act of rapt attention may be transformed into a permanent image or symbol. The poet is one set apart, the conscience and unacknowledged law-maker of human society who as a consequence of his solitariness is doomed to be misinterpreted and mistreated; he does not endure the world but re-creates it in the act of imagination, and must place his own sensibility at the heart of this enterprise because there is no other sure foundation of knowledge. The romantic poet is a lamp rather than a mirror, to use a celebrated antithesis, the source of illumination within his or her own breast. If this entails the re-creation of the self as well as of the world, then the divine afflatus of the bard may also be a mode of private transformation. A human being may be transfigured by god-like powers of the imagination. “A Man’s life of any worth is a continual allegory,” Keats wrote. “Shakespeare led a life of Allegory; his works are the comments on it.”

  We may lower the temperature a little by recalling Coleridge’s comment upon the acting of Edmund Kean; watching him upon the stage, he remarked, was “like reading Shakespeare by flashes of lightning.” It is of some interest in this context that the romantic image, or at least the image of the romantic hero, was largely embodied in actors and in paintings of actors. They, rather than the poets themselves, seemed to fulfil the prerequisites of the part. Kemble as Coriolanus and as Hamlet, painted by Thomas Lawrence respectively in 1798 and 1801, set the mood and tone with “these heroic figures, dark cloaked against murky skies” exhibiting “Hamlet’s introversion” and “Coriolanus’s humiliated pride.”2 The connection of the romantic poets with the theatre is not confined to portraiture alone. All of them wrote verse dramas, and most of them speculated upon the nature of theatrical passion and dramatic performance. They associated their art with the techniques of impersonation. Coleridge may be said to set the scene of the dramatic action with his remark upon Shakespeare that “he had only to imitate certain parts of his character, or exaggerate such as existed in possibility, and they were at once true to nature, and fragments of the divine mind that drew them.” In this passage the notion of imitation, and of exaggeration, is indistinguishable from that of creation.

  The renown of actors such as Kean and Kemble, Macready and Mrs. Siddons was such that the nature of dramatic poetry itself was seen in the context of their art. Charles Lamb wrote even of a relatively minor actor, Robert Bensley, that he “had most of the swell of soul, was greatest in the delivery of heroic conceptions, the emotions consequent upon the presentment of a great idea to the fancy. He had the true poetical enthusiasm.” Yet the terms of approbation are precisely those which were awarded to the poets themselves, so that there seems to be no difference at all between the poetic and theatrical “delivery” of feeling. That may perhaps be sufficient cause for the ready identification of Shelley and Coleridge with the character of Hamlet, as if somehow their finest or most fugitive feelings were most nobly expressed by a dramatic persona. Coleridge described Hamlet as “forever occupied with the world within him, and abstracted from external things; his words give a substance to shadows: and he is dissatisfied with commonplace realities.” This might be a definition of Coleridge himself. Poetry itself is then fully explicated in the processes of the theatrical imagination. What is real, and what is feigned? As Coleridge puts it in Table Talk, “I have a smack of Hamlet myself, if I may say so.”

  If we turn from the part to the actor, then there is evidence of further confusion or conflation. Hazlitt comprehended the performance of Kemble as “intensity”; he was able to seize upon one feeling or one idea, “working it up, with a c
ertain graceful consistency, and conscious grandeur of conception, to a very high degree of pathos or sublimity.” Kemble “had all the regularity of art” and lent “the deepest and most permanent interest to the uninterrupted progress of individual feeling.” A casual reader might be forgiven for believing that Hazlitt was describing the imaginative procedures of the poet rather than the stage life of the actor. It is so common an identification in the period that it often passes without comment, but it is suggestive nonetheless. When Keats celebrates the “sensual grandeur” which Kean brings to the “spiritual passion” of Shakespeare’s verse, he might have been describing his own practice; the poet then confirms and elaborates upon his point with the suggestion that “Kean delivers himself up to the instant feeling, without a shadow of thought about anything else. He feels his being as deeply as Wordsworth. . . . We will say no more.” Enough has been said, however, to provoke the student of Wordsworth or of Keats himself into speculations about the theatrical management of passion.

  The language of dramatic criticism was similarly of a piece with the language of literary criticism. Kean, as Iago, was praised for “the ease, familiarity and tone of nature” of his delivery; as Timon of Athens he was criticised for want of “sufficient variety and flexibility of passion.” The same vocabulary, and the same sentiments, were applied to the latest poetical productions of the period. Romantic acting, and romantic poetry, were considered to be equivalent. It throws curious light, too, upon Keats’s conception of “the poetical character” which “is not itself—it has no self—it is everything and nothing . . . the camileon poet”; to which definition he adds: “A poet is the most unpoetical of anything in existence, because he has no identity; he is continually . . . filling, some other body.” This might stand as a definition of the actor, too, as if the poet and performer shared the same identity—or, rather, shared the same absence of identity.