Thomas Moore

CHAPTER IV

The interlude opened with a real holiday, which was in truth amply deserved. After a fortnight's stay in Paris, spent in seeing theatres, sights, and a deal of company, Lord John Russell and his travelling companion posted off through France to Geneva; explored the associations of Ferney under the guidance of Dumont, the translator of Bentham, and sometime tutor to Lord Lansdowne; and then set out for the Alps. The passage over the Simplon, and the sight of the Jungfrau with the sunset-flush on its snows, so wrought upon Moore's emotions that he shed tears. At Milan the travellers parted company, Lord John proceeding to Genoa, while Moore's destinations were Venice and Rome. Travelling alone, in the "crazy little calèche" which he had been advised to buy, was no joy, and he gladly reached La Mira, Byron's country house, two hours' drive from Padua. The friends met for the first time after a separation of five years, and Moore's note of the occurrence is curiously lacking in warmth. The Byron whom he had known and liked so well was a different person from the Byron of Italy. Much had happened in the interval, and with a great deal of Byron's later, and maturer, work, Moore was very imperfectly in sympathy. Nor did the Countess Guiccioli much impress him. Byron, who had put his Venetian palace at Moore's disposal, commended him to his friend Scott, who showed the traveller round the place. A day or two later Byron came to Venice, and there was much intimate talk between the two men. On the 11th of October, Moore paid a farewell visit to La Mira and the Countess; and before the poets parted, a notable thing happened. Lord Byron handed to Moore the Memoirs of himself, of which Moore had heard for the first time a few days earlier.

From Padua to Ferrara and so to Florence we trace in the Diary rather a homesick gentleman, who begins to affect the virtuoso a little, and at the time to collect notes for an epistle on the cant of connoisseurs. In Florence he found some acquaintances, and they were in shoals before him at Rome, where he arrived in the end of October. During the three weeks of his stay here, Chantrey the sculptor and Jackson the painter—to the latter of whom Moore at this time sat—were his principal associates, and he left Rome in their company. His impressions of Italy savour a little too much of second-hand ideas to be of interest. Moore had, evidently enough, no education in art and yet was so susceptible to surrounding influences that his talk was all of pictures, statuary, buildings and so forth. His judgments on the music which he heard are in strong contrast, brief and confident—the utterance of a genuine taste. But the friendship formed with Chantrey seems to have been sympathetic and lasting, based on a common interest in human character.

On December 11th Moore arrived in Paris, and 'went as soon as I could with a beating heart to enquire for letters from home.' There were none of recent date, for the beloved Tom was ill, and Bessy would not write till the crisis was over; moreover, the Longmans wrote that nothing had as yet been settled in the Bermuda business, so that a return to England was impossible. "This is a sad disappointment," Moore writes,—"my dear cottage and my books. I must, however, lose no time in determining upon bringing Bessy and her little ones over; and wherever they are, will be home, and a happy one, to me."

Meanwhile, he took "an entresol in the Rue Chantereine at 250 fr. a month," and saw a deal of society, English and French, with potentates in plenty. But it did not console him. "I have no one here that I care one pin for, and begin to feel, for the first time, like a banished man," he wrote to Rogers; and a Christmas day apart from his family only deepened his gloom. But on January 1st, 1820, Bessy and her young ones landed safely in Paris, and things began to brighten singularly. "My dear tidy girl," Moore writes, "notwithstanding her fatigue, set about settling and managing everything immediately." Chief of the things settled was a resolution not to go into society, "which was tolerably adhered to for some time";—Moore meanwhile working at his "Fudge Family in Italy," a first draft of the poetical impressions which he published ultimately as Rhymes on the Road. After about a month, a successful move was made to "a very pretty cottage in the Allée des Veuves," somewhere in the Champs Élysées—"as rural and secluded a workshop as I have ever had," says Moore.

Gradually, however, virtue evaporated. The poet was beset with invitations, and, moreover, he owns to a sense of depression before the task of writing, "when the attention of all the reading world is absorbed by two writers, Scott and Byron." He had also a consciousness that his poetical essays in and upon connoisseurship were not the right thing; and finally, in June, after the whole had been set up by a French printer, it was decided to suppress the publication; Sir James Mackintosh having advised the Longmans, that the incidental satire on Castlereagh and other leading members of the Government would be injurious to Moore's interest, at a time when it might be possible to induce Government to drop its share of the claims against him; and Moore himself being influenced by the wish to publish nothing new till he had something of importance to produce.

In July the kindness of friends, M. Villamil, a Spanish gentleman, and his wife, enabled the Moores to move for the summer into pleasant quarters—a little pavillion in the grounds of the Villamils' house near Sèvres. Here the poet, still in pursuit of an important subject, returned to an idea which first germinated in his mind after the completion of Lalla—the story of a Greek who goes to Egypt in search of some philosophic secret, and during a celebration of the Egyptian priestly mysteries becomes enamoured of a young girl. She proves to be a Christian, and the hero is thus introduced to the secret communion. It is of course the basis of Moore's prose romance, The Epicurean, but his collected works contain a considerable fragment of Alciphron, his first sketch of it in verse, which dates from this time. Studies for the work brought him into touch with French savants, and the more Moore read upon the subject, the less he appears to have written. But the research drew him to Paris and away from his quarters in the "pavilion"; and when, in October, the household returned to its home in the Allée des Veuves, and Moore and his wife dined at home with the little ones for the first time since the beginning of July, "Bessy said in going to bed, 'This is the first rational day we have had for a long time.'"

Lord John Russell notes penitently on this passage, that he regrets his part in persuading Moore to prefer France to Holyrood, for "his universal popularity was his chief enemy." At no time did Moore suffer so much from being lionised, for his home was in easy reach of Paris, and in Paris French and English alike pursued this celebrity. Lalla Rookh was then at the height of its fame; was in the East being translated into Persian, and in the West transformed into a kind of masque which a troupe of royal amateurs presented at Berlin: and Lalla's poet was naturally much courted. Further, in the close of the year, there came a missive from Byron which was a fatal encouragement to idleness and outlay. He forwarded the continuation of the Memoirs, with the suggestion that Moore should sell the reversion of the MS. The suggestion was acted on after a while, and Murray consented to advance the large sum of 2000 guineas. Meanwhile engagements accumulated, and Moore began to lose health as well as time. He went into the world more and more as a bachelor, Bessy, as always, falling into the background when expenses grew high; though, at first, in Paris he and she went about a good deal together. Nevertheless, he wrote with all sincerity on March 25th, 1821:—

"This day ten years we were married, and though Time has made his usual changes in us both, we are still more like lovers than any married couple of the same standing I am acquainted with."

