Imágenes de páginas
PDF
EPUB

thought of. Here is a list of some of them, Pattison, Tickell, Hill, Somerville, Browne, Pitt, Wilkie, Dodsley, Shaw, Smart, Langhorne, Bruce, Greame, Glover, Lovibond, Penrose, Mickle, Jago, Scott, Whitehead, Jenyns, Logan, Cotton, Cunningham, and Blacklock. I think it will be best to let them pass and say nothing about them. It will be hard to persuade so many respectable persons that they are dull writers, and if we give them any praise, they will send others.

But here comes one whose claims cannot be so easily set aside; they have been sanctioned by learning, hailed by genius, and hallowed by misfortune, I mean Chatterton. Yet I must say what I think of him, and that is not what is generally thought. I pass over the disputes between the learned antiquaries, Dr. Milles, Herbert Croft, and Dr. Knox, whether he was to be placed after Shakspeare and Dryden, or to come after Shakspeare alone. A living poet has borne a better testimony to him:

'I thought of Chatterton, the marvellous boy,
The sleepless soul that perished in his pride,
And him 1 who walked in glory and in joy

Beside his plough along the mountain side.'

1 Burns. These lines are taken from the introduction to Mr. Wordsworth's poem of the 'Leech-gatherer.'

They

I am loath to put asunder whom so great an authority has joined together; but I cannot find in Chatterton's works anything so extraordinary as the age at which they were written. have a facility, vigour, and knowledge which were prodigious in a boy of sixteen, but which would not have been so in a man of twenty. He did not show extraordinary powers of genius, but extraordinary precocity. Nor do I believe he would have written better, had he lived. He knew this himself, or he would have lived. Great geniuses, like great kings, have too much to think of to kill themselves; for their mind to them also a kingdom is.' With an unaccountable power coming over him at an unusual age, and with the youthful confidence it inspired, he performed wonders, and was willing to set a seal on his reputation by a tragic catastrophe. He had done his best; and, like another Empedocles, threw himself into Etna to insure immortality. The brazen slippers alone remain.

LECTURE VII.

CHATTERTON (continued).

ON BURNS, AND

I

AM

THE OLD ENGLISH BALLADS.

that what I said in the conclusion sorry of the last Lecture respecting Chatterton, should have given dissatisfaction to some persons with whom I would willingly agree on all such matters. What I meant was less to call in question Chatterton's genius than to object to the common mode of estimating its magnitude by its prematureness. The lists of fame are not filled with the dates of births or deaths; and the side-mark of the age at which they were done, wears out in works destined for immortality. Had Chatterton really done more, we should have thought less of him, for our attention would then have been fixed on the excellence of the works themselves, instead of the singularity of the circumstances in which they were produced. But because he attained to the full powers of manhood at an early age, I do not see that he would have attained to more than those powers had he lived to be a

man. He was a prodigy, because in him the ordinary march of Nature was violently precipitated; and it is therefore inferred that he would have continued to hold on his course, 'unslacked of motion.' On the contrary, who knows but he might have lived to be poet-laureate? It is much better to let him remain as he was. Of his actual productions, any one may think as highly as he pleases; I would only guard against adding to the account of his quantum meruit those possible productions by which the learned rhapsodists of his time raised his gigantic pretensions to an equality with those of Homer and Shakspeare. It is amusing to read some of these exaggerated descriptions, each rising above the other in extravagance. In Anderson's Life we find that Mr. Warton speaks of him as a prodigy of genius,' as 'a singular instance of prematurity of abilities.' That may be true enough, and Warton was at any rate a competent judge; but Mr. Malone believes him to have been the greatest genius that England has produced since the days of Shakspeare. Dr. Gregory says he must rank, as a universal genius, above Dryden, and perhaps only second to Shakspeare.' Mr. Herbert Croft is still more unqualified in his praises; he asserts that no such being, at any period

[ocr errors]
[ocr errors]

of life, has ever been known, or possibly ever will be known.' He runs a parallel between Chatterton and Milton, and asserts that ' an army of Macedonian and Swedish mad butchers fly before him,'-meaning, I suppose, that Alexander the Great and Charles the Twelfth were nothing to him; nor,' he adds, does my memory supply me with any human being who at such an age, with such advantages, has produced such compositions. Under the heathen mythology, superstition and admiration. would have explained all by bringing Apollo on earth; nor would the God ever have descended with more credit to himself.' Chatterton's physiognomy would at least have enabled him to pass incognito. It is quite different from the look of timid wonder and delight with which Annibal Caracci has painted a young Apollo listening to the first sounds he draws from a Pan's pipe under the tutelage of the old Silenus. If Mr. Croft is sublime on the occasion, Dr. Knox is no less pathetic. The testimony of Dr. Knox,' says Dr. Anderson,1 does equal credit to the classical taste and amiable benevolence of the writer, and the genius and reputation of Chatterton.' 'When I read,' says the Doctor, the researches of those learned antiEssays, p. 144.

1

« AnteriorContinuar »