"Our breath shall intermix, our bosoms bound,
And our veins beat together; and our lips
With other eloquence than words, eclipse
The soul that burns between them, and the wells
Which boil under our being's inmost cells,
The fountains of our deepest life, shall be
Confused in passion's golden purity,
As mountain-springs under the morning Sun.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
One hope within two wills, one will beneath
Two overshadowing minds, one life, one death,
One Heaven, one Hell, one immortality,
And one annihilation. Woe is me!
The winged words on which my soul would pierce
Into the height of love's rare universe,
Are chains of lead around its flight of fire--
I pant, I sink, I tremble, I expire!"
If Byron's domain is that of the tortures of the luckless or forsaken
lover, Shelley's is, as we see, that of the pain of the happy lover,
of self-annihilation in the rapture of love. But for the very reason
that the erotic domain of both these great poets was thus definitely
limited, neither of them wrote many erotic poems; to neither was this
one of the most important fields of his productivity.
Moore, on the contrary, was a born erotic poet, of the type of
our (Danish) Christian Winther. What the majority of love-poets
are possessed by is the erotic passion; Moore's distinguishing
characteristic is erotic fancy. He loves everything that is beautiful,
exquisite, delicate, soft, and bright, for its own sake, without
requiring any background to throw it into relief. He never tells any
eventful story, never sets off by any strong contrast, never undermines
by deep brooding. He loves the blossoms of the tree, not its roots.
The objects which fascinate him, fascinate with the first impression;
they are beautiful and bright; they dazzle the senses; they enthral
the eye and the ear more than the heart; they are exchanged for other
objects possessing the same qualities--there is a constant gleam and
flutter. But all essentially erotic poets have butterfly natures. In
this matter no more striking contrast can be imagined than that between
Wordsworth and Moore. The former deliberately chooses themes which in
themselves are insignificant, or unattractive, or even ugly, in order
to endow them with a moral or spiritual beauty; the latter detests
the sordid details of human life, recoils from all its adversities,
and evades every moral with a Wieland-like smile and bow. When he is
forced to give the ugly a place, he cannot resist casting a soft,
glittering veil over it. His style has been blamed for its overweight
of gorgeous adjectives, its propensity to let every passion lose
itself in a simile, and its restless glitter and gleam. It has been
called artificial in comparison with Wordsworth's. "Artificial!" cries
one of his Irish admirers, "when every human being can enjoy Moore's
poetry, whilst a new taste has to be created to enable one to enjoy
Wordsworth's!" Is it really the case, then, we are led to ask, that
study and a cultivated taste are required for the enjoyment of the
natural, whilst only ordinary feeling is demanded for the enjoyment
of artificial beauty? Wordsworth and Coleridge were poets for a
cultivated, literary public; Moore was the poet for a nation. The
faults with which he may fairly be charged are the consequences of his
natural limitations, of his being a musician and a colourist, but not a
draughtsman; he is incapable of drawing or describing a _whole_ object,
what he does is to paint the separate attributes of beautiful objects.
He devotes verse after verse to the praises of a blush, a smile, the
melody of a voice; instead of beautiful outlines he gives us a list of
beauties. Employing Voltaire's clever definition of love--"nature's
cloth, which imagination has embroidered"--it must be confessed that in
Moore's love-poetry the embroidery is often so gorgeous and abundant
that it hardly permits the cloth to appear at all. But the cloth is
there, and is nature's.
And it is only fair to add that in Moore's best and most beautiful
poems the over-abundance of imagery has disappeared. Where the true
Irish melancholy has taken possession of his soul, it has blown away
all the tinsel and found expression in imperishable language. The style
of "Take back the virgin page" and "The last rose of summer" is as
simple as their metre is perfect. There is not a simile in either of
them. Nor is there a single simile in the beautiful little song which,
in spite of its brevity, has for Ireland all the significance of a
national epic--the simple song of the lovely young girl who, though
adorned with precious jewels and with a beauty still more alluring,
went without fear from one end of Ireland to the other, knowing that
Erin's sons, "though they love woman and golden store," love honour and
virtue more. ("Rich and rare were the gems she wore.") Of the man who
wrote such a song Byron might safely assert: "Moore's _Irish Melodies_
will go down to posterity with their music; and both will last as long
as Ireland or as music and poetry."
Moore's was a happy life. At the age of thirty-one he married a
beautiful and amiable girl, Miss Bessy Dyke; and their married life was
a most harmonious one. He was not always in good circumstances, but
after his fame was established, his works provided him with a handsome
income. Though in the _Grand Dinner of Type and Co_. he makes the rich
publishers (in the manner of the legendary warriors who after death
drank mead out of the skulls of their enemies) drink their wine out of
the skulls of poor authors, he himself had no reason to complain of
his publisher, who offered him £3000 for _Lalla Rookh_ before seeing a
line of it, and gave him £4200 for his excellent Life of Lord Byron.
Moore was held in equal honour by the Irish and English. In 1818 he
was entertained at a banquet in Dublin by all the most famous literary
and public men of the country, and when he went to Paris in 1822 he
was _fêted_ by the British nobility there. It was not till he grew old
that misfortunes came upon him. Then he lost his health and had severe
trials with his children. He died in 1842.