In the autumn, it was decided that Moore should come to England sub rosa, and try to compromise the Bermuda claims with a lump sum out of Murray's advance. He was met with dissuasion by his friendly publishers the Longmans, and it transpired finally that Lord Lansdowne had left £1000 with them to attempt a similar settlement. The kindness gratified Moore's best qualities, as well as his mild vanity, and though he declined to profit by it, he was greatly uplifted. From London he crossed to Dublin to see his parents after three years' separation—but the separation had made no breach, for Moore wrote twice every week to his mother. The visit was a short one, and he had some fears for his safety from arrest, as he had been widely recognised in Dublin. But on his return to town the publishers met him with joyful news. The chief claim had been settled for £1000, and he was free to "walk boldly out into the sunshine," and show himself up Bond Street and St. James's. Of this £1000, three hundred were extorted from Mr. Sheddon, uncle and recommender of the defaulting deputy; the rest was settled (as a compliment) out of Lord Lansdowne's money, but a draft on Murray was immediately sent him to repay the loan.

For the present, however, Moore lacked the means to move back to England, and he remained in Paris, where, in the summer of 1822, he at last settled down to a serious piece of work—his Loves of the Angels—"a subject," he says, "on which I long ago wrote a prose story and have ever since meditated a verse one." The work went quickly, a thousand lines were completed within two months; and in November, when the poet's friends in Paris mustered to give him a farewell dinner, allusion was made to the new poem as all but ready to appear. It was actually out before Christmas. By that time Moore was back and comfortably established at Sloperton (an intervening tenant having died seasonably), and here he found his study enlarged, his family well, and himself "most happy to be at home again." "Oh, quid solutis!"—he exclaims, recalling the lines of Horace which tell of the joy it is to shake off a load of care, and to rest after labours in a foreign land.

When the Angels appeared, the press was favourable, but Lady Donegal and a good many more protested vehemently against the application to profane purposes of the scriptural legend, which tells of the sons of God mating with daughters of men. Publishers are sensitive to this type of criticism, and the Longmans jumped at Moore's offer to remodel the poem, by giving it an Eastern cast, and "turning his poor Angels into Turks." Accordingly a fifth edition was produced, in which the metamorphosis was completed; but the disguise was soon abandoned, and Moore appears to have been ashamed of his concession, for in his preface to the poem in the 1841 edition, no mention is made of this recension.

The Loves of the Angels never attained to the popularity of Lalla Rookh, and yet it seems a much more praiseworthy composition. In the first place, Moore had chosen a subject that fell more within his range. Outside of light verse, his only themes were love and patriotism, and here we have the amatory poet indulging his genius to the full. The whole poem is about love-making—love-making in excelsis, and surrounded with accessories so decorative that they remove all hint of reality. One feels instinctively that the fierce accent of passion would be out of place here, and, consequently, does not censure the absence of it. His three fallen angels who meet and recall the loves for which they lost heaven, furnish three types of love-story, distinguished with all the care of a troubadour expert in la gaye science.

The first angel—one of a lower rank in heaven—is of look "the least celestial of the three," and, before the crisis in his story, has tasted

"That juice of earth, the bane
And blessing of man's heart and brain."

He is the one whom woman resisted—for Woman is throughout the poem all but deified; and his lady, to escape from the terrors of his love, as he comes to her after the wine-cup, steals the spell-word from him, and flies off to heaven, whither his wings can no longer follow. The second angel, a spirit of knowledge, is wooed by woman rather than her wooer, and at last is fated to destroy her with the death of Semele. Moore evidently thought that much knowledge was a dangerous thing for the sex. His ideal of womanhood is rather that depicted in the third story, of which the third angel is the subject, not the narrator. In this angel—

"That amorous spirit, bound
By beauty's spell, where'er 'twas found,"

who fell—

"From loving much,
Too easy lapse, to loving wrong,"

we may, I think, fairly trace some lineaments of Moore's conception of himself. For this seraph a gentler doom was decreed. He and his nymph are first drawn together by the snare of music, a snare even though in sacred song: for, as the poem tells—

"Love, though unto earth so prone,
Delights to take Religion's wing
When time or grief hath stained his own.
How near to Love's beguiling brink
Too oft entranced Religion lies!
While Music, Music is the link
They both still hold by to the skies."

The lovers meet at the altar, but they appeal to the altar to consecrate their vows. And thus the poem closes with a passage in celebration of connubial love, which, even though it perhaps seemed to Lady Donegal too bold a gloss on the text of Genesis, may very well have pleased the poet's Bessy; for we can be very certain that the poet was thinking more of Bessy than of Genesis when he wrote it. I shall quote the whole passage, which contains some lines that have hardly their equal in Moore's writings—notably the fine strain beginning, "For humble was their love,"—and, further on, the closing period which recalls, yet not by imitation, Wordsworth's scarcely more beautiful tribute to his wife:—

"Sweet was the hour, though dearly won,
And pure, as aught of earth could he,
For then first did the glorious sun
Before Religion's altar see
Two hearts in wedlock's golden tie
Self-pledged, in love to live and die.
Blest union! by that Angel wove,
And worthy from such hands to come;
Safe, sole asylum, in which Love,
When fall'n or exiled from above,
In this dark world can find a home.

"And though the spirit had transgress'd,
Had, from his station 'mong the blest
Won down by woman's smile, allow'd
Terrestrial passion to breathe o'er
The mirror of his heart, and cloud
God's image, there so bright before—
Yet never did that Power look down
On error with a brow so mild;
Never did Justice wear a frown
Through which so gently Mercy smiled.

