to the year 1845, when circumstances enabled us to enjoy the
long-looked-for happiness of visiting Moore and his beloved wife in
their home at Sloperton.
The poet was then in his sixty-fifth year, and had in a great measure
retired from actual labor; indeed, it soon became evident to us that the
faculty for enduring and continuous toil no longer existed. Happily, it
was not absolutely needed; for, with very limited wants, there was a
sufficiency,--a bare sufficiency, however, for there were no means to
procure either the elegances or the luxuries which so frequently become
the necessities of man, and a longing for which might have been excused
in one who had been the friend of peers and the associate of princes.
The forests and fields that surround Bowood, the mansion of the Marquis
of Lansdowne, neighbor the poet's humble dwelling. The spire of the
village church, beside the portals of which the poet now sleeps, is seen
above adjacent trees. Laborers' cottages are scattered all about. They
are a heavy and unimaginative race, those peasants of Wiltshire; and,
knowing their neighbor had written books, they could by no means get rid
of the idea that he was the writer of _Moore's Almanac_, and
perpetually, greeted him with a salutation, in hopes to receive in
return some prognostic of the weather, which might guide them in
arrangements for seedtime and harvest. Once, when he had lost his
way,--wandering till midnight,--he roused up the inmates of a cottage,
in search of a guide to Sloperton, and, to his astonishment, found he
was close to his own gate. "Ah, Sir," said the peasant, "that comes of
yer skyscraping!"
He was fond of telling of himself such simple anecdotes as this; indeed,
I remember his saying that no applause he ever obtained gave him so much
pleasure as a compliment from a half-wild countryman, who stood right in
his path on a quay in Dublin, and exclaimed, slightly altering the words
of Byron,--"Three cheers for Tommy Moore, the pote of all circles, and
the _darlint_ of his own!"
I recall him at this moment,--his small form and intellectual face, rich
in expression, and that expression the sweetest, the most gentle, and
the kindliest. He had still in age the same bright and clear eye, the
same gracious smile, the same suave and winning manner I had noticed as
the attributes of his comparative youth; a forehead not remarkably broad
or high, but singularly impressive, firm, and full,--with the organ of
gayety large, and those of benevolence and veneration greatly
preponderating. Ternerani, when making his bust, praised the form of his
ears. The nose, as observed in all his portraits, was somewhat upturned.
Standing or sitting, his head was invariably upraised, owing, perhaps,
mainly to his shortness of stature, with so much bodily activity as to
give him the character of restlessness; and no doubt that usual
accompaniment of genius was eminently his. His hair, at the time I speak
of, was thin and very gray; and he wore his hat with the jaunty air that
has been often remarked as a peculiarity of the Irish. In dress,
although far from slovenly, he was by no means particular. Leigh Hunt,
speaking of him in the prime of life, says,--"His forehead is bony and
full of character, with 'bumps' of wit large and radiant enough to
transport a phrenologist. His eyes are as dark and fine as you would
wish to see under a set of vine-leaves; his mouth generous and
good-humored, with dimples." He adds,--"He was lively, polite, bustling,
full of amenities and acquiescences, into which he contrived to throw a
sort of roughening cordiality, like the crust of old Port. It seemed a
happiness to him to say 'Yes.'" Jeffrey, in one of his letters, says of
him,--"He is the sweetest-blooded, warmest-hearted, happiest,
hopefullest creature that ever set Fortune at defiance"; he speaks also
of "the buoyancy of his spirits and the inward light of his mind"; and
adds,--"There is nothing gloomy or bitter in his ordinary talk, but,
rather, a wild, rough, boyish pleasantry, much more like Nature than his
poetry."
"The light that surrounds him is all from within."
He had but little voice; yet he sang with a depth of sweetness that
charmed all hearers: it was true melody, and told upon the heart as well
as the ear. No doubt much of this charm was derived from association;
for it was only his own "Melodies" he sang. It would be difficult to
describe the effect of his singing. I remember some one saying to me, it
conveyed an idea of what a mermaid's song might be. Thrice I heard him
sing, "As a beam o'er the face of the waters may glow,"--once in 1822,
once at Lady Blessington's, and once in my own house. Those who can
recall the touching words of that song, and unite them with the deep,
yet tender pathos of the music, will be at no loss to conceive the
intense delight of his auditors.
