Well—how does Moore write a song?
In the twilight of a September evening he strolls through the park to
dine with the marquis. As he draws on his white gloves, he sees the
evening star looking at him steadily through the long vista of the
avenue, and he construes its punctual dispensation of light into a
reproach for having, himself a star, passed a day of poetic idleness.
“Damme,” soliloquizes the little fat planet, “this will never do! Here
have I hammered the whole morning at a worthless idea, that, with the
mere prospect of a dinner, shows as trumpery as a ‘penny fairing.’ Labor
wasted! And at my time of life, too! Faith!—it’s dining at home these
two days with nobody to drink with me! It’s eyewater I want! Don’t
trouble yourself to sit up for me, brother Hesper! I shall see clearer
when I come back!
‘Bad are the rhymes
That scorn old wine.’
as my friend Barry sings. Poetry? hum! Claret? Prithee, call it claret!”
And Moore is mistaken! He draws his inspiration, it is true, with the
stem of a glass between his thumb and finger, but the wine is the least
stimulus to his brain. _He talks and is listened to admiringly_, and
that is his Castaly. He sits next to Lady Fanny at dinner, who thinks
him an “adorable little love,” and he employs the first two courses in
making her in love with herself, i. e., blowing everything she says up
to the red heat of poetry. Moore can do this, for the most stupid things
on earth are, after all, the beginnings of ideas, and every fool is
susceptible of the flattery of seeing the words go straight from his
lips to the “highest heaven of invention.” And Lady Fanny is not a fool,
but a quick and appreciative woman, and to almost everything she says,
the poet’s _trump_ is a germ of poetry. “Ah!” says Lady Fanny with a
sigh, “this will be a memorable dinner—not to you, but to me; for you
see pretty women every day, but I seldom see Tom Moore!” The poet looks
into Lady Fanny’s eyes and makes no immediate answer. Presently she
asks, with a delicious look of simplicity, “Are you as agreeable to
everybody, Mr. Moore?”—“There is but one Lady Fanny,” replies the poet;
“or, _to use your own_ beautiful simile, ‘The moon sees many brooks, but
the brook sees but one moon!’” (Mem. jot that down.) And so is treasured
up _one_ idea for the morrow, and when the marchioness rises, and the
ladies follow her to the drawing-room, Moore finds himself sandwiched
between a couple of whig lords, and opposite a past or future
premier—an audience of cultivation, talent, scholarship, and
appreciation; and as the fresh pitcher of claret is passed round, all
regards radiate to the Anacreon of the world, and with that sanction of
expectation, let alone Tom Moore. Even our “Secretary of the Navy and
National Songster” would “turn out his lining”—such as it is. And Moore
is delightful, and with his “As you say, my lord!” he gives birth to a
constellation of bright things, no one of which is dismissed with the
claret. Every one at the table, except Moore, is subject to the hour—to
its enthusiasm, its enjoyment—but the hour is to Moore a precious
slave. So is the wine. It works for him! It brings him money from
Longman! It plays his trumpet in the reviews! It is his filter among the
ladies! Well may he sing its praises! Of all the poets, Moore is
probably the only one who is thus _master of his wine_. The glorious
_abandon_ with which we fancy him, a brimming glass in his hand, singing
“Fly not yet!” exists only in the fancy. He keeps a cool head and coins
his conviviality; and to revert to my former figure, they who wish to
know what Moore’s electricity amounts to _without_ the convivial
friction, may read his history of Ireland. Not a sparkle in it, from the
landing of the Phœnicians to the battle of Vinegar Hill! He wrote _that_
as other people write—with nothing left from the day before but the
habit of labor—and the travel of a collapsed balloon on a man’s back,
is not more unlike the same thing, inflated and soaring, than Tom Moore,
historian, and Tom Moore, bard!
Somewhere in the small hours the poet walks home, and sitting down
soberly in his little library, he puts on paper the half-score
scintillations that collision, in one shape or another, has struck into
the tinder of his fancy. If read from this paper, the world would
probably think little of their prospect of ever becoming poetry. But the
mysterious part is done—the life is breathed into the chrysalis—and
the clothing of these naked fancies with winged words, Mr. Moore knows
very well can be done in very uninspired moods by patient industry. Most
people have very little idea what that industry is—how deeply language
is ransacked, how often turned over, how untiringly rejected and
recalled with some new combination, how resolutely sacrificed when only
tolerable enough to pass, how left untouched day after day in the hope
of a fresh impulse after repose. The vexation of a Chinese puzzle is
slight, probably, to that which Moore has expended on some of his most
natural and flowing single verses. The exquisite nicety of his ear,
though it eventually gives his poetry its honied fluidity, gives him no
quicker choice of words, nor does more, in any way, than pass inexorable
judgment on what his industry brings forward. Those who think a song
dashed off like an invitation to dinner, would be edified by the
progressive phases of a “Moore’s Melody.” Taken with all its rewritings,
emendations, &c., I doubt whether, in his most industrious seclusion,
Moore averages a couplet a day. Yet this persevering, resolute,
unconquerable patience of labor is the secret of his fame. Take the best
thing he ever wrote, and translate its sentiments and similitudes into
plain prose, and do the thing by a song of any second-rate imitator of
Moore, one abstract would read as well as the other. Yet Moore’s song is
immortal, and the other ephemeral as a paragraph in a newspaper, and the
difference consists in a patient elaboration of language and harmony,
and in that only. And even thus short, _seems_ the space between the
_ephemeron_ and the immortal. But it is wider than they think, oh,
glorious Tom Moore!