"For humble was their love—with awe
And trembling like some treasure kept,
That was not theirs by holy law—
Whose beauty with remorse they saw,
And o'er whose preciousness they wept.
Humility, that low, sweet root,
From which all heavenly virtues shoot,
Was in the hearts of both—but most
In Nama's heart, by whom alone
Those charms, for which a heaven was lost,
Seem'd all unvalued and unknown;
And when her Seraph's eyes she caught,
And hid hers glowing on his breast,
Even bliss was humbled by the thought—
'What claim have I to be so blest?'
Still less could maid, so meek, have nursed
Desire of knowledge—that vain thirst,
With which the sex hath all been cursed,
From luckless Eve to her, who near
The Tabernacle stole to hear
The secrets of the angels: no—
To love as her own Seraph loved,
With Faith, the same through bliss and woe
Faith, that, were even its light removed,
Could, like the dial, fix'd remain,
And wait till it shone out again;—
With Patience that, though often bow'd
By the rude storm, can rise anew;
And Hope that, ev'n from Evil's cloud,
Sees sunny Good half breaking through!
This deep, relying Love, worth more
In heaven than all a Cherub's lore—
This Faith, more sure than aught beside,
Was the sole joy, ambition, pride
Of her fond heart—th' unreasoning scope
Of all its views, above, below—
So true she felt it that to hope,
To trust, is happier than to know.

"And thus in humbleness they trod,
Abash'd, but pure before their God;
Nor e'er did earth behold a sight
So meekly beautiful as they,
When, with the altar's holy light
Full on their brows, they knelt to pray,
Hand within hand, and side by side.
Two links of love, awhile untied
From the great chain above, but fast
Holding together to the last!
Two fallen Splendours, from that tree,
Which buds with such eternally,
Shaken to earth, yet keeping all
Their light and freshness in the fall.

"Their only punishment, (as wrong,
However sweet, must bear its brand,)
Their only doom was this—that, long
As the green earth and ocean stand,
They both shall wander here—the same,
Throughout all time, in heart and frame—
Still looking to that goal sublime,
Whose light remote, but sure, they see;
Pilgrims of Love, whose way is Time,
Whose home is in Eternity!
Subject, the while, to all the strife
True Love encounters in this life—
The wishes, hopes, he breathes in vain;
The chill, that turns his warmest sighs
To earthly vapour, ere they rise;
The doubt he feeds on, and the pain
That in his very sweetness lies:—
Still worse, th' illusions that betray
His footsteps to their shining brink;
That tempt him, on his desert way
Through the bleak world, to bend and drink,
Where nothing meets his lips, alas!—
But he again must sighing pass
On to that far-off home of peace,
In which alone his thirst will cease.

"All this they bear, but, not the less,
Have moments rich in happiness—
Blest meetings, after many a day
Of widowhood passed far away,
When the loved face again is seen
Close, close, with not a tear between—
Confidings frank, without control,
Pour'd mutually from soul to soul;
As free from any fear or doubt
As is that light from chill or stain,
The sun into the stars sheds out,
To be by them shed back again!—
That happy minglement of hearts,
Where, chang'd as chymic compounds are,
Each with its own existence parts,
To find a new one happier far!
Such are their joys—and, crowning all,
That blessed hope of the bright hour,
When, happy and no more to fall,
Their spirits shall, with freshen'd power,
Rise up rewarded for their trust
In Him, from whom all goodness springs,
And shaking off earth's soiling dust
From their emancipated wings,
Wander for ever through those skies
Of radiance, where Love never dies!"

There is nothing else in the poem at all so good as this. And even this would gain considerably by condensation, even by simple excisions. But the writing is consistently polished, easy, and—short of inspiration—even excellent. The opening may be quoted for a fine example:—

"'Twas when the world was in its prime,
When the fresh stars had just begun
Their race of glory, and young Time
Told his first birthdays by the sun;
When, in the light of Nature's dawn
Rejoicing, men and angels met
On the high hill and sunny lawn,
Ere sorrow came, or Sin had drawn
'Twixt man and heav'n her curtain yet!
When earth lay nearer to the skies
Than in those days of crime and woe,
And mortals saw without surprise,
In the mid air, angelic eyes
Gazing upon this world below."

Moore had abandoned the heroic couplet, and also the anapæstic measure, in favour of the eight-syllabled iambic, used with skilful variations of rhyme. And it is a proof of his matured judgment, that there is none of the tendency to melodrama which disfigures Lalla Rookh. He had realised that horror was not for him to convert to beauty; he tears no passion to tatters. Indeed, in the one instance where he plunges into a melodramatic subject, describing the fate of Lilis shrivelled to ashes by the embrace of her lover, and her unblest kiss, printed with "Hell's everlasting element," the vehemence is more impressive because more restrained.

At the same time, it does not seem probable that any current of taste will bring back either the Loves of the Angels or Lalla into popularity. Everywhere, even in the beautiful passage on wedlock's consolations, ornament is pushed to redundancy; there is no concentration in the style. The same looseness of texture may be observed in Scott and Byron, but Scott and Byron have behind their work a weight of personality which is lacking in Moore. They are moreover closer in touch with reality than Moore, who attributes to himself in the Diary "that kind of imagination which is chilled by the real scene and can best describe what it has not seen, merely taking it from the descriptions of others." He quotes Milton and Dante as instances where this kind of imagination produces the noblest work. One can only say—and Moore would have been prompt to agree—that Thomas Moore was neither Dante nor Milton; and for poets of a lower order we want close touch with fact. Moore's gift, indeed, was not imagination. His highest talent lay, like that of Horace, in giving expression to common emotions, which belong rather to a race, or a class, than to an individual, and which are consequently very general, though not very poignant, in their appeal.

A much higher rank may be claimed for him as a writer of satiric verse than of romantic narrative. The satiric inspiration with him long outlasted the other, for the Loves of the Angels was virtually the last poem published under his own name.[1] But under his other incarnation, as Thomas Brown the Younger, he contributed squibs to various newspapers and issued volumes for another dozen of years. The Odes on Cash, Catholics, and other matters, collected in 1828, show him to advantage, and we find something of the "wonted fires" even in The Fudges in England, published so late as 1835, after his brain had begun to flag. But for the top of his achievement in this kind one would always turn to the volume published a few months after The Loves of the Angels. This was the Fables for the Holy Alliance and Rhymes on the Road, comprising the work which he had cast and recast so often in Paris, together with a considerable handful of occasional verses.

