CHAPTER II--Early Manhood and Marriage
CHAPTER III--"Lalla Rookh"
CHAPTER IV--Period of Residence Abroad
CHAPTER V--Work as Biographer and Controversialist
CHAPTER VI--The Decline of Life
CHAPTER VII--General Appreciation
APPENDIX
INDEX
THOMAS MOORE
CHAPTER I
BOYHOOD AND EARLY POEMS
Sudden fame, acquired with little difficulty, suffers generally a period
of obscuration after the compelling power which attaches to a man's
living personality has been removed; and from this darkness it does not
always emerge. Of such splendour and subsequent eclipse, Moore's fate
might be cited as the capital example.
The son of a petty Dublin tradesman, he found himself, almost from his
first entry on the world, courted by a brilliant society; each year
added to his friendships among the men who stood highest in literature
and statesmanship; and his reputation on the Continent was surpassed
only by that of Scott and Byron. He did not live to see a reaction. Lord
John Russell could write boldly in 1853, a year after his friend's
death, that "of English lyrical poets, Moore is surely the greatest."
There is perhaps no need to criticise either this attitude of excessive
admiration, or that which in many cases has replaced it, of tolerant
contempt. But it is as well to emphasise at the outset the fact that
even to-day, more than a century after he began to publish, Moore is
still one of the poets most popular and widely known throughout the
English-speaking world. His effect on his own race at least has been
durable; and if it be a fair test of a poet's vitality to ask how much
of his work could be recovered from oral tradition, there are not many
who would stand it better than the singer of the Irish Melodies. At
least the older generation of Irishmen and Irishwomen now living have
his poetry by heart.
The purpose of this book is to give, if possible, a just estimate of the
man's character and of his work as a poet. The problem, so far as the
biographical part is concerned, is not to discover new material but to
select from masses already in print. The Memoirs of his Life, edited by
Lord John Russell, fill eight volumes, though the life with which they
deal was neither long nor specially eventful. In addition we have
allusions to Moore, as a widely known social personage, in almost every
memoir of that time; and newspaper references by thousands have been
collected. These extraneous sources, however, add very little to the
impression which is gained by a careful reading of the correspondence
and of the long diaries in which Moore's nature, singularly unsecretive,
displays itself with perfect frankness. Whether one's aim be to justify
Moore or to condemn him, the most effective means are provided by his
own words; and for nearly everything that I have to allege in the
narrative part of this work, Moore, himself is the authority. Nor is the
critical estimate which has to be put forward, though remote from that
of Moore's official biographer, at all unlike that which the poet
himself seems to have formed of his work.
Thomas Moore was born in Dublin on the 28th of May 1779, at No. 12
Aungier Street, where his father, a native of Kerry, kept a grocer's
shop. His mother, Anastasia Clodd, was the daughter of a small provision
merchant in Wexford. Moore was their eldest child, and of the brothers
and sisters whom he mentions, only two girls, his sisters Katherine and
Ellen, appear to have grown up or to have played any part in his life.
His parents were evidently prosperous people, devoted to their clever
boy and ambitious to secure him social promotion by giving scope to the
talents which he showed from his early schooldays. The memoir of his
youth, which Moore wrote in middle life, notes the special pleasure
which his mother took in the friendship of a certain Miss Dodd, an
elderly maiden lady moving in "a class of society somewhat of a higher
level than ours"; and it is easy enough to understand why the precocious
imp of a boy found favour with this distinguished person and her guests.
He had all the gifts of an actor and a mimic, and they were encouraged
in him first at home, and then at the boarding-school to which he was
sent. Samuel Whyte, its head master, had been the teacher of Sheridan,
and though he discovered none of Sheridan's abilities, the connection
with the Sheridan family, added to his own tastes, had brought him into
close touch with the stage. He was the author of a didactic poem on "The
Theatre," a great director of private theatricals, and a teacher of
elocution. Such a man was not likely to neglect the gifts of the clever
small boy entrusted to him, and Master Moore, at the age of eleven,
already figured on the playbill of some important private theatricals as
reciting the Epilogue. He was encouraged also in the habit of rhyming, a
habit that reached back as far as he could remember; and before his
fifteenth year was far gone, he attained to the honours of print in a
creditable magazine, the _Anthologia Hibernica_. The first of his
contributions was an amatory address to a Miss Hannah Byrne, herself, it
appears, a poetess. The lines, "To Zelia on her charging the Author with
writing too much on love," need not be quoted (though the subject is
characteristic), nor the "Pastoral Ballad" which followed in the number
for October 1793. It is worth noting, however, that in 1794 we find
Moore paraphrasing Anacreon's Fifth Ode; and further that in March of
the same year he is acknowledging his debt to Mr. Samuel Whyte with
verses beginning
"Hail heaven-taught votary of the laurel'd Nine"
--an unusual form of address from a schoolboy to his pedagogue.