I occasionally met Moore in public, and once or twice at public dinners.
One of the most agreeable evenings I ever passed was in 1830, at a
dinner given to him by the members of "The Literary Union." This club
was founded in 1829 by the poet Campbell. I shall have to speak of it
when I write a "Memory" of him. Moore was in strong health at that time,
and in the zenith of his fame. There were many men of mark about
him,--leading wits and men of letters of the age. He was full of life,
sparkling and brilliant in all he said, rising every now and then to say
something that gave the hearers delight, and looking as if "dull care"
had been ever powerless to check the overflowing of his soul. But
although no bard of any age knew better how to
"Wreathe the bowl with flowers of the soul,"
he had acquired the power of self-restraint, and could stop when the
glass was circulating too freely. At the memorable dinner of the
Literary Fund, at which the good Prince Albert presided, (on the 11th of
May, 1842,) the two poets, Campbell and Moore, had to make speeches. The
author of the "Pleasures of Hope," heedless of the duty that devolved
upon him, had "confused his brain." Moore came in the evening of that
day to our house; and I well remember the terms of true sorrow and
bitter reproach in which he spoke of the lamentable impression that one
of the great authors of the age and country must have left on the mind
of the royal chairman, then new among us.
It is gratifying to record, that the temptations to which the great
lyric poet, Thomas Moore, was so often and so peculiarly exposed, were
ever powerless for wrong.
Moore sat for his portrait to Shee, Lawrence, Newton, Maclise, Mulvany,
and Richmond, and to the sculptors Ternerani, Chantrey, Kirk, and Moore.
On one occasion of his sitting, he says,--"Having nothing in my round
potato face but what painters cannot catch,--mobility of character,--the
consequence is, that a portrait of me can be only one or other of two
disagreeable things,--_caput mortuum_, or a caricature." Richmond's
portrait was taken in 1843. Moore says of it,--"The artist has worked
wonders with unmanageable faces such as mine." Of all his portraits,
this is the one that pleases me best, and most forcibly recalls him to
my remembrance.
I soon learned to love the man. It was easy to do so; for Nature had
endowed him with that rare, but happy gift,--to have pleasure in giving
pleasure, and pain in giving pain; while his life was, or at all events
seemed to be, a practical comment on his own lines:--
"They may rail at this life; from the hour I began it,
I've found it a life full of kindness and bliss."
I had daily walks with him at Sloperton,--along his
"terrace-walk,"--during our brief visit; I listening, he talking; he now
and then asking questions, but rarely speaking of himself or his books.
Indeed, the only one of his poems to which he made any special reference
was his "Lines on the Death of Sheridan," of which he said,--"That is
one of the few things I have written of which I am really proud." And I
remember startling him one evening by quoting several of his poems in
which he had said "hard things" of women,--then, suddenly changing,
repeating passages of an opposite character, and his saying, "You know
far more of my poems than I do myself."
The anecdotes he told me were all of the class of those I have
related,--simple, unostentatious. He has been frequently charged with
the weakness of undue respect for the aristocracy. I never heard him,
during the whole of our intercourse, speak of great people with whom he
had been intimate, never a word of the honors accorded to him; and,
certainly, he never uttered a sentence of satire or censure or harshness
concerning any one of his contemporaries. I cannot recall any
conversation with him in which he spoke of intimacy with the great, and
certainly no anecdote of his familiarity with men or women of the upper
orders; although he conversed with me often of those who are called the
lower classes. I remember his describing with proud warmth his visit to
his friend Boyse, at Bannow, in the County of Wexford: the delight he
enjoyed at receiving the homage of bands of the peasantry, gathered to
greet him; the arches of green leaves under which he passed; and the
dances with the pretty peasant-girls,--one in particular, with whom he
led off a country-dance.[L] Would that those who fancied him a
tuft-hunter could have heard him! They would have seen how really humble
was his heart. Indeed, a reference to his Journal will show that of all
his contemporaries, whenever he spoke of them, he had ever something
kindly to say. There is no evidence of ill-nature in any case,--not a
shadow of envy or jealousy. The sturdiest Scottish grazier could not
have been better pleased than he was to see the elegant home at
Abbotsford, or have felt prouder to know that a poet had been created a
baronet. When speaking of Wordsworth's absorption of all the talk at a
dinner-table, Moore says,--"But I was well pleased to be a listener."