From this general laudation, the Rhymes on the Road, Moore's impressions of Switzerland and Italy, must be excepted. Nothing in them repays perusal but the "Introductory Rhymes," with their ingenious and erudite discussion of the places and methods in which poets may compose—where Moore incidentally alludes to a favourite theory and practice of his own, which he supported by the example of Milton, as well as that here cited:—

"Herodotus wrote most in bed,
And Richerand, a French physician,
Declares the clockwork of the head
Goes best in that reclined position."

There is also a good skit on the ubiquitous English tourist, which ends with the vision of

"Some Mrs. Hopkins, taking tea
And toast upon the wall of China."

But for the rest, we have serious lucubrations—a long, long way after Childe Harold—upon Venice, Florence, the first view of Mont Blanc, Rousseau's abode, and other such moving themes. It is a vast relief to turn to the Fables, of which there are eight; and if one reader thinks the first the best, with its description of all the royalties at dinner in an Ice Palace on the Neva, and the general confusion when the Ice Palace takes to melting, it is odds but the next will choose another for his favourite. Most of them have a Proem, and one may quote the Proem and part of the Fable of "The Little Grand Lama."

PROEM.

Novella, a young Bolognese,
The daughter of a learn'd Law Doctor,
Who had with all the subtleties
Of old and modern jurists stock'd her,
Was so exceeding fair, 'tis said,
And over hearts held such dominion,
That when her father, sick in bed,
Or busy, sent her, in his stead,
To lecture on the Code Justinian,
She had a curtain drawn before her,
Lest, if her eyes were seen, the students
Should let their young eyes wander o'er her,
And quite forget their jurisprudence.
Just so it is with Truth, when seen,
Too dazzling far,—'tis from behind
A light, thin allegoric screen,
She thus can safest teach mankind.

FABLE.

In Thibet once there reign'd, we're told,
A little Lama, one year old—
Raised to the throne, that realm to bless,
Just when his little Holiness
Had cut—as near as can be reckon'd—
Some say his first tooth, some his second.
Chronologers and Nurses vary,
Which proves historians should be wary.
We only know th' important truth,
His Majesty had cut a tooth.
And much his subjects were enchanted,—
As well all Lama's subjects may be,
And would have giv'n their heads, if wanted,
To make tee-totums for the baby.
Throned as he was by Right Divine—
(What Lawyers call Jure Divino,
Meaning a right to yours, and mine,
And everybody's goods and rhino,)
Of course, his faithful subjects' purses,
Were ready with their aids and succours;
Nothing was seen but pension'd Nurses,
And the land groan'd with bibs and tuckers.

Oh! had there been a Hume or Bennet,
Then sitting in the Thibet Senate,
Ye Gods, what room for long debates
Upon the Nursery Estimates!
What cutting down of swaddling-clothes
And pin-a-fores, in nightly battles!
What calls for papers to expose
The waste of sugar-plums and rattles!

But no—If Thibet had M.P.'s,
They were far better bred than these;
Nor gave the slightest opposition,
During the Monarch's whole dentition.
But short this calm:—for, just when he
Had reach'd th' alarming age of three,
When Royal natures, and, no doubt,
Those of all noble beasts break out—
The Lama, who till then was quiet,
Show'd symptoms of a taste for riot;
And, ripe for mischief, early, late,
Without regard for Church or State,
Made free with whosoe'er came nigh;
Tweak'd the Lord Chancellor by the nose,
Turn'd all the Judges' wigs awry,
And trod on the old Generals' toes:
Pelted the Bishops with hot buns,
Rode cockhorse on the City maces,
And shot from little devilish guns,
Hard peas into his subjects' faces.
In short, such wicked pranks he play'd,
And grew so mischievous, God bless him!
That his Chief Nurse—with ev'n the aid
Of an Archbishop—was afraid,
When in these moods, to comb or dress him.
Nay, ev'n the persons most inclined
Through thick and thin, for Kings to stickle,
Thought him (if they'd but speak their mind,
Which they did not) an odious pickle.

Praed himself never equalled the ease and gaiety of these admirable compositions, and their only defect as satire is that they are too gay and too good-humoured, though certainly not too respectful. Moore's shafts have no poison: there is no strength of hatred to drive home the barb. Yet the sincerity is real, and here and there the wit leaps into real poetry, as in this stanza from "The Torch of Liberty"—

"I saw th' expectant nations stand,
To catch the coming flame in turn;—
I saw, from ready hand to hand,
The clear, though struggling, glory burn."

For finish and force these productions are far ahead of the earlier verses of the Postbag and Fudge Family in Paris: they are also clear of the rhetoric which occasionally overloads the latter. But none of them quite reaches the pitch attained in the lines on the Death of Sheridan (reprinted in the 1823 volume) which were based on the report that the Prince of Wales, after repeated neglect of entreaties, sent at last a gift of £200 to the dying man, who, knowing it too late, returned the missive. A few stanzas must be cited.

"How proud they can press to the fun'ral array
Of one whom they shunn'd in his sickness and sorrow;—
How bailiffs may seize his last blanket, to-day,
Whose pall shall be held up by nobles to-morrow!

"And Thou, too, whose life, a sick epicure's dream,
Incoherent and gross, even grosser had pass'd,
Were it not for that cordial and soul-giving beam,
Which his friendship and wit o'er thy nothingness cast:—

"No, not for the wealth of the land, that supplies thee
With millions to heap upon Foppery's shrine;—
No, not for the riches of all who despise thee,
Though this would make Europe's whole opulence mine;—

"Would I suffer what—ev'n in the heart that thou hast—
All mean as it is—must have consciously burn'd,
When the pittance, which shame had wrung from thee at last,
And which found all his wants at an end, was return'd."

There is a real anger inspiring the phrase, worthy of Dryden at his best, which stigmatises the Prince's life—"a sick epicure's dream, incoherent and gross." But Moore was too easily moved by kindness, and a civil word or action from Eldon or from Canning exempted them for ever from his attacks. Except Castlereagh, in whom he saw with justice the inveterate enemy of Ireland—and that enemy a renegade from Grattan's principles—he pursued no man relentlessly, and no institution moved him to continued hatred except the Church of Ireland. "Could you not contrive," said Sydney Smith to a portrait painter at work on a head of Moore, "to throw into the features a little more hostility to the Establishment?" Enough hostility certainly was thrown into the verses which he continued for years to contribute to the papers; and he pleased himself vastly with one address to a shovel hat:—

"Gods! when I gaze upon that brim,
So redolent of Church all over,
What swarms of Tithes, in vision dim,—
Some pig-tail'd, some like cherubim,
With ducklings' wings—around it hover!
Tenths of all dead and living things,
That Nature into being brings,
From calves and corn to chitterlings."