Briefly, one gathers the impression that Moore's schooldays were
enlivened by many small gaieties, while his holidays abounded with the
same distractions. The family was sent down to Sandymount, now a suburb,
but then a seaside village on Dublin Bay, and there, in addition to
sea-bathing, they had their fill of mild play-acting. Moore reproduces
some lines from an epilogue written for one of these occasions when the
return to school was imminent:--
"Our Pantaloon that did so agéd look
Must now resume his youth, his task, his book;
Our Harlequin who skipp'd, leap'd, danced, and died,
Must now stand trembling by his tutor's side."
And he notes genially how the pathos of his farewell nearly moved him to
tears as he recited the closing words--doubtless with a thrilling
tremble in his accents. Moore was always [greek: _artidakrous_]. But he
was a healthy, active youngster, and we read that he emulated Harlequin
in jumping talents, as well as in the command of tears and laughter; and
practised over the rail of a tent-bed till he could at last "perform the
headforemost leap of his hero most successfully."
School made little break in these pleasures; for while the family were
at the seaside, his indulgent father provided the boy with a pony on
which he rode down every Saturday to stay over the Sunday; "and at the
hour when I was expected, there generally came my sister with a number
of young girls to meet me, and full of smiles and welcomes, walked by
the side of my pony into the town." Never was a boy more petted. About
this time, too, his musical gifts began to be discovered; for Mrs. Moore
insisted that her daughter Katherine should be taught not only the
harpsichord, but also the piano, and that a piano should be bought. On
this instrument Moore taught himself to play; and since his mother had a
pleasant voice and a talent for giving gay little supper-parties,
musical people used to come to the house, and the boy had plenty of
chances for showing off his accomplishments, accompanying himself, and
developing already his uncanny knack of dramatic singing.
A young gentleman thus brought up was, one would say, in a fair way to
be spoiled, and Moore, looking back, is quick to recognise the danger.
Yet he is fully justified in the comment which closes his narrative of
the triumphant entries into Sandymount with schoolgirls escorting his
pony:--
"There is far more of what is called vanity in my now reporting the
tribute, than I felt then in receiving it; and I attribute very
much to the cheerful and kindly circumstances which thus surrounded
my childhood, that spirit of enjoyment and, I may venture to add,
good temper, which has never, thank God, failed me to the present
time (July 1833)."
Moreover, if his parents were interested in his pleasures, they were no
less concerned about his work. His mother, he writes, examined him daily
in his studies; sometimes even, when kept out late at a party, she would
wake the boy out of his sleep in the small hours of morning, and bid him
sit up and repeat over his lessons. Her affectionate care met with that
return from her son which was continued to the end of her life. There
was nothing in his power that Moore would not do to please his mother.
Nevertheless, touching as the relation was, it had its weak side, and
Moore in time realised it. In a notable passage of his diary, which
describes the pleasant days spent by him at Abbotsford in 1825, we read
how he congratulated Scott on the advantages of his upbringing--the
open-air life, field sports, and free intercourse with the peasantry.
"I said that the want of this manly training showed itself in my
poetry, which would perhaps have had a far more vigorous character,
if it had not been for the sort of _boudoir_ education I had
received." ("The only thing, indeed," he adds, "that conduced to
brace and invigorate my mind was the strong political feelings that
were stirring round me when I was a boy, and in which I took a deep
and most ardent interest.")
Part of this stirring manifested itself in a secret association under
John Moore's own roof; for the son had organised his father's two clerks
into a debating and literary society, of which he constituted himself
president. The meetings took place after the common meal of the
household was over, when the clerks retired to their bedroom, and Master
Thomas to his own apartment--a corner of the same bedroom, but boarded
off, fitted with a table, chest of drawers, and book-case, and decorated
by its owner with inscriptions of his own composition "in the manner, as
I flattered myself, of Shenstone at the Leasowes." The secret society
met at dead of night in a closet beyond the large bedroom, once or twice
a week; and each member was bound to produce a riddle or rebus in verse,
which the others were set to solve. And in addition to this more
literary part of the proceedings, the members discussed politics--Tom
Ennis, the senior clerk, being a strong nationalist.
Politics certainly played a great part in moulding Moore's feelings and
imagination, and it should be observed that his nonage almost coincided
with the duration of Ireland's independent Parliament. He was three
years old when the Volunteers established the freedom of the legislature
in College Green, and twenty-one when Pitt and Castlereagh purchased its
extinction. His father, as a Catholic, had naturally a keen interest in
the great question of reform and Catholic enfranchisement, and Moore
remembered being taken by him to a dinner in honour of Napper Tandy,
when the hero of the evening noticed the small boy. The Latin usher at
Whyte's school too, Mr. Donovan, was an ardent patriot, and in the hours
of special instruction which he devoted to the young scholar--for Moore
had early outstripped his class-fellows in Latin and Greek--he taught
his pupil more than the classics. But these influences bred at most a
predisposition. It was Trinity College that made Moore a rebel--or as
nearly a rebel as he ever became.
