540 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1958 
a different sort. Instead of becoming proficient in taking and giving 
the hard knocks of social relations with his contemporaries, the child 
of genius is thrown back on the resources of his imagination, and 
through it becomes aware of his own depth, self-conscious in the fullest 
sense, and essentially independent. There is danger, however, in the 
intense cultivation of fantasy. If it does not flow over into the ordi- 
nary social relations by some channel, if it has to be dammed up as 
something socially useless, then it threatens life itself. An expression 
of what I am referring to is given in that powerful scene in the first 
part of Goethe’s “Faust” where the physician-magician, tampering 
with incantations, raises a spirit of overwhelming presence and quails 
before him. Something nearer to an outright demonstration is fur- 
nished by the life of Chatterton and his suicide. 
Before he was 18 Chatterton was dead by his own hand. If we 
examine his life, we see that it breaks apart into two distinct regions: 
an outer shell of schoolboy, apprentice, pretended antiquarian, and 
writer of brittle satire; and a core—the serious and deeply emotional 
15th-century poet Rowley, whose connection with himself he never 
publicly acknowledged. One must not forget that Chatterton’s fan- 
tasy existence as Rowley has points of contact with his father, the 
musician schoolteacher who died before his son was born, but who, in 
a sense, presided over the boy’s education through the music manu- 
script from which he learned his letters and the blackletter Testament 
in which he learned to read, and who, by his connection and the con- 
nection of his family with the magnificent church of St. Mary Red- 
cliffe, which overshadowed the place of Chatterton’s birth and was his 
favorite resort from the brutalities of Bristol, might surely continue 
to hold converse with the imaginative boy. The Rowley poems fur- 
thermore are related to Chatterton’s search for a pedigree. In short, 
through Rowley, Chatterton established relations with the world of 
the dead; and since he could not admit that he himself was the author 
of the Rowley poems, but had to pretend to have found them in his role 
as antiquary, and was thus rejected as an impostor by Walpole, he 
could not through Rowley establish contact with the world of the liv- 
ing. The surface which he was able to present to the world was hard, 
brittle, violent, unreal. Yet even in his relations with the world he 
appeared to be doing the same thing he was doing through the Rowley 
fantasies, namely, seeking a father to love and protect him. He 
evidently placed great hopes in Walpole; but he had also tried and 
been disappointed in the patronage of men of lower caliber in Bristol. 
Eventually he came to a dead end in London, where he had no friends 
even of the quality of Bristol’s Catcott. Just before he committed 
suicide he was Rowley once again in the most beautiful of his poems, 
the “Balade of Charitie,” which sums up his experience of the world 
and his yearning for a loving father. If it was Rowley who enabled 
Chatterton to live, it was also Rowley who opened the door of death 