It is not a long way from verse of this kind on this subject to the prose of "Captain Rock." The distance, no doubt, covers a descent. But it may fairly be urged that if Moore after the year 1823 was only in a secondary sense a writer of verse, and primarily occupied with prose, the reason is, not that prose was easier or paid better, but because he was increasingly preoccupied with matter which he could not handle except in prose—matter of serious controversial argument—and matter which he was impelled to handle by a growing desire to serve his own country.

CHAPTER V

On the way south Moore revived memories of his courtship by a visit to Kilkenny. "Happy times!" he notes, "but not more happy than those which I owe to the same dear girl still." Further south, alarming rumours began to come in, telling of secret organisation among the peasantry, and of the ascendency of "Captain Rock," a mysterious individual in whose name orders and threatening letters were then issued. Killarney charmed Moore with its loveliness, but we find sympathetic observations also concerning Lord Lansdowne's trouble with his Kerry tenants, occasioned by their habits of sub-letting, rearing large families, and so forth. Altogether, the Journal is written by one who sees keenly the oppression of tithes, but on all other matters wears a landlord's spectacles; and this criticism was made sharply, and with justice, in an answer to the book which resulted from this journey.

Moore came back with his head full of material, and set to work reading for a projected narrative of his tour; but after a couple of weeks, the brilliant idea occurred to him of converting it into a History of Captain Rock and his Ancestors. The project expanded a good deal as he wrote, and six months' work resulted in a considerable volume, of which the first part was a review of Irish history, which showed with ingenious irony how well English policy, from the first enactments of Henry II. against Irish dress, has been adapted to perpetuate the type and breed of Captain Rock. It was the first book which Moore had written in prose, and nowhere else in his prose writings was he so lavish of wit. I may cite a couple of examples.

"My unlucky countrymen," says Captain Rock (for the Captain was the nominal author of his own Memoirs) "have always had a taste for justice—a taste as inconvenient to them, situated as they have always been, as a taste for horse-racing would be to a Venetian."

"Our Irish rulers have always proceeded in proselytism on the principle of a wedge with its wrong side foremost.... The courteous address of Launcelot to the young Jewess, 'Be of good cheer, for truly I think thou art damned,' seems to have been the model on which the Protestant Church has founded all its conciliatory advances to Catholics."

The broad facts of English misrule in Ireland were not then staled by much repetition, and Moore's statement of them was read with eagerness. In execution the book was faulty, the irony being ill sustained towards the latter part, where it touched contemporary topics. But the success was brilliant, and from Almack's to Holland House Moore heard nothing but its praises. Naturally enough, it made its way in Ireland; "the people through the country are subscribing their sixpences and shillings to buy a copy," a Dublin bookseller wrote; and the Catholics of Drogheda forwarded a formal expression of gratitude, which pleased Moore the better as he "rather feared the Catholics would not take very cordially to the work, owing to some infidelities to their religion which break out now and then in it." And, in truth, the tone is throughout that of one who rather deplores the employment of tyranny to frighten Irish Catholics out of their religion than dislikes the idea of a change of faith. Politically speaking, however, the tone of the book was firm enough. Moore, like most Irishmen, had little knowledge of Irish history, and only began to read it when he had to instruct others in its lessons. Whether because of its effect on his mind, or because Captain Rock gave him a reputation in Ireland, which he dearly valued, as the champion of Irish liberties, it is certain that from this time onward the direction of his mind was increasingly towards Irish subjects.

He had felt the attraction earlier. A letter to Corry, written when Lalla Rookh was nearly completed, says: "I have some thoughts of undertaking a very voluminous work about Ireland (if properly encouraged by patres nostri—the Longmans), and this will require my residence for at least two or three years in or near Dublin." Nothing came of the project, which was perhaps not strongly formed; and in any case he was drawn away from it by the enforced move to France. And although one can trace, from the publication of Captain Rock onward, a steady bent of purpose in him to use his pen in the service of his country, he was a second time driven out of his course by an unforeseen event. In the midst of the Captain's triumphs, while editions were rapidly succeeding each other, a great stroke of misfortune fell on Moore. Byron died; and the depositary of his Memoirs was immediately plunged into a most embarrassing situation.

The case about this famous document may be briefly stated. In October 1819, Byron handed Moore the first portion of it, as a gift which would ultimately be of value; and in 1821 he sent the remainder to his friend in Paris, making the suggestion that money might be raised on it by anticipation. This was accordingly done, and, in September 1821, Murray agreed to pay two thousand guineas, and took the manuscript into his keeping. Part of this money was applied in settlement of the Bermuda claims, and in November of that year Moore signed a deed making over the property. This deed was submitted to Byron, and Byron signed an assignment of the manuscript to Murray. Scarcely was the transaction completed, when scruples were aroused in Moore by Lord Holland's saying that he wished the money could have been got in any other way. Lord Holland's objection, as Moore states it (though expressly in his own words) was, that it seemed like depositing in cold blood a quiver of poisoned arrows for use in future warfare upon private character. Moore protested against this view of the document, and Lord Holland, who had read the manuscript, could recall nothing admitting of such a description, except a passage relating to Mme de Staël, and a charge against Sir Samuel Romilly—both of which, Moore pointed out, could be omitted or neutralised in editing for publication, as he had reserved the right to do. Nevertheless, the scruple wrought in him, and in the following April (1822) he approached Murray with a request that the deed of sale should be cancelled, and replaced by an agreement converting the transaction into a loan, with the manuscript held as security till Moore should be able to repay. An agreement on these lines was accordingly drawn up, and Moore's conscience was relieved. He expresses strongly in his Diary his feeling of satisfaction that the control of the matter was again in his own hands.