The measure of partial enfranchisement passed in 1793 admitted Catholics
to study in the University of Dublin, though its emoluments were denied
them. A curious point should be noted here. The entry under June 2,
1794, reads: "Thomas Moore, P. Prot," _i.e._ Commoner (pensionarius),
Protestant. Now Moore himself states that it was for a while debated in
the family circle whether he should be entered as a Protestant to
qualify him for scholarship, fellowship and the rest; he does not seem
to know that a preliminary step was actually taken, quite possibly by
his school-master. John Moore's political friends were mostly Protestant
("the Catholics," his son writes, "being still too timorous to come
forward openly in their own cause"); the atmosphere into which the
student entered was strongly Protestant, the friends whom he made were
of the dominant religion. But neither then nor at any time was Moore
prepared to change creeds for material advantage. This is the more
remarkable because the family's religion was none of the strictest.
Moore notes that while at college he abandoned the practice of
confession, his mother, after some protest, "very wisely consenting."
Whether owing to the lack of incentive, or because he had no taste for
science, then a necessary part of any honours course, Moore troubled
little about academic successes, and, after gaining a single premium in
his first year, decided to "confine himself to such parts of the course
as fell within his own tastes and pursuits." Incidentally he earned
distinction for a composition in English verse sent in instead of the
prescribed Latin prose; and, needless to say, was busy with less
authorised verse-writing. He did, however, in his third year, 1797,
present himself for the scholarship examination and was (he says) placed
on the list of successful candidates, though his religion disqualified
him for enjoyment of the privileges. Records show that on Tuesday, 13th
June of that year, thirteen exhibitions were given, supplementary to the
list of scholars published on Trinity Monday (the 12th), and on this
list Moore stands first. The award was presumably a solatium.
But the serious and lasting part of his university education was gained,
as so often happens, not from his tutors but from his associates. The
recall of Lord Fitzwilliam in March 1795--"that fatal turning-point in
Irish history," as Mr. Lecky calls it--had shattered the hopes of Irish
Catholics and made civil war a result to be eagerly urged by extremists
on both sides. "The political ferment soon found its way within the
walls of our university," writes Moore; and among his personal friends
was a young man destined to tragic fame.
"This youth was Robert Emmet, whose brilliant success in his
college studies, and more particularly in the scientific portion of
them, had crowned his career, as far as he had gone, with all the
honours of the course; while his powers of oratory displayed at a
debating society, of which, about this time (1796-7), I became a
member, were beginning to excite universal attention, as well from
the eloquence as the political boldness of his displays. He was, I
rather think, by two classes, my senior, though it might have been
only by one. But there was, at all events, such an interval between
our standings as, at that time of life, makes a material
difference; and when I became a member of the debating society, I
found him in full fame, not only for his scientific attainments
but also for the blamelessness of his life and the grave suavity of
his manners."
In the beginning of 1797 this debating club came to an end, and Emmet as
well as Moore transferred his energies to the more important Historical
Society. Here Moore, by his own account, distinguished himself only as
the author of "a burlesque poem called an 'Ode upon Nothing, with Notes
by Trismegistus Rustifustius,'" which earned first a medal by general
acclamation, and then a vote of censure by reason of the broad licence
of certain passages. Emmet, however, was a member of a different kind,
and the speeches delivered by him attracted so much attention that a
senior man was detailed by the governing Board to attend meetings and
answer the young orator. About the same time a paper called _The Press_
was set up by Emmet's elder brother, Thomas Addis Emmet, and other
leaders of the United Irishmen; and in this Moore published anonymously
a "Letter to the Students of Trinity College." The letter was, by
Moore's account of it, treasonable enough, and when, according to
custom, he read out the paper to his father and mother at home, they
pronounced it to be "very bold." Next day a friend called and made some
veiled allusion to the matter, which Moore's mother caught at, and she,
says Moore, "most earnestly entreated of me never again to venture on so
dangerous a step." Her son promised, and a few days later Emmet's
influence was added to the mother's. Moore's account of the circumstance
is so characteristic that it must be quoted.
"A few days after, in the course of one of those strolls into the
country which Emmet and I used often to take together, our
conversation turned upon this letter, and I gave him to understand
it was mine; when, with that almost feminine gentleness of manner
which he possessed, and which is so often found in such determined
spirits, he owned to me that on reading the letter, though pleased
with its contents, he could not help regretting that the public
attention had been thus drawn to the politics of the University, as
it might have the effect of awakening the vigilance of the college
authorities, and frustrate the progress of the good work (as we
both considered it) which was going on there so quietly. Even then,
boyish as my own mind was, I could not help being struck with the
manliness of the view which I saw he took of what men ought to do
in such times and circumstances, namely, not to _talk_ or _write_
about their intentions, but to _act_. He had never before, I think,
in conversation with me, alluded to the existence of the United
Irish societies in college, nor did he now, or at any subsequent
time, make any proposition to me to join in them, a forbearance
which I attribute a good deal to his knowledge of the watchful
anxiety about me which prevailed at home, and his foreseeing the
difficulty which I should experience--from being, as the phrase is,
constantly 'tied to my mother's apron-strings'--in attending the
meetings of the society without being discovered."
