fig-leaf and knife that we have known readers who wondered why on earth
any one should ever have objected to him. He was a good deal more
uncastrated originally, but there never was much harm in him. It is true
that the excuse made by Sterne for Tristram Shandy, and often repeated
for Moore, does not quite apply. There is not much guilt in Little, but
there is certainly very little innocence. He knows that a certain amount
of not too gross indecency will raise a snigger, and, like Voltaire and
Sterne himself, he sets himself to raise it. But he does not do it very
wickedly. The propriety of the nineteenth century, moreover, had not
then made the surprisingly rapid strides of a few years later, and some
time had to pass before Moore was to go out with Jeffrey, and nearly
challenge Byron, for questioning his morality. The rewards of his
harmless iniquity were at hand; and in the autumn of 1803 he was made
Secretary of the Admiralty in Bermuda. Bermuda, it is said, is an
exceedingly pleasant place; but either there is no Secretary of the
Admiralty there now, or they do not give the post to young men
four-and-twenty years old who have written two very thin volumes of
light verses. The Bermoothes are not still vexed with that kind of Civil
Servant. The appointment was not altogether fortunate for Moore,
inasmuch as his deputy (for they not only gave nice berths to men of
letters then, but let them have deputies) embezzled public and private
moneys, with disastrous results to his easy-going principal. But for the
time it was all, as most things were with Moore, plain sailing. He went
out in a frigate, and was the delight of the gun-room. As soon as he got
tired of the Bermudas, he appointed his deputy and went to travel in
America, composing large numbers of easy poems. In October 1804 he was
back in England, still voyaging at His Majesty's expense, and having
achieved his fifteen months' trip wholly on those terms. Little is heard
of him for the next two years, and then the publication of his American
and other poems, with some free reflections on the American character,
brought down on him the wrath of _The Edinburgh_, and provoked the
famous leadless or half-leadless duel at Chalk Farm. It was rather hard
on Moore, if the real cause of his castigation was that he had offended
democratic principles, while the ostensible cause was that, as Thomas
Little, he had five years before written loose and humorous verses. So
thinks M. Vallat, with whom we are not wholly disposed to agree, for
Jeffrey, though a Whig, was no Democrat, and he was a rather strict
moralist. However, no harm came of the meeting in any sense, though its
somewhat burlesque termination made the irreverent laugh. It was indeed
not fated that Moore should smell serious powder, though his courage
seems to have been fully equal to any such occasion. The same year
brought him two unquestioned and unalloyed advantages, the friendship of
Rogers and the beginning of the Irish Melodies, from which he reaped not
a little solid benefit, and which contain by far his highest and most
lasting poetry. It is curious, but by no means unexampled, that, at the
very time at which he was thus showing that he had found his right way,
he also diverged into one wholly wrong--that of the serious and very
ineffective Satires, "Corruption," "Intolerance," and others. The year
1809 brought "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers" with a gibe from
Byron and a challenge from Moore. But Moore's challenges were fated to
have no other result than making the challenged his friends for life.
All this time he had been more or less "about town." In 1811 he married
Elizabeth Dyke ("Bessy"), an actress of virtue and beauty, and wrote the
very inferior comic opera of "The Blue Stocking." Lord Moira gave the
pair a home first in his own house, then at Kegworth near Donington,
whence they moved to Ashbourne. Moore was busy now. The politics of "The
Two-penny Postbag" are of course sometimes dead enough to us; but
sometimes also they are not, and then the easy grace of the satire,
which is always pungent and never venomed, is not much below Canning.
Its author also did a good deal of other work of the same kind, besides
beginning to review for _The Edinburgh_. Considering that he was in a
way making his bread and butter by lampooning, however good-humouredly,
the ruler of his country, he seems to have been a little unreasonable in
feeling shocked that Lord Moira, on going as viceroy to India, did not
provide for him. In the first place he was provided for already; and in
the second place you cannot reasonably expect to enjoy the pleasures of
independence and those of dependence at the same time. At the end of
1817 he left Mayfield (his cottage near Ashbourne) and Lord Moira, for
Lord Lansdowne and Sloperton, a cottage near Bowood, the end of the one
sojourn and the beginning of the other being distinguished by the
appearance of his two best works, next to the Irish Melodies--"Lalla
Rookh" and "The Fudge Family at Paris." His first and almost his only
heavy stroke of ill-luck now came on him: his deputy at Bermuda levanted
with some six thousand pounds, for which Moore was liable. Many friends
came to his aid, and after some delay and negotiations, during which he
had to go abroad, Lord Lansdowne paid what was necessary. But Moore
afterwards paid Lord Lansdowne, which makes a decided distinction
between his conduct and that of Theodore Hook in a similar case.
