1 MARCH 1852
THE ELEGY OF TOM MOORE should not contain one mournful or distressing note! Flourishing in an age of poets – of men who have stamped their characters upon the literature of their country and earned undying fame – he takes his ground as fairly as the best of them. Within his sphere he is unapproachable. He has little in common with the stormy passion of Byron; the philosophical grandeur of Coleridge is unknown to him; the muse of Scott and his own are scarcely kindred cousins; his productions have as little of the dreamy and mystical splendour of Shelley as they are allied to the elaborate and fatiguing epics of Southey; but within the circle of his own uncontested dominion he has poured forth strains as exquisite as any fancy ever clothed in sparkling verse to delight the jocund heart of man. The mind of Moore, from the moment that he took pen in hand, may be said to have been always in a state of pleasure. He has written satires as well as songs, and dealt with themes both sacred and profane: he has described the loves of angels and the holy piety of erring mortals; but, whatever the employment, one condition of feeling is always manifest. Most musical, most happy was his genius, and music and joyousness are careering in almost every syllable that he spoke …
Thomas Moore was born in Dublin on the 30th of May, 1780, the son of a small tradesman, who afterwards became a quartermaster in the army. It is not easy to decide when he first attempted verse. Upon looking back he could not discover when he was not a scribbler. In his thirteenth year he was already a contributor to a magazine; in his fourteenth he had addressed a sonnet to his school-master; and some three years before he sent his productions to the Irish periodical he had distinguished himself in another branch of art by undertaking principal characters in amateur theatricals. Moore was privileged to be precocious without paying the penalty of precocity. When he was 12 years old he accompanied his father, a Roman Catholic, to a patriotic dinner held in honour of the French Revolution, then a recent event, and regarded, as he himself tells us, as a signal to the slave, wherever suffering, that “the day of his deliverance was near at hand.” Men’s hearts, it has been written, are cradled into poetry by wrong. The early genius of Moore was, no doubt, nurtured by the sufferings of his race, and maintained in vigour and freshness until the decaying music of his native land came to claim him wholly as her own. The act of Parliament having opened the University to Roman Catholics in 1793