It will be seen that Moore makes no claim for heroic conduct. One may
assume with great certainty that in such a matter Emmet would not have
obeyed a mother's injunctions. But although Moore's parents desired that
their son should not go out of his way to incur risks, they were by no
means of opinion that he should seek safety at any price. In 1797, on
the eve of the rebellion, an inquisition was held within Trinity by Lord
Chancellor FitzGibbon. On the first day of the tribunal's sitting, one
of Emmet's friends, named Hamilton, refused to answer certain questions,
and was sent down with the sentence of banishment from the University,
carrying with it exclusion from all the learned professions. Moore went
home and discussed the situation that evening.
"The deliberate conclusion which my dear, honest father and mother
came to was that, overwhelming as the consequences were to all
their prospects and hopes for me, yet if the questions leading to
the crimination of others which had been put to almost all examined
on that day, and which poor Dacre Hamilton alone refused to answer,
should be put also to me, I must in the same manner and at all
risks return a similar refusal."
Next day Moore was called, and, after objecting to the oath, took it
with the express reservation that he should refuse to answer any
question which might criminate his associates. No such question was
asked, and his fortitude was not put to the proof, nor does it seem that
after this Moore dabbled in rebellion. Five years later, in 1803, when
Emmet's abortive rising was nipped in the bud and the young leader went
to his death, Moore was in London, preparing to depart for Bermuda. None
of the letters preserved from that time contain any reference to this
tragedy; but Moore's writings show again and again that the capacity for
hero-worship was evoked in him by this friend of boyhood as by no other
figure of his time. In the first number of the _Irish Melodies_,
published in 1808, an early place is given to the lyric:--
"O breathe not his name, let it sleep in the shade,
Where cold and unhonoured his ashes are laid;
Sad, silent, and dark be the tears that we shed,
As the night-dew that falls on the grass o'er his head.
"But the night-dew that falls, though in silence it weeps,
Shall brighten with verdure the grave where he sleeps;
And the tear that we shed, though in secret it rolls,
Shall long keep his memory green in our souls."
Every one, in Ireland at least, who read these lines heard in them an
echo of the closing passage in Emmet's speech from the dock:--
"I have but one request to ask at my departure from this world. It
is the charity of its silence. Let no man write my epitaph. When my
country shall have taken her place among the nations of the earth,
then, and not till then, let my epitaph be written."
Emmet's words are established among the scriptures of the Irish people;
but it may well be allowed that their fame would be less had not Moore
caught up and amplified their thought with all his habitual felicity and
more than his habitual passion. Nor is this all. "The Fire Worshippers"
is the most characteristic of the four long poems set in the framework
of _Lalla Rookh_, and "The Fire Worshippers" is a glorification of
rebellion, which is merely made explicit in the following fine
passage:--
"Rebellion! foul, dishonouring word,
Whose wrongful blight so oft has stain'd
The holiest cause that tongue or sword
Of mortal ever lost or gain'd,
How many a spirit, born to bless,
Hath sunk beneath that withering name,
Whom but a day's, an hour's success,
Had wafted to eternal fame!"
More than that, the rebels glorified are men like Emmet, who take up
arms as a supreme protest, almost without hope of success.
"Who, though they know the strife is vain,
Who, though they know the riven chain
Snaps but to enter in the heart
Of him who rends its links apart,
Yet dare the issue,--blest to be
Even for one bleeding moment free,
And die in pangs of liberty!"
The affinity is not only between Emmet and the rebel hero Hafed. Hinda,
the beloved of Hafed, has many traits that recall Emmet's betrothed, the
beautiful and most unhappy Sarah Curran. For although John Philpot
Curran was a leading supporter of Grattan's principles, yet no man more
bitterly denounced Emmet's attempt; and Al Hassan himself, the fierce
Moslem chief, could not have dealt more harshly with Hinda, had he
detected her love for the Gheber, than did Curran when he was confronted
with the proofs that his daughter continued her affection to a declared
rebel. It is not hard to guess of whom Moore thought when he wrote the
moving and beautiful lines which describe Hinda's passion in the days
after her lover had been revealed to her for the foe of her father's
arms:--
"Ah! not the love that should have bless'd
So young, so innocent a breast;
Not the pure, open, prosperous love,
That, pledged on earth and seal'd above,
Grows in the world's approving eyes,
In friendship's smile and home's caress,
Collecting all the heart's sweet ties
Into one knot of happiness!
No, Hinda, no--thy fatal flame
Is nursed in silence, sorrow, shame.--
A passion, without hope or pleasure,
In thy soul's darkness buried deep,
It lies, like some ill-gotten treasure,--
Some idol, without shrine or name,
O'er which its pale-eyed votaries keep
Unholy watch, while others sleep!"