Although the days of Moore lasted for half an ordinary lifetime after
this, they saw few important events save the imbroglio over the Byron
memoirs. They saw also the composition of a great deal of literature and
journalism, all very well paid, notwithstanding which, Moore seems to
have been always in a rather unintelligible state of pecuniary distress.
That he made his parents an allowance, as some allege in explanation,
will not in the least account for this; for, creditable as it was in him
to make it, this allowance did not exceed one hundred pounds a year. He
must have spent little in an ordinary way, for his Sloperton
establishment was of the most modest character, while his wife was an
excellent manager, and never went into society. Probably he might have
endorsed, if he had been asked, the great principle which somebody or
other has formulated, that the most expensive way of living is staying
in other peoples houses. At any rate his condition was rather precarious
till 1835, when Lord John Russell and Lord Lansdowne obtained for him a
Civil List pension of three hundred pounds a year. In his very last days
this was further increased by an additional hundred a year to his wife.
His end was not happy. The softening of the brain, which set in about
1848, and which had been preceded for some time by premonitory symptoms,
can hardly, as in the cases of Scott and Southey, be set down to
overwork, for though Moore had not been idle, his literary life had been
mere child's play to theirs. He died on 26th February 1852.
Of Moore's character not much need be said, nor need what is said be
otherwise than favourable. Not only to modern tastes, but to the
sturdier tastes of his own day, and even of the days immediately before
his, there was a little too much of the parasite and the hanger-on about
him. It is easy to say that a man of his talents, when he had once
obtained a start, might surely have gone his own way and lived his own
life, without taking up the position of a kind of superior gamekeeper or
steward at rich men's gates. But race, fashion, and a good many other
things have to be taken into account; and it is fair to Moore to
remember that he was, as it were from the first, bound to the
chariot-wheels of "the great," and could hardly liberate himself from
them without churlishness and violence. Moreover, it cannot possibly be
denied by any fair critic that if he accepted to some extent the awkward
position of led-poet, he showed in it as much independence as was
compatible with the function. Both in money matters, in his language to
his patrons, and in a certain general but indefinable tone of behaviour,
he contrasts not less favourably than remarkably, both with the
ultra-Tory Hook, to whom we have already compared him, and with the
ultra-Radical Leigh Hunt. Moore had as little of Wagg as he had of
Skimpole about him; though he allowed his way of life to compare in some
respects perilously with theirs. It is only necessary to look at his
letters to Byron--always ready enough to treat as spaniels those of his
inferiors in station who appeared to be of the spaniel kind--to
appreciate his general attitude, and his behaviour in this instance is
by no means different from his behaviour in others. As a politician
there is no doubt that he at least thought himself to be quite sincere.
It may be that, if he had been, his political satires would have galled
Tories more than they did then, and could hardly be read by persons of
that persuasion with such complete enjoyment as they can now. But the
insincerity was quite unconscious, and indeed can hardly be said to have
been insincerity at all. Moore had not a political head, and in English
as in Irish politics his beliefs were probably not founded on any
clearly comprehended principles. But such as they were he held to them
firmly. Against his domestic character nobody has ever said anything;
and it is sufficient to observe that not a few of the best as well as of
the greatest men of his time, Scott as well as Byron, Lord John Russell
as well as Lord Moira, appear not only to have admired his abilities and
liked his social qualities, but to have sincerely respected his
character. And so we may at last find ourselves alone with the plump
volume of poems in which we shall hardly discover with the amiable M.
Vallat "the greatest lyric poet of England," but in which we shall find
a poet certainly, and if not a very great poet, at any rate a poet who
has done many things well, and one particular thing better than anybody
else.
The volume opens with "Lalla Rookh," a proceeding which, if not
justified by chronology, is completely justified by the facts that Moore
was to his contemporaries the author of that poem chiefly, and that it
is by far the most considerable thing not only in mere bulk, but in
arrangement, plan, and style, that he ever did. Perhaps I am not quite a
fair judge of "Lalla Rookh." I was brought up in what is called a strict
household where, though the rule was not, as far as I can remember,
enforced by any penalties, it was a point of honour that in the nursery
and school-room none but "Sunday books" should be read on Sunday. But
this severity was tempered by one of the easements often occurring in a
world which, if not the best, is certainly not the worst of all possible
worlds. For the convenience of servants, or for some other reason, the
children were much more in the drawing-room on Sundays than on any other
day, and it was an unwritten rule that any book that lived in the
drawing-room was fit Sunday-reading. The consequence was that from the
time I could read, till childish things were put away, I used to spend a
considerable part of the first day of the week in reading and re-reading
a collection of books, four of which were Scott's poems, "Lalla Rookh,"
_The Essays of Elia_ (First Edition,--I have got it now), and Southey's
_Doctor_. Therefore it may be that I rank "Lalla Rookh" rather too high.