In the succeeding year he appears to have arranged that the Longmans should take over the debt (and presumably the security), advancing him the means to repay Murray; and on May 13th one of the firm mentioned that the money was ready. On the 14th it was too late; news of Byron's death reached London; and that evening Moore received a note from Douglas Kinnaird "anxiously inquiring in whose possession the Memoirs were, and saying that he was ready on the part of Lord Byron's family to advance the £2000 for the manuscript, in order to give Lady Byron and the rest of the family an opportunity of deciding whether they wished them to be published or no."

Moore soon learned that Murray, immediately on hearing the news, had gone to Wilmot Horton, offering to place the Memoirs at the disposal of the family, without recognising that Moore had any voice in the matter. Moore went to Hobhouse and explained his view of the situation, which was that nothing could be done without his consent; and he substantiated his view by recalling a clause which he had inserted in the draft-agreement. This gave him a period of three months, in case of Byron's death, in which to raise the money. The agreement had never been formally completed, and the draft could not be found. But Murray admitted in principle Moore's claim, and expressed himself ready to comply with the arrangement, provided his money were repaid in full, with interest. The manuscript could then be disposed of, as Moore suggested, by placing it in the hands of "Lord Byron's dearest friend, his sister, Augusta Leigh."

From the proposal that the work should be placed at the disposal of Lady Byron, Moore dissented altogether; it would be treachery, he said (and Hobhouse agreed), to Byron's intentions and wishes. He also strongly opposed the view, put forward by Hobhouse and Kinnaird, that Mrs. Leigh ought "to burn the manuscript altogether without any previous perusal or deliberation." This, he said, was to treat it as if it were a pest-bag, whereas, "although the second part was full of very coarse things, the first contained (with the exception of about three or four lines) nothing which on the score of decency might not be safely published."

Matters were at this point on May 15th, and on the 16th a meeting took place at Murray's between Moore, Hobhouse, and Mr. Wilmot Horton and Colonel Doyle, the last two representing Mrs. Leigh. The agreement between Moore and Murray had not yet been found, and discussion was conducted on the assumption that Moore had a controlling voice in the matter. Thus, although, as it was subsequently decided, Byron's formal sanction of the assignment of the property to Murray would have rendered the later agreement inoperative, Moore has full right to praise or blame for the consent which he gave to the step taken at this memorable meeting; when, as the world knows, after a very quarrelsome scene, the manuscript was formally destroyed by Mrs. Leigh's representatives.

It does not appear that any one of the parties concerned in the act felt in the least that they were depriving Byron of a posthumous justification of his own career. Moore, in all the references to this Memoir, treats it solely as a piece of literature, and Lord John Russell, who had read most, if not all, of the composition, simply says that it "contained little trace of Byron's genius and no interesting details of his life." Those who were eager for suppression appear to have been influenced by the desire to avoid scandal; and the notion was widespread, for Moore, after the affair, was congratulated on having "saved the country from a pollution." His most serious objection to destroying the MS. rested on the support which such an action would give to this view of what Byron had written.

But the objection was not strong enough to induce him to jeopardise his own character. Moore's hands were tied in the transaction by the fact that he stood to lose two thousand guineas if the MS. were destroyed, and would avoid this loss if his own opinion, favouring publication, were adopted. Whoever opposed publication in the discussion at Murray's, had merely to hint that Moore's advocacy was interested, and pride would at once constrain the needy poet to consent to the holocaust.

The two persons who stood to lose in the matter were Moore and Murray, and both made a creditable sacrifice. Murray resigned his chances of a considerable profit. But Moore incurred deliberately a ruinous burden of debt. Even so, his sensitive conscience was not quite clear as to the justification of his act; but Hobhouse appears to have decided him by saying that Byron had more than once expressed a regret at having put the Memoirs out of his own power, and had only been prevented from reclaiming them by his dislike to taking back a gift.

Moore's need for consulting on points of honour did not end with the burning of the MS. Byron's family were anxious to repay him the money which he had paid to Murray before the cremation; and, not unnaturally, Lord Lansdowne and other friends urged him to accept. But he refused persistently to do so, though one adviser after another forced him to postpone for a week the irrevocable step of publishing his account of the transaction in the papers. His view was, that his duty had been to surrender the trust into the hands most proper to receive it, and that he could keep at least the credit of having made a sacrifice in order to do so. With this credit he refused to part; and he notes that he had little trouble in bringing his men of business, the Longmans, to take his view of the matter, but could not so easily persuade Lord Lansdowne, with Rogers and the rest, that a poor man ought to act on the same principles as if he were rich. It should be remembered to Moore's credit that he on many occasions followed his own sense of honour when he might have pleaded the advice of most honoured and honourable persons for adopting another course.

Friends of Moore's fame will rejoice that he acted in so scrupulous a spirit, but the necessity is to be deplored. The heavy load of debt thus thrown upon him forced him into producing too much. It also made it practically inevitable that he should recoup himself for this loss by undertaking the most lucrative task that offered—namely, a biography of Byron; yet he was uncertain for a considerable time whether the thing ought to be done, and, if done, whether he was the right person to do it. Even when his mind was clear of these perplexities—which Hobhouse strengthened by dissuading him from the task—there was a long period of suspense for which Murray was answerable. During three years Moore was distracted, anxious, and uneasy, unable to settle down to any important work.

For the present, however, once the Byron business was settled, his mind and his hands were full. It had been finally settled that the Longmans, and not Murray, should be the publishers of the Life of Sheridan; they undertaking, not only to pay Moore a thousand guineas, but to give the Sheridan family half profits, once 2500 copies had been disposed. Moore went resolutely to work, and in October of the next year the book made its appearance, and succeeded beyond expectation. The Longmans expressed their sense of its merits by adding £300 to the stipulated thousand.

The Life of Sheridan did not interest contemporaries mainly as a piece of biography. Many references to traits and stories of the dramatist and statesman, which occur in the Diary, make it plain that Moore had conceived an opinion of Sheridan by no means wholly favourable, and biography of the unsparing order was not a task which he would have undertaken. His aim was to outline Sheridan's career, rather than to paint the man, and consequently the book's main value lay in the historical view which it gave of the past fifty years. On this Moore was congratulated by so good a judge as Jeffrey, and he had a right to feel that his claim was established to rank with serious political thinkers.

