Note 202 — Chapter XVI · BRITISH FREETHOUGHT IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

The hapless Chatterton, fatally precocious, a boy in years and experience of life, a man in understanding at seventeen, incurred posthumous obloquy more for his “infidelity” than for the harmless literary forgeries which reveal his poetic affinity to a less prosaic age. It is a memorable fact that this first recovery of the lost note of imaginative poetry in that “age of prose and reason” is the exploit of a boy whose mind was as independently “freethinking” on current religion as it was original even in its imitative reversion to the poetics of the past. Turning away from the impossible mythicism and mysticism of the Tudor and Stuart literatures, as from the fanaticism of the Puritans, the changing English world after the Restoration had let fall the artistic possession of imaginative feeling and style which was the true glory of the time of Renascence. The ill-strung genius of Chatterton seems to have been the first to reunite the sense of romantic beauty with the spirit of critical reason. He was a convinced deist, avowing in his verse, in his pathetic will (1770), in a late letter, and at times in his talk, that he was “no Christian,” and contemning the ethic of Scripture history and the absurdity of literal inspiration.202 Many there must have been who went as far, with less courage of avowal.