At the same time, I confess that it still seems to me a very respectable
poem indeed of the second rank. Of course it is artificial. The parade
of second, or third, or twentieth-hand learning in the notes makes one
smile, and the whole reminds one (as I daresay it has reminded many
others before) of a harp of the period with the gilt a little tarnished,
the ribbons more than a little faded, and the silk stool on which the
young woman in ringlets used to sit much worn. All this is easy
metaphorical criticism, if it is criticism at all. For I am not sure
that, when the last age has got a little farther off from our
descendants, they will see anything more ludicrous in such a harp than
we see in the faded spinets of a generation earlier still. But much
remains to Lalla if not to Feramorz. The prose interludes have lost none
of their airy grace. Even Mr. Burnand has not been able to make Mokanna
ridiculous, nor have the recent accounts of the actual waste of desert
and felt huts banished at least the poetical beauty of "Merou's bright
palaces and groves." There are those who laugh at the bower of roses by
Bendemeer's stream: I do not. "Paradise and the Peri" is perhaps the
prettiest purely sentimental poem that English or any other language can
show. "The Fire Worshippers" are rather long, but there is a famous
fight--more than one indeed--in them to relieve the monotony. For "The
Light of the Harem" alone I have never been able to get up much
enthusiasm; but even "The Light of the Harem" is a great deal better
than Moore's subsequent attempt in the style of "Lalla Rookh," or
something like it, "The Loves of the Angels." There is only one good
thing that I can find to say of that: it is not so bad as the poem which
similarity of title makes one think of in connection with
it--Lamartine's disastrous "Chute d'un Ange."
As "Lalla Rookh" is far the most important of Moore's serious poems, so
"The Fudge Family in Paris" is far the best of his humorous poems. I do
not forget "The Two-penny Postbag," nor many capital later verses of the
same kind, the best of which perhaps is the Epistle from Henry of Exeter
to John of Tchume. But "The Fudge Family" has all the merits of these,
with a scheme and framework of dramatic character which they lack. Miss
Biddy and her vanities, Master Bob and his guttling, the eminent
turncoat Phil Fudge, Esq. himself and his politics, are all excellent.
But I avow that Phelim Connor is to me the most delightful, though he
has always been rather a puzzle. If he is intended to be a satire on the
class now represented by the O'Briens and the McCarthys he is exquisite,
and it is small wonder that Young Ireland has never loved Moore much.
But I do not think that Thomas Brown the Younger meant it, or at least
wholly meant it, as satire, and this is perhaps the best proof of his
unpractical way of looking at politics. For Phelim Connor is a much more
damning sketch than any of the Fudges. Vanity, gluttony, the scheming
intrigues of eld, may not be nice things, but they are common to the
whole human race. The hollow rant which enjoys the advantages of liberty
and declaims against the excesses of tyranny is in its perfection Irish
alone. However this may be, these lighter poems of Moore are great fun,
and it is no small misfortune that the younger generation of readers
pays so little attention to them. For they are full of acute observation
of manners, politics, and society by an accomplished man of the world,
put into pointed and notable form by an accomplished man of letters. Our
fathers knew them well, and many a quotation familiar enough at second
hand is due originally to the Fudge Family in their second appearance
(not so good, but still good) many years later, to "The Two-penny
Postbag" and to the long list of miscellaneous satires and skits. The
last sentence is however to be taken as most strictly excluding
"Corruption," "Intolerance," and "The Sceptic." "Rhymes on the Road,"
travel-pieces out of Moore's line, may also be mercifully left aside:
and "Evenings in Greece;" and "The Summer Fête" (any universal provider
would have supplied as good a poem with the supper and the rout-seats)
need not delay the critic and will not extraordinarily delight the
reader. Not here is Moore's spur of Parnassus to be found.