And he records, that General Peachey, "who is a neighbor of Southey,
mentions some amiable traits of him."
The house at Sloperton is a small, neat, but comparatively poor cottage,
for which Moore paid originally the princely sum of forty pounds a year,
"furnished." Subsequently, however, he became its tenant under a
repairing-lease at eighteen pounds annual rent. He took possession of it
in November, 1817. Bessy was "not only satisfied, but delighted with it,
which shows the humility of her taste," writes Moore to his mother; "for
it is a small thatched cottage, and we get it furnished for forty pounds
a year." "It has a small garden and lawn in front, and a kitchen-garden
behind. Along two of the sides of this kitchen-garden is a raised
bank,"--the poet's "terrace-walk," so he loved to call it. Here a small
deal table stood through all weathers; for it was his custom to compose
as he walked, and at this table to pause and write down his thoughts.
Hence he had always a view of the setting sun; and I believe nothing on
earth gave him more intense pleasure than practically to realize the
line,--
"How glorious the sun looked in sinking!"--
for, as Mrs. Moore has since told us, he very rarely missed this sight.
In 1811, the year of his marriage, he lived at York Terrace, Queen's
Elm, Brompton. Mrs. Moore tells me it was a pretty house: the Terrace
was then isolated, and opposite nursery-gardens. Long afterwards (in
1824) he went to Brompton to "indulge himself with a sight of that
house." In 1812 he was settled at Kegworth; and in 1813, at Mayfield
Cottage, near Ashbourne, in Derbyshire. Of Mayfield, one of his friends,
who twenty years afterwards accompanied him there to see it, remarks on
the small, solitary, and now wretched-looking cottage, where all the
fine "orientalism" and "sentimentalism" had been engendered. Of this
cottage he himself writes,--"It was a poor place, little better than a
barn; but we at once took it and set about making it habitable."
As Burns was made a gauger because he was partial to whiskey, Moore was
made Colonial Secretary at Bermuda, where his principal duty was to
"overhaul the accounts of skippers and their mates." Being called to
England, his affairs were placed in charge of a superintendent, who
betrayed him, and left him answerable for a heavy debt, which rendered
necessary a temporary residence in Paris. That debt, however, was paid,
not by the aid of friends, some of whom would have gladly relieved him
of it, but literally by "the sweat of his brow." Exactly so it was when
the MS. "Life of Byron" was burned: it was by Moore, and not by the
relatives of Byron, (neither was it by aid of friends,) the money he had
received was returned to the publisher who had advanced it. "The
glorious privilege of being independent" was, indeed, essentially
his,--in his boyhood, throughout his manhood, and in advanced
age,--always!
In 1799 he came to London to enter at the Middle Temple. (His first
lodging was at 44, George Street, Portman Square.) Very soon afterwards
we find him declining a loan of money proffered him by Lady Donegal. He
thanked God for the many sweet things of this kind God threw in his way,
yet at that moment he was "terribly puzzled how to pay his tailor." In
1811, his friend Douglas, who had just received a large legacy, handed
him a blank check, that he might fill it up for any sum he needed. "I
did not accept the offer," writes Moore to his mother; "but you may
guess my feelings." Yet just then he had been compelled to draw on his
publisher, Power, for a sum of thirty pounds, "to be repaid partly in
songs," and was sending his mother a second-day paper, which he was
enabled "to purchase at rather a cheap rate." Even in 1842 he was
"haunted worryingly," not knowing how to meet his son Russell's draft
for one hundred pounds; and a year afterwards he utterly drained his
banker to send fifty pounds to his son Tom. Once, being anxious that
Bessy should have some money for the poor at Bromham, he sent a friend
five pounds, requesting him to forward it to Bessy as from himself; and
when urged by some thoughtless person to make a larger allowance to his
son Tom, in order that he might "live like a gentleman," he writes,--"If
_I_ had thought but of living like a gentleman, what would have become
of my dear father and mother, of my sweet sister Nell, of my admirable
Bessy's mother?" He declined to represent Limerick in Parliament, on the
ground that his "circumstances were not such as to justify coming into
Parliament at all, because to the labor of the day I am indebted for my
daily support." His must be a miserable soul who could sneer at the poet
studying how he could manage to recompense the doctor who would "take no
fees," and at his amusement when Bessy was "calculating whether they
could afford the expense of a fly to Devizes."