Yet even before this, he was by no means regarded merely as a person of quick fancy and lively talent. It was proposed that he should join Jeffrey in editing the Edinburgh; and, still more remarkable, in 1822 the proprietors of the Times invited him to replace Barnes for six months in conducting their paper. Moore refused the offer (which was made at the suggestion of Rogers), but felt highly gratified; and from his return to England he was a constant contributor to the Times, sending there all his satiric verses. Their popularity was so great that the proprietors authorised Barnes to pay Moore a retainer of £400 a year; and up to 1828 this source of income, with the annuity from Power, was his main revenue. It was precarious, however; for the Times sometimes took a tone in handling Irish topics which made it difficult for Moore to continue the connection, and in 1827 he formally closed it. It was renewed, however, after Barnes made a tour in Ireland (carrying introductions from Moore), and returned ready "to support the Irish cause with all his might."

Indeed, the best work of the three years 1825-8 is to be found in the Odes on Cash, Corn, and Catholics, nearly all of which were contributed to the Times. The first "evening" of Evenings in Greece, and the fifth and sixth numbers of National Airs, which were the work done for Power at this period, have little in them but fluent verse; and even less can be said for the work which Moore took up as a pièce de résistance, his discarded Egyptian story, which he now completed as a prose romance. In The Epicurean we have the last and by no means sprightly runnings of the vein which produced Lalla and the Loves of the Angels: an imagination feeding itself on marvels read of in books, and producing literature which appealed to curiosity more than to any other instinct. The description of the Egyptian mysteries seen by the young philosopher, who goes to the land of pyramids and catacombs in search of new truth, is frigid in the extreme; and the flashes of genuine poetry which redeem Lalla and The Angels find no place in this very bad example of deliberately poetic prose. Nevertheless its oversweetened eloquence found plenty of readers, and the book realised £700 to its author,—of which, however, £500 had already been anticipated, independently of the main debt, the two thousand guineas.

One may note here a very curious scruple of literary conscience which Moore adhered to with surprising consistency. Although heavily in debt, and forced to make every penny by sheer production, he constantly set aside a means, which for at least ten years was constantly open to him, of earning money with little labour. His reputation then stood at its highest point; he was not only high in favour with the frequenters of Holland House, but also with the whole fashionable world and its far-off imitators. A single trait—which, with his usual naïve pleasure in instances of his own popularity, he records—may illustrate the matter. At a country ball, a young lady who was fortunate enough to shake hands with the poet "wrapped the hand up in her shawl, saying no one else should touch it that night." Fame of this sort is very marketable, and to-day would bring its owner big offers from the popular magazines. Their equivalent in those days was found in the annuals of the type of the Forget-me-not, Souvenir, etc.; and request after request was made to Moore for his name either as editor or contributor. The Longmans proposed to undertake such a publication, and tempted him with the prospects of £500 to £1000 a year if he would edit it. He replied, not with a direct refusal, but with a letter stating his views concerning literature of this class, which not only convinced the firm that he personally would injure his reputation by accepting, but decided them to abandon the scheme. Again, about 1827, Heath the engraver offered, first £500 and subsequently £700 a year to Moore if he would edit a new album or magazine, and at the same time tried to force on him a cheque for a hundred pounds as the price of a contribution of a hundred lines. But Moore was not to be tempted. Only once in his career did he depart from what his sense of the dignity of letters demanded, and that was at a time when he had brought himself low in purse by writing books to express his convictions, and refusing commissions that would have brought in large sums. His scruple, which nowadays seems strangely demoded, is the more respectable because he never hints a word of blame for those who did not share that "horror of Albumising, Annualising, and Periodicalising which my one inglorious surrender (and for base money too) has but confirmed me in." Characteristically enough, however, he did for courtesy what he so often refused to do for profit, and waived the scruple in favour of his old and beautiful friend Lady Blessington, to whom he thus expressed himself. He sent her some verses for her Book of Beauty, which are among the latest and by no means the worst that he wrote.

In 1827, however, at a time when nothing was yet settled as to the Life of Byron, his refusal of the inducements held out by Heath and the Longmans was not his only example of constancy to a point of honour. Letters apprised him in December 1826 that his father's death could not be long deferred, and when he reached Dublin the old man was too far gone to see or recognise his son. It is characteristic of Moore that he counted this to be a great relief, "as I would not for worlds have the sweet impression he left upon my mind when I last saw him exchanged for one which would haunt me, I know, dreadfully through all the remainder of my life." This morbid shrinking from actual physical impressions of pain or horror was a marked trait of the man, and not a manly one; it was doubtless closely connected with his temperamental liability to uncontrollable bursts of emotion. Nevertheless it was a thing hardly more within his will-power than is the common tendency to turn faint at the sight of blood; and in other respects he made up for it by exhibiting a noble staunchness. The death of his father was a heavy blow, as making the first gap in a family so closely linked by affection; but a man at forty-seven must be prepared to lose his parents, and the actual trouble of so quiet a death in the fulness of age would soon have passed naturally. But John Moore's pension died with him, and his son, already sufficiently embarrassed, found his mother and sister added to his other charges. The burden could have been avoided; for Lord Wellesley, then Viceroy, at once signified a wish to continue the half-pay pension to Moore's sister, out of a fund which he, as Lord-Lieutenant, could dispose of without reference to England, where the King might reasonably be presumed unfriendly to such a favour. "All this," Moore notes, "very kind and liberal of Lord Wellesley; and God knows how useful such an aid would be to me, as God alone knows how I am to support all the burdens now heaped upon me; but I could not accept such a favour. It would be like that lasso with which they catch wild animals in South America; the noose would only be on the tip of the horn, it is true, but it would do."

He found himself again approved in his action by men of business (Power the publisher and various Irish friends) but censured by Lord Lansdowne. His answer was ready, however. The Life of Sheridan, with its outspoken strictures on certain passages in Whig policy, had not been altogether relished at Bowood, and Moore was for once not sorry, since the lack of approbation proved the independence of his attitude. And it was now easy for him to say that, since Lord Lansdowne had described his last published book as too conciliatory to the Tories, any favour coming to its author from a Tory government would certainly be construed by unfriendly judges as the price of this civility.