For that domain of his we must go to the songs which, in extraordinary
numbers, make up the whole of the divisions headed Irish Melodies,
National Airs, Sacred Songs, Ballads and Songs, and some of the finest
of which are found outside these divisions in the longer poems from
"Lalla Rookh" downwards. The singular musical melody of these pieces has
never been seriously denied by any one, but it seems to be thought,
especially nowadays, that because they are musically melodious they are
not poetical. It is probably useless to protest against a prejudice
which, where it is not due to simple thoughtlessness or to blind
following of fashion, argues a certain constitutional defect of the
understanding powers. But it may be just necessary to repeat pretty
firmly that any one who regards, even with a tincture of contempt, such
work (to take various characteristic examples) as Dryden's lyrics, as
Shenstone's, as Moore's, as Macaulay's Lays, because he thinks that, if
he did not contemn them, his worship of Shakespeare, of Shelley, of
Wordsworth would be suspect, is most emphatically not a critic of poetry
and not even a catholic lover of it. Which said, let us betake ourselves
to seeing what Moore's special virtue is. It is acknowledged that it
consists partly in marrying music most happily to verse; but what is not
so fully acknowledged as it ought to be is, that it also consists in
marrying music not merely to verse, but to poetry. Among the more
abstract questions of poetical criticism few are more interesting than
this, the connection of what may be called musical music with poetical
music; and it is one which has not been much discussed. Let us take the
two greatest of Moore's own contemporaries in lyric, the two greatest
lyrists as some think (I give no opinion on this) in English, and
compare their work with his. Shelley has the poetical music in an
unsurpassable and sometimes in an almost unapproached degree, but his
verse is admittedly very difficult to set to music. I should myself go
farther and say that it has in it some indefinable quality antagonistic
to such setting. Except the famous Indian Serenade, I do not know any
poem of Shelley's that has been set with anything approaching to
success, and in the best setting that I know of this the honeymoon of
the marriage turns into a "red moon" before long. That this is not
merely due to the fact that Shelley likes intricate metres any one who
examines Moore can see. That it is due merely to the fact that Shelley,
as we know from Peacock, was almost destitute of any ear for music is
the obvious and common explanation. But neither will this serve, for we
happen also to know that Burns, whose lyric, of a higher quality than
Moore's, assorts with music as naturally as Moore's own, was quite as
deficient as Shelley in this respect. So was Scott, who could yet write
admirable songs to be sung. It seems therefore almost impossible, on the
comparison of these three instances, to deny the existence of some
peculiar musical music in poetry, which is distinct from poetical music,
though it may coexist with it or may be separated from it, and which is
independent both of technical musical training and even of what is
commonly called "ear" in the poet. That Moore possessed it in probably
the highest degree, will I think, hardly be denied. It never seems to
have mattered to him whether he wrote the words for the air or altered
the air to suit the words. The two fit like a glove, and if, as is
sometimes the case, the same or a similar poetical measure is heard set
to another air than Moore's, this other always seems intrusive and
wrong. He draws attention in one case to the extraordinary irregularity
of his own metre (an irregularity to which the average pindaric is a
mere jog-trot), yet the air fits it exactly. Of course the two feet
which most naturally go to music, the anapæst and the trochee, are
commonest with him; but the point is that he seems to find no more
difficulty, if he does not take so much pleasure, in setting
combinations of a very different kind. Nor is this peculiar gift by any
means unimportant from the purely poetical side, the side on which the
verse is looked at without any regard to air or accompaniment. For the
great drawback to "songs to be sung" in general since Elizabethan days
(when, as Mr. Arber and Mr. Bullen have shown, it was very different)
has been the constant tendency of the verse-writer to sacrifice to his
musical necessities either meaning or poetic sound or both. The climax
of this is of course reached in the ineffable balderdash which usually
does duty for the libretto of an opera, but it is quite as noticeable in
the ordinary songs of the drawing-room. Now Moore is quite free from
this blame. He may not have the highest and rarest strokes of poetic
expression; but at any rate he seldom or never sins against either
reason or poetry for the sake of rhythm and rhyme. He is always the
master not the servant, the artist not the clumsy craftsman. And this I
say not by any means as one likely to pardon poetical shortcomings in
consideration of musical merit, for, shameful as the confession may be,
a little music goes a long way with me; and what music I do like, is
rather of the kind opposite to Moore's facile styles. Yet it is easy,
even from the musical view, to exaggerate his facility. Berlioz is not
generally thought a barrel-organ composer, and he bestowed early and
particular pains on Moore.