And how does Barry Cornwall write?
I answer, from the efflux of his soul! Poetry is not labor to him. He
_works_ at _law_—he plays, relaxes, luxuriates in _poetry_. Mr. Proctor
has at no moment of his life, probably, after finishing a poetic
effusion, designed ever to write another line. No more than the sedate
man, who, walking on the edge of a playground, sees a ball coming
directly towards him, and seized suddenly with a boyish impulse, jumps
aside and sends it whizzing back, as he had not done for twenty years,
with his cane—no more than that unconscious school-boy of fourscore
(thank God there _are_ many such live coals under the ashes) thinks he
shall play again at ball. Proctor is a prosperous barrister, drawing a
large income from his profession. He married the daughter of Basil
Montague (well known as the accomplished scholar, and the friend of
Coleridge, Lamb, and that bright constellation of spirits,) and with a
family of children of whom, the world knows, he is passionately fond, he
leads a more domestic life, or, rather, a life more within himself and
his own, than any author, present or past, with whose habits I am
conversant. He has drawn his own portrait; however, in outline, and as
far as it goes, nothing could be truer. In an epistle to his friend
Charles Lamb, he says:—
“Seated beside this Sherris wine,
And near to books and shapes divine,
Which poets and the painters past
Have wrought in line that aye shall last,—
E’en I, with Shakspere’s self beside me,
And one whose tender talk can guide me
Through fears and pains and troublous themes,
Whose smile doth fall upon my dreams
Like sunshine on a stormy sea,******”
Proctor slights the world’s love for his wife and books, and, as might
be expected, the world only plies him the more with its caresses. He is
now and then seen in the choicest circles of London, where, though love
and attention mark most flatteringly the rare pleasure of his presence,
he plays a retired and silent part, and steals early away. His library
is his Paradise. His enjoyment of literature should be mentioned as
often in his biography as the “feeding among the lilies” in the Songs of
Solomon. He forgets himself, he forgets the world in his favorite
authors, and that, I fancy, was the golden link in his friendship with
Lamb. Surrounded by exquisite specimens of art, (he has a fine taste,
and is much beloved by artists,) a choice book in his hand, his wife
beside him, and the world shut out, Barry is in the meridian of his true
orbit. Oh, then, a more loving and refined spirit is not breathing
beneath the stars! He reads and muses; and as something in the pages
stirs some distant association, suggests some brighter image than its
own, he half leans over to the table, and scrawls it in unstudied but
inspired verse. He thinks no more of it. You might have it to light your
cigar. But there sits by his side one who knows its value, and it is
treasured. Here, for instance, in the volume I have spoken of before,
are some forty pages of “fragments”—thrown in to eke out the volume of
his songs. I am sure, that when he was making up his book, perhaps
expressing a fear that there would not be pages enough for the
publisher’s design, these fragments were produced from their secret
hiding-place to his great surprise. The quotations I have made were all
from this portion of his volume, and, as I said before, they are worthy
of Shakspere. There is no mark of labor in them. I do not believe there
was an erasure in the entire manuscript. They bear all the marks of a
sudden, unstudied impulse, immediately and unhesitatingly expressed.
Here are several fragments. How evident it is that they were suggested
directly by his reading:—
“She was a princess—but she fell; and now
Her shame goes blushing through a line of kings.
* * * * * * * * * * *
Sometimes a deep thought crossed
My fancy, like the sullen bat that flies
Athwart the melancholy moon at eve.
* * * * * * * * * * *
Let not thy tale tell but of stormy sorrows!
She—who was late a maid, but now doth lie
In Hymen’s bosom, like a rose grown pale,
A sad, sweet wedded wife—why is _she_ left
Out of the story? Are good deeds—great griefs,
That live but ne’er complain—naught? What are tears?—
Remorse?—deceit? at best weak water drops
Which wash out the bloom of sorrow.
* * * * * * * * * * *
Is she dead?
Why so shall I be—ere these autumn blasts
Have blown on the beard of winter. Is she dead?
Aye, she is dead—quite dead! The wild sea kissed her
With its cold, white lips, and then—put her to sleep:
She has a sand pillow, and a water sheet,
And never turns her head, or knows ’tis morning!
* * * * * * * * * * *
Mark, when he died, his tombs, his epitaphs!
Men did not pluck the ostrich for his sake,
Nor dyed’t in sable. No black steeds were there,
Caparisoned in wo; no hired crowds;
No hearse, wherein the crumbling clay (imprisoned
Like ammunition in a tumbril) rolled
Rattling along the street, and silenced grief;
No arch whereon the bloody laurel hung;
No stone; no gilded verse;—poor common shows!
But tears and tearful words, and sighs as deep
As sorrow is—these were _his_ epitaphs!
Thus—(fitly graced)—he lieth now, inurned
In hearts that loved him, on whose tender sides
Are graved his many virtues. When they perish,
He’s lost!—and so’t should be. The poet’s name.
And hero’s—on the brazen book of Time,
Are writ in sunbeams, by Fame’s loving hand;
But none record the household virtues there.
These better sleep (when all dear friends are fled)
In endless and serene oblivion.”
* * * * * * * * * * *