Hafed and Hinda are lovers who find themselves united by all the
attraction of their natures, yet separated irretrievably by external
circumstances which are, in no small part, of the hero's making. The man
is resolute to forfeit, not only life, but the fruition of declared
love, sooner than abandon a national cause, even when that cause is most
desperate;--the girl sees herself with "a divided duty," torn away by
imperious love from all her natural loyalties;--and such lovers also, in
Moore's own youth, were Robert Emmet and Sarah Curran. I have quoted the
famous lyric in which he consecrates the memory of the man who died for
the faith that was in him. Not less famous, and still more beautiful, is
the melody which preserves the memory of the surviving lover, and the
sad moods of retrospect which were evident in her broken life. Here,
more than perhaps in any other poem, Moore has fixed in his words that
plangent quality of voice, by which a hundred times he moved listeners
to tears.
"She is far from the land where her young hero sleeps,
And lovers are round her sighing;
But coldly she turns from their gaze, and weeps,
For her heart in his grave is lying.
"She sings the wild song of her dear native plains,
Every note which he loved awaking:--
Ah! little they think, who delight in her strains,
How the heart of the Minstrel is breaking.
"He had lived for his love, for his country he died,
They were all that to life had entwin'd him;
Nor soon shall the tears of his country be dried,
Nor long will his love stay behind him.
"Oh! make her a grave where the sunbeams rest
When they promise a glorious morrow;
They'll shine o'er her sleep, like a smile from the West,
From her own loved island of sorrow."
With the terrible events of 1798 Moore had no personal concern. His
memoir notes that he was ill in bed when the long-expected revolt broke
out, and when folks in Dublin were scared by the going out of all the
street lamps on the night fixed for an attempt on the metropolis. Yet it
is strange how little trace is left in his writings by that bloodstained
year. Even in his Life of Lord Edward Fitzgerald, we seem to find the
result of subsequent reading and inquiry, rather than the narrative of
one who was almost a man grown when Lord Edward's tragic end moved pity
throughout the whole kingdom.
And in truth, though politics were always well to the front among
Moore's interests, they never dominated his life. The memoir of his
youth notes that even among his political associates other enthusiasms
were cultivated. Edward Hudson, one of the Committee of United Irishmen,
seized just before the rebellion broke out, was, Moore says,
"passionately devoted to Irish music," and had "collected and
transcribed all our most beautiful airs." To intercourse with him in
these days the poet ascribed much of his own early acquaintance with the
chief source of his inspiration. Further, Moore formally completed his
education by graduating in 1798, and before this time he had been
entered at the Middle Temple by the father of his friend Beresford
Burston, a young man of good family and of sporting tastes. But, while
still an undergraduate, he had already commenced the composition whose
success was to turn him from all serious thoughts of the bar.
The interest of another friend had procured him admission at all seasons
to Marsh's Library, and here he plunged deep in miscellaneous reading.
We read in the preface to his early volume, _Poetical Works of the late
Thomas Little_, that "Mr. Little" (the supposititious author) "gave much
of his time to the study of the amatory writers"; and it is safe to
conclude that Mr. Little's original read, in the fine library founded by
Archbishop Marsh, whatever the Latin and Greek writers had to say on the
subject of gallantry. Here also it is probable that he made acquaintance
with what the same preface calls "the graceful levity, the _grata
protervitas_ of a Rochester and a Sedley," and there probably he
acquired that knowledge of Olympia Fulvia Morata, Alessandra Scala, and
the other "Latin _blues_," which, long after, gave him the rare
opportunity "to show off to Macaulay all such reading as _he_ never
read." Moore was always a surprising devourer of books, and his parents
had profited by the presence of French émigrés to add a good knowledge
of modern tongues to his store of classics; a fine memory completed his
equipment for the academic side of literature.
Oddly enough, the desire for academic recognition seems to have prompted
his first undertaking. Given a young man possessing a good supply of
Greek and Latin, a large fund of miscellaneous knowledge, a strong taste
for the amatory poets, and a remarkably neat turn with verse, it was
natural enough that he should turn to translation of the classics.
Anacreon, who had engaged his attention in schooldays, still held it:
and about the time of his graduating, Moore went to the Provost of
Trinity, Dr. Kearney, with a good handful of renderings from that poet,
and suggested that his industry should be recognised by "some honour or
reward." Dr. Kearney was sympathetic and flattering, but at the same
time "expressed his doubts whether the Board could properly confer any
public reward upon the translation of a work so amatory and convivial as
the Odes of Anacreon." Nevertheless, he strongly advised publication,
adding, with an agreeable touch of nature, "The young people will like
it." It may be added that, when publication came to be arranged, Dr.
Kearney was one of the only two subscribers found among "the monks of
Trinity," as Moore contemptuously called them; and further, that he
appears to have lent to the young poet his copy of Spaletti's
edition--one of two sent from the Pope to Trinity College by the
intermediacy of the Catholic Archbishop Troy.
This, however, is to anticipate. It was in the spring of April 1799 that
Mr. Thomas Moore set out to eat his first dinner at the Middle Temple.
The proceeds of the little grocery business--of which Moore never was
ashamed, and which never seems to have been a hindrance to him in
society--were now to be sharply taxed. Mrs. Moore had long been hoarding
against the journey to London, to gather the guineas which she now sewed
up in the waistband of the adventurer's pantaloons. In some other part
of the garments, "unknown to me" (Moore writes), "she had stitched in a
scapular, a small piece of cloth blessed by the priest, which a fond
superstition inclined her to believe would keep the wearer of it from
harm." The journey was accomplished successfully, and quarters were
found for the traveller at 44 George Street, Portman Square, by some
Irish acquaintances. Except for his Irish connections, most of them
people in a small way of life, apothecaries and the like, Moore was
rather friendless in town. The custom of the Temple obliging each
novice, as part of the form of initiation, to give a dinner to some
brother Templars, embarrassed him at first, since he did not know a
soul; and he was only relieved "by a young fellow, who, addressing me
very politely, offered to collect for me the number of diners generally
used on such occasions." It seems that he felt despondent, and a letter
to his father suggests that he wrote querulously, asking leave to return
home and give up the game. It is certain that he was immeasurably
homesick, and each one of his letters to "my dearest father" and "my
darling mother" teems with expressions of eagerness for the sight of
them.
Nevertheless he was making his way, and, before a month was over, could
write, "I need never be out of company if I chose it." He had formed
also one of the two or three connections which dominated his life.
Joseph Atkinson, secretary in Ireland to the Ordnance Board, who had
made friends with the young singer in Dublin, gave him an introduction
to Lord Moira (afterwards the second Marquis of Hastings). Moore, a few
days after arriving, called on the great man, and was invited to dinner;
the acquaintance must have progressed rapidly, for in the same year he
was invited to pay a visit to Donington Park, Lord Moira's country seat,
on his way back from spending the summer vacation in Ireland.
"This was of course at that time," Moore observes with that
good-humoured candour which is a characteristic of him, "a great
event in my life, and among the most vivid of my early English
recollections is that of my first night at Donington, when Lord
Moira, with that high courtesy for which he was remarkable, lighted
me himself to my bedroom; and there was this stately personage
stalking on before through the long lighted gallery, bearing in his
hand my bed-candle which he delivered to me at the door of my
apartment. I thought it all exceedingly fine and grand, but at the
same time most uncomfortable, and little I foresaw how much at home
and at my ease I should one day find myself in that great house."
After this visit, negotiations with a publisher for the issue of the
_Anacreon_, which had been begun during Moore's first sojourn in London,
were resumed, and probably the name of friendship with Lord Moira did no
harm. At all events the business was conducted to a successful issue by
Moore's friend, Dr. Hume; and on December 19, 1799, the new poet writes
rapturously of getting a good number of names for the subscription,
adding that he has "received two hard guineas already from Mr. Campbell
and Mr. Tinker, which I hope will be lucky. They are the only guineas I
ever kissed, and I have locked them up religiously." Dr. Lawrence, a
scholar of repute, reported favourably of the translation. Mrs.
Fitzherbert was added to the list of subscribers; and finally, to crown
all, Moore wrote--
"My dear Mother, I have got the Prince's name and his permission
that I should dedicate _Anacreon_ to him. Hurra! Hurra!"
And before the translator returned to the home where he was so eagerly
expected, he had been duly presented to "his Royal Highness, George
Prince of Wales." "He is beyond doubt a man of very fascinating
manners," the letter goes on (dated August 4, 1800); and indeed the
Prince's remarks, as Moore reports them, were vastly civil:--
"The honour was entirely _his_ in being allowed to put his name 'to
a work of such merit.' He then said that he hoped when he returned
to town in the winter, we should have many opportunities of
_enjoying each other's society_; that he was passionately fond of
music and had long heard of my talents in that way. Is not all this
very fine?"
Very fine indeed. "But, my dearest mother, it has cost me a new coat.
By-the-bye, I am still in my other tailor's debt." There one has in a
nutshell the epitome of Moore's life, if the life were to be written
from a hostile point of view. On the other hand, considered candidly,
there is nothing more surprising than the small degree of harm done to
Moore by his disproportionate success. For the son of a small Irish
tradesman to find himself at the age of one-and-twenty flattered by the
heir-apparent--at a time too when the heir-apparent was the
all-conquering leader of society--was indeed a dazzling promotion. And
from that day onwards, Moore never lost ground. He had through life his
choice of whatever was most brilliant in social intercourse, and his
choice showed a steadily growing sanity of judgment. Moreover, although
his intimates were always people set on a pinnacle, he never for an
instant wavered in his fidelity to the home where he had been brought up
with so much love. The end of the letter which describes his
introduction to the Prince deserves to be quoted for its natural
warmth:--
"Do not let any one read this letter but yourselves; none but a
father and a mother can bear such egotising vanity; but I know who
I am writing to--that they are interested in what is said of me,
and that they are too partial not to tolerate my speaking of
myself."
It is easy to see that Moore's success was mainly social at first rather
than literary. Throughout life he exercised an irresistible charm. An
infectious gaiety, joined to copious but never ill-natured wit, made his
company desired by all; and his physical presence, though not striking,
was always agreeable. Diminutive in size, and plain of feature, he
gained something approaching beauty by the constant play of expression
centred in his vivacious eyes and the mobile and beautiful mouth. More
distinctive still, in youth at least, was his hair, which curled in long
tendrils over his head. But the special charm which he exercised,--and
it was doubtless of greater importance in youth, before his powers as a
talker had matured--lay in a gift for singing, which appears to have
been something peculiar to himself. He sang always to his own
accompaniment, and the performance by all accounts approached
declamation rather than ordinary song. Moore is the only poet of modern
times who, like the ancient bards, lent to his own verses the added
charm of musical expression. Poet first, musician afterwards, he gave
the words for all they were worth, and he seems always to have counted
it a failure, if there were no wet eyes among his hearers.
To this gift, nearer the actor's than either the musician's or the
poet's, he owed probably the suddenness of his fame. It called attention
to his literature; but the attention was well deserved, for this boyish
production was notable, coming when it did.
In 1800, when the _Odes of Anacreon_ appeared, Wordsworth and Coleridge
had, it is true, published _Lyrical Ballads_. The revolution in taste
had begun. Yet these fighters in the van beat heavily upon an armed
opposition; and for the moment the tradition of Pope, as modified in
different directions by Gray and Goldsmith, was passionately upheld
against them. Burns, indeed, had already made a great breach in the
solid academic phalanx, and had won through to acceptance. But
newcomers, who preached such doctrines as were set out in the preface to
_Lyrical Ballads_, roused fierce hostility; they came with their mouths
full of arguments. Moore, on the other hand, troubled no man with
controversy, yet was hardly more academic than they. Like them, he
boldly discarded the eighteenth-century manner, still flourishing in the
hands of Crabbe. "The early poets of our language," says the preface to
Little's Poems, "were the models which Mr. Little selected for
imitation." A glance at the _Anacreon_ will show the truth of this
observation. Take the third ode--
Listen to the Muse's lyre,
Master of the pencil's fire!
Sketch'd in painting's bold display,
Many a city first portray,
Many a city revelling free,
Warm with loose festivity.
Picture then a rosy train,
Bacchants straying o'er the plain,
Piping, as they roam along,
Roundelay or shepherd-song.
Paint me next, if painting may
Such a theme as this portray,
All the happy heaven of love
Which these blessed mortals prove.
Here the suggestion, if not of Fletcher's manner, at least of some
manner contemporary with Fletcher, is unmistakable. But since the verses
were put forward without comment, no one thought of objecting. It is
like the fable of the Wind and the Sun: Moore's genial example relaxed
the bonds of 'correctness' by far more quickly than Wordsworth's austere
theorising.
The easy way is seldom so good as the hard way, and no one would put
Moore's early work into comparison with the wonderful volume that was
the fruit of the years spent by Wordsworth and Coleridge at Nether
Stowey. Yet it is only just to emphasise the fact that Moore was the
first to bring back to English that note of song, natural even in its
artificiality, which is heard all through the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, but, except by Blake, was never sounded during the
eighteenth. One can readily imagine the delight with which a generation,
nursed on Cowper and Crabbe, turned to these facile yet not vulgar
harmonies. And the work, though seemingly so easy, was wrought with
delicate care; Lord Moira noted, and Moore gratefully recorded the
praise, that few among the best poets had been so strictly grammatical!
Always a careful craftsman, Moore never worked harder than on this first
attempt. But his labour detracted nothing from the flush of youth, the
zest for enjoyment, which pervades the lines. 'The young people will
like it,' probably in any generation, whenever they chance to read it.
Moore, however, could never reconcile himself to effacing altogether the
traces of his study. _Lalla Rookh_ testifies to his passion for
footnotes, and the same unfortunate itch displays itself already in the
_Anacreon_. We find him quoting, not only Ronsard and Lessing--a wide
range for one-and-twenty--but commentators and authors by far more
recondite--Cornelius de Pauw, the poetess Veronica Cambara, the Epistles
of Alciphron, together with Aulus Gellius and Angerianus. One must
remember, however, that Moore's age had a taste for what we should
dismiss as pedantry--witness the polyglot jesting of Father Prout; and
he doubtless obeyed a wise instinct when he opened his prefatory remarks
in a manner worthy of the gentleman whom Dr. Primrose met in jail:--
"There is but little known with certainty of the life of Anacreon.
Chamæleon Heracleotes, who wrote upon the subject, has been lost in
the general wreck of ancient literature."
In the next publication, which followed rapidly upon the success of the
first, Moore dispensed with erudition. Censorious people shook their
heads over the _Poetical Works of the late Thomas Little, Esq._, and it
must be allowed that the censure had some justification. In the remarks
upon _Anacreon_, Moore had praised that poet because "his descriptions
are warm; but the warmth is in the ideas not the words." There is
certainly no grossness in the words of Mr. Thomas Little, but there is
considerable warmth in his ideas--and indeed what could be more natural?
Moore was an exceedingly healthy normal young man, strongly attracted
towards the other sex, but exempt from any vehemences of passion. The
tone of these lyrics is rather that of the Restoration poets than of the
earlier Caroline school; there is prettiness, elegance, gaiety, rather
than beauty; and, as in all his models, there is preoccupation rather
with a sex than an individual. It is amatory poetry, not love-poetry;
but in its own kind, it is as good as can be found. What could be better
than
"Still the question I must parry,
Still a wayward truant prove,
Where I love I cannot marry,
Where I marry cannot love."
No other poet for a hundred years had got such elasticity and gaiety out
of English rhythms as were to be found in these two early volumes. One
need not claim high rank for this sort of poetry, but it would be
ignorant to overlook the service which Moore was doing to all who after
him came to handle English metre.
So much for his successes. The second volume is also interesting with
records of his failures. The "Fragments of College Exercises" show a
futile attempt to wield the heroic couplet with sonorous rhetoric. And
in two other poems, _Reuben and Rose and The Ring_, we find Moore
wandering off after the fashion of the German spectral ballad:--
"'Twas Reuben, but ah! he was deathly and cold,
And fleeted away like the spell of a dream."
And so on, with cold carcases and other properties of this form of
composition, to which the poet never returned--wisely recognising that
it was not for him to make readers' flesh creep.
In the meantime, while the _Anacreon_ was passing into its second
edition, and Little's Poems were making their appearance, Moore stayed
in England, and his connection with Lord Moira grew closer. A great
part of the year 1801 seems to have been spent by him at Donington,
sometimes alone, when he worked hard in the library, shot rooks,
repaired his complexion and slept sweetly, "not dreaming of ambition,
though under the roof of an earl." In 1802 he had hopes of Lord Moira's
coming into administration. But Lord Moira did not come in, and though
considerable sums were earned by the Poems, Moore was obliged to borrow
from his mother's brother. In the early part of 1803 a proposal was made
to him, by Wickham, then Chief Secretary for Ireland, on behalf of the
Irish Government. An Irish laureateship was to be established, with the
same salary as the English, for the young Irish poet; the movers in this
matter were Lord Moira and the always friendly Joe Atkinson. Our most
definite record of the transaction is a letter from Moore to his mother,
which makes it clear that he himself was prepared to accept the "paltry
and degrading stipend," but was deterred by a letter from his father,
which unfortunately we do not possess. The motive which he alleges was
"the _urging_ apprehension that my dears at home wanted it"; but since
he was reassured that they stood in no instant necessity, he declined
the offer. The letter however makes it perfectly clear that he looked
forward at this time to a post provided by Government: legal studies in
the meantime having lapsed.
These expectations were not wholly disappointed. In August Lord Moira's
interest secured for him a place as registrar of a naval prize-court at
Bermuda--an employment whose profits depended upon an active state of
war in and about the West Indies.
The idea of so complete a separation from his home distressed him, and
he tried to keep the facts from his mother as long as
possible--discussing the project only by letters to his father and
uncle. But on August 16th, John Moore--wrote to his son an admirable
epistle (the only one from his pen that is preserved),--which deprecated
the attempt to keep Mrs. Moore in the dark:--
"There could be no such deception carried on with her where you, or
indeed any one of her family, were concerned, for she seems to know
everything respecting them by instinct. It would not be doing her
the justice she well deserves to exclude her from such
confidence.... For my particular part, I think with you, that there
is a singular chance, as well as a special interference of
Providence, in your getting so honourable a situation at this very
critical time.[1] I am sure no one living can possibly feel more
sensibly than your poor mother and me do, at losing that comfort we
so long enjoyed, of at least hearing from you once every week of
your life that you were absent from us; for surely no parents had
ever such happiness in a child; and much as we regret the wide
separation which this situation of yours will for some time cause
between us, we give you our full concurrence, and may the Almighty
God spare and prosper you as you deserve."
Preparations went through quickly, and on September 22, 1803, Moore
wrote, from Portsmouth, his "heart's farewell to the dear darlings at
home." Carpenter, the publisher, had made advances which rendered
departure possible, and so
"now all is smooth for my progress, and Hope sings in the shrouds
of the ship that is to carry me. Good-by. God bless you all, dears
of my heart."
[1] This was just after Emmet's rising.