As with his mother, so with his wife. From the year 1811, the year of
his marriage,[M] to that of his death, in 1852, she received from him
the continual homage of a lover; away from her, no matter what were his
allurements, he was ever longing to be at home. Those who love as he did
wife, children, and friends will appreciate, although the worldling
cannot, such commonplace sentences as these:--"Pulled some heath on
Ronan's Island (Killarney) to send to my dear Bessy"; when in Italy,
"got letters from my sweet Bessy, more precious to me than all the
wonders I can see"; while in Paris, "sending for Bessy and my little
ones; wherever they are will be home, and a happy home to me." When
absent, (which was rarely for more than a week,) no matter where or in
what company, seldom a day passed that he did not write a letter to
Bessy. The home enjoyments, reading to her, making her the depositary of
all his thoughts and hopes,--they were his deep delights, compensations
for time spent amid scenes and with people who had no space in his
heart. Even when in "terrible request," his thoughts and his heart were
there,--in
"That dear Home, that saving Ark,
Where love's true light at last I've found,
Cheering within, when all grows dark
And comfortless and stormy round."
This is the tribute of Earl Russell to the wife of the poet Moore:--"The
excellence of his wife's moral character, her energy and courage, her
persevering economy, made her a better and even a richer partner to
Moore than an heiress of ten thousand a year would have been, with less
devotion to her duty, and less steadiness of conduct." Moore speaks of
his wife's "democratic pride." It was the pride that was ever above a
mean action, and which sustained him in the proud independence that
marked his character from birth to death.
In March, 1846, his diary contains this sad passage:--"The last of my
five children is gone, and we are left desolate and alone. Not a single
relation have I in this world." His father had died in 1825; his sweet
mother in 1832; "excellent Nell" in 1846; and his children one after
another, three of them in youth, and two grown up to manhood,--his two
boys, Tom and Russell, the first-named of whom died in Africa in 1846,
an officer in the French service; the other at Sloperton in 1842, soon
after his return from India, having been compelled by ill-health to
resign his commission as a lieutenant in the Twenty-Fifth Regiment.
In 1835 the influence of Lord Lansdowne obtained for Moore a pension of
three hundred pounds a year from Lord Melbourne's government,--"as due
from any government, but much more from one some of the members of which
are proud to think themselves your friends." The "wolf, poverty,"
therefore, in his latter years, did not prowl so continually about his
door. But there was no fund for luxuries, none for the extra comforts
that old age requires. Mrs. Moore now lives on a crown pension of one
hundred pounds a year, and the interest of the sum of three thousand
pounds,--the sum advanced by the ever-liberal friends of the poet, the
Longmans, for the Memoirs and Journal edited by Lord John, now Earl,
Russell,--a lord whom the poet dearly loved.
When his diary was published, as from time to time volumes of it
appeared, slander was busy with the fame of one of the best and most
upright of all the men that God ennobled by the gift of genius.[N] For
my own part, I seek in vain through the eight thick volumes of that
diary for any evidence that can lessen the poet in this high estimate. I
find, perhaps, too many passages fitted only for the eye of love or the
ear of sympathy; but I read _no one_ that shows the poet other than the
devoted and loving husband, the thoughtful and affectionate parent, the
considerate and generous friend.
It was said of him by Leigh Hunt, that Lord Byron summed up his
character in a sentence,--"Tommy loves a lord!" Perhaps he did; but if
he did, only such lords as Lansdowne and Russell were his friends. He
loved also those who are "lords of humankind" in a far other sense; and,
as I have shown, there is nothing in his character that stands out in
higher relief than his entire _freedom from dependence_. To which of the
great did he apply during seasons of difficulty approaching poverty?