To many persons, however, the results are more interesting than the
analysis of their qualities and principles; so let us go to the songs
themselves. To my fancy the three best of Moore's songs, and three of
the finest songs in any language, are "Oft in the stilly Night," "When
in Death I shall calm recline," and "I saw from the Beach." They all
exemplify what has been pointed out above, the complete adaptation of
words to music and music to words, coupled with a decidedly high quality
of poetical merit in the verse, quite apart from the mere music. It can
hardly be necessary to quote them, for they are or ought to be familiar
to everybody; but in selecting these three I have no intention of
distinguishing them in point of general excellence from scores, nay
hundreds of others. "Go where Glory waits thee" is the first of the
Irish melodies, and one of those most hackneyed by the enthusiasm of
bygone Pogsons. But its merit ought in no way to suffer on that account
with persons who are not Pogsons. It ought to be possible for the
reader, it is certainly possible for the critic, to dismiss Pogson
altogether, to wave Pogson off, and to read anything as if it had never
been read before. If this be done we shall hardly wonder at the delight
which our fathers, who will not compare altogether badly with ourselves,
took in Thomas Moore. "When he who adores thee" is supposed on pretty
good evidence to have been inspired by the most hollow and senseless of
all pseudo-patriotic delusions, a delusion of which the best thing that
can be said is that "the pride of thus dying for" it has been about the
last thing that it ever did inspire, and that most persons who have
suffered from it have usually had the good sense to take lucrative
places from the tyrant as soon as they could get them, and to live
happily ever after. But the basest, the most brutal, and the bloodiest
of Saxons may recognise in Moore's poem the expression of a possible, if
not a real, feeling given with infinite grace and pathos. The same
string reverberates even in the thrice and thousand times hackneyed Harp
of Tara. "Rich and rare were the Gems she wore" is chiefly comic opera,
but it is very pretty comic opera; and the two pieces "There is not in
the wide world" and "How dear to me" exemplify, for the first but by no
means for the last time, Moore's extraordinary command of the last
phase of that curious thing called by the century that gave him birth
Sensibility. We have turned Sensibility out of doors; but he would be a
rash man who should say that we have not let in seven worse devils of
the gushing kind in her comparatively innocent room.
Then we may skip not a few pieces, only referring once more to "The
Legacy" ("When in Death I shall calm recline"), an anacreontic quite
unsurpassable in its own kind. We need dwell but briefly on such pieces
as "Believe me if all those endearing young Charms," which is typical of
much that Moore wrote, but does not reach the true devil-may-care note
of Suckling, or as "By the Hope within us springing," for Moore's
war-like pieces are seldom or never good. But with "Love's Young Dream"
we come back to the style of which it is impossible to say less than
that it is quite admirable in its kind. Then after a page or two we come
to the chief _cruces_ of Moore's pathetic and of his comic manner, "The
Last Rose of Summer," "The Young May Moon," and "The Minstrel Boy." I
cannot say very much for the last, which is tainted with the unreality
of all Moore's Tyrtean efforts; but "The Young May Moon" could not be
better, and I am not going to abandon the Rose, for all her perfume be
something musty--a _pot-pourri_ rose rather than a fresh one. The song
of O'Ruark with its altogether fatal climax--
On our side is virtue and Erin,
On theirs is the Saxon and guilt--
(which carries with it the delightful reflection that it was an Irishman
running away with an Irishwoman that occasioned this sweeping moral
contrast) must be given up; but surely not so "Oh had we some bright
little Isle of our own." For indeed if one only had some bright little
isle of that kind, some _rive fidèle où l'on aime toujours_, and where
things in general are adjusted to such a state, then would Thomas Moore
be the Laureate of that bright and tight little island.
But it is alarming to find that we have not yet got through twenty-five
pages out of some hundred or two, and that the Irish Melodies are not
yet nearly exhausted. Not a few of the best known of Moore's songs,
including "Oft in the stilly Night," are to be found in the division of
National Airs, which is as a whole a triumph of that extraordinary
genius for setting which has been already noticed. Here is "Flow on thou
shining River," here the capital "When I touch the String," on which
Thackeray loved to make variations. But "Oft in the stilly Night" itself
is far above the others. We do not say "stilly" now: we have been taught
by Coleridge (who used to use it freely himself before he laughed at it)
to laugh at "stilly" and "paly" and so forth. But the most acrimonious
critic may be challenged to point out another weakness of the same kind,
and on the whole the straightforward simplicity of the phrase equals
the melody of the rhythm.
The Sacred Songs need not delay us long; for they are not better than
sacred songs in general, which is saying remarkably little. Perhaps the
most interesting thing in them is the well-known couplet,
This world is but a fleeting show
For man's illusion given--