At last, however, the long negotiations about Byron's Life and Letters came to a conclusion. Moore, whose debt was to the Longmans, and who was moreover bound to them by gratitude for much real friendliness, inclined to write the Life for them, and an arrangement to that effect was made. But in February 1828, when Murray, who held the great bulk of the material, finally made up his mind to secure Moore's services, if possible, both as editor and biographer, the Longmans, with their accustomed liberality, waived their claim. It was settled that Moore should receive 4000 guineas, of which sum half was to be advanced, to pay off his debt to the Longmans. And thus, after many efforts, he got, for a time at least, level with the world.

The work once undertaken went on fast—Moore working, he writes, "as hard as it is in my nature to work at anything"—and by the end of 1829 the first of two quarto volumes was ready for publication. In his prefatory note to the second volume, which shortly followed, Moore—whom Byron called "the only modest author he had ever known"—attributed the success of the work to the interest of the subject and the materials. There is no denying that his modesty was in this case justified. The Life of Byron has probably been more read than any biography in the language, with the single exception of Boswell's; yet it has no claim to rank, for instance, with Lockhart's masterpiece as a literary achievement. Moore's task was simply to weave together a chain of narrative from the copious materials presented to him by the poet's journals, letters, and, not least, by his poems. His work was, however, hampered by the necessity of sparing sensibilities, and we have frequently to wish that he had been less discreet. Nevertheless, upon the whole, a very difficult undertaking was carried through with supreme tact, with well-practised dexterity, and, above all, with a most commendable absence of pretension. Beyond the skilled selection and grouping of materials, Moore's part is very considerable. It amounts to a very acute exposition of the Byron whom he had known—a man wholly unlike the popular conception of him. Naturally enough, the work has the character of a defence or justification, and as such it is loyal and sincere. Moore never goes back on his friend. But there were in that friend's character certain elements which he disliked, and in his intellect ranges which he did not fully comprehend; and we feel always that the Byron whom Moore best understands is the Byron of earlier days, the writer of vehement romance and impassioned soliloquy—a Byron who had not yet come to the full scope of his powers. This also was natural enough, for Moore's personal intercourse with Byron practically ended when Byron married.

Their friendship began, drolly enough, as has been already mentioned, out of a cartel resulting from another challenge. In 1809, Moore saw English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, and had no special cause to quarrel with the attack upon his own work. Little,

"The young Catullus of his day,
As sweet, but as immoral, in his lay,"

might regard the attack as verging on a tribute; and indeed Little's poems were among Byron's earliest favourites and models in verse. But Moore was choleric; he did not like to hear himself entitled the "melodious advocate of lust"; and further on he came upon a passage which touched him on a sensitive point. His abortive duel with Jeffrey furnished too obvious material for the satirist to miss—above all, when Jeffrey was the special mark—and accordingly Moore found the following reference to it:—

"Can none remember that eventful day,
That ever glorious, almost fatal fray,
When Little's leadless pistol met the eye,
And Bow Street's myrmidons stood laughing by?"

A note was appended, stating that, in the duel at Chalk Farm, "on examination, the balls of the pistols were found to have evaporated."

The satire being anonymous, Moore, though sufficiently vexed, took no steps; but when a second edition was issued with Byron's name, he wrote from Ireland to the author, saying that in the note "the lie was given" to his own public statement, published in the Times concerning the duel, and demanding to know whether Byron would "avow the insult."

This letter, as Moore soon learnt, had not reached its address, for Byron had gone abroad; but he was told that Hodgson had undertaken to forward it. Nothing more was heard, and Moore let things rest till a year and a half later, when Byron returned from abroad. Moore had in the meantime married, and was about to become a father; he was therefore, as he admits, inclined to be conciliatory, but none the less determined to push the matter to an explanation. Referring to the previous letter, which he assumed to have miscarried, he re-stated his grievance in writing, but then continued:—

"It is now useless to speak of the steps with which it was my intention to follow up that letter. The time which has elapsed since then, though it has done away neither the injury nor the feeling of it, has in many respects materially altered my situation; and the only object which I have now in writing to your Lordship is to preserve some consistency with that former letter, and to prove to you that the injured feeling still exists, however circumstances may compel me to be deaf to its dictates at present. When I say 'injured feeling,' let me assure your Lordship that there is not a single vindictive sentiment in my mind towards you. I mean but to express that uneasiness under (what I must consider to be) a charge of falsehood, which must haunt a man of any feeling to his grave, unless the insult be retracted or atoned for."

Byron answered stiffly enough, that he had never seen Moore's denial, and therefore had never intended "giving the lie"; but that he could neither retract nor apologise for a charge of falsehood which he never advanced. He was ready, he said, "to accept any conciliatory proposition which did not compromise his own honour"—or, failing that, to give satisfaction. Moore, in his account of the affair, admits freely that he had shown a want of tact in talking of friendly advances, while demanding an explanation; and he expresses his admiration for Byron's conduct in the difficulty. It is certain that the younger man showed more sense and less inclination to take offence, and the final proposal that a friendly meeting should be arranged was Byron's. The place fixed on was Rogers's table, and Campbell was of the company; and the dinner (though complicated by Byron's unexpected wish to dine on biscuits and soda water—neither of which was forthcoming) had the happiest results. Byron formed a lasting friendship with Rogers; but between him and Moore an intimacy of the closest kind ripened rapidly—the more so because Byron's state was then one of considerable isolation. A few months later, the blazing success of Childe Harold only confirmed the friendship, as it made the new poet the lion of a society where Moore's position was already firmly fixed. Jealousy was none of Moore's vices, or he had ample ground for it in that sudden leap past him, into a region of fame which, as he always knew in his heart, he could never occupy. But even a jealous nature might have been conciliated by Byron's frank enthusiasm. "I am too proud of being your friend," he wrote, "to care with whom I am linked in your estimation"; and the fragmentary "Journal" which he kept in 1813 expresses the grounds of his admiration very fully.

"Moore has a peculiarity of talent, or rather talents—poetry, music, voice—all his own; and an expression in each, which never was, nor will be, possessed by another. But he is capable of still higher nights in poetry. By the bye, what humour, what—everything, in the 'Post Bag'! There is nothing Moore may not do, if he will but seriously set about it. In society he is gentlemanly, gentle, and, altogether, more pleasing than any individual with whom I am acquainted. For his honour, principle, and independence, his conduct to...[1] speaks 'trumpet-tongued.' He has but one fault—and that one I daily regret—he is not here."