Which of them did he use for selfish purposes? Whose patronage among
them all was profitable? To what Baael did the poet Moore ever bend the
knee?
He had a large share of domestic sorrows; one after another, his five
beloved children died; I have quoted his words, "We are left--alone."
His admirable and devoted wife survives him. I visited, a short time
ago, the home that is now desolate. If ever man was adored where
adoration, so far as earth is concerned, is most to be hoped for and
valued, it is in the cottage where the poet's widow lives, and will die.
Let it be inscribed on his tomb, that ever, amid privations and
temptations, the allurements of grandeur and the suggestions of poverty,
he preserved his self-respect; bequeathing no property, but leaving no
debts; having had no "testimonial" of acknowledgment or reward,--seeking
none, nay, avoiding any; making millions his debtors for intense
delight, and acknowledging himself paid by the poet's meed, "the tribute
of a smile"; never truckling to power; laboring ardently and honestly
for his political faith, but never lending to party that which was meant
for mankind; proud, and rightly proud, of his self-obtained position,
but neither scorning nor slighting the humble root from which he sprang.
He was born and bred a Roman Catholic; but his creed was entirely and
purely catholic. Charity was the outpouring of his heart; its pervading
essence was that which he expressed in one of his Melodies,--
"Shall I ask the brave soldier who fights by my side,
In the cause of mankind, if our creeds agree?
Shall I give up the friend I have valued and tried,
If he kneel not before the same altar with me?"
His children were all baptized and educated members of the Church of
England. He attended the parish church, and according to the ritual of
the Church of England he was buried.
It was not any outward change of religion, but homage to a purer and
holier faith, that induced him to have his children baptized and brought
up as members of the English Church. "For myself," he says, "my having
married a Protestant wife gave me opportunity of choosing a religion, at
least for my children; and if my marriage had no other advantage, I
should think this quite sufficient to be grateful for."
Moore was the eloquent advocate of his country, when it was oppressed,
goaded, and socially enthralled; but when time and enlightened policy
removed all distinctions between the Irishman and the Englishman,
between the Protestant and the Roman Catholic, his muse was silent,
because content; nay, he protested in impressive verse against a
continued agitation that retarded her progress, when her claims were
admitted, her rights acknowledged, and her wrongs redressed.
Reference to the genius of Moore is needless. My object in this "Memory"
is to offer homage to his moral and social worth. The world that obtains
intense delight from his poems, and willingly acknowledges its debt to
the poet, has been less ready to estimate the high and estimable
character, the loving and faithful nature of the man. There are,
however, many--may this humble tribute augment the number!--by whom the
memory of Thomas Moore is cherished in the heart of hearts; to whom the
cottage at Sloperton will be a shrine while they live,--that grave
beside the village church a monument better loved than that of any other
of the men of genius by whom the world is delighted, enlightened, and
refined.
"That God is love," writes his friend and biographer, Earl Russell, "was
the summary of his belief; that a man should love his neighbor as
himself seems to have been the rule of his life." The Earl of Carlisle,
inaugurating the statue of the poet,[O] bore testimony to his moral and
social worth "in all the holy relations of life,--as son, as brother, as
husband, as father, as friend"; and on the same occasion, Mr. O'Hagan,
Q.C., thus expressed himself:--"He was faithful to all the sacred
obligations and all the dear charities of domestic life,--he was the
idol of a household."
Perhaps a better, though a far briefer, summary of the character of
Thomas Moore than any of these may be given in the words of Dr. Parr,
who bequeathed to him a ring:--
"To one who stands high in my estimation for original genius, for his
exquisite sensibility, for his independent spirit, and incorruptible
integrity."
FOOTNOTES:
[F] Mrs. Moore--writing to me in May, 1864--tells me I have a wrong
impression as to Moore's father; that he was "handsome, full of fun, and
with good manners." Moore himself calls him "one of Nature's gentlemen."
[G] Mrs. Moore write me, that I am here also wrong in my impression.
"She was only a little grown out in one shoulder, but with good health;
her expression was feeling, not suffering." "Dear Ellen," she adds, "was
the delight of every one that knew her,--sang sweetly,--her voice very
like her brother's. She died suddenly, to the grief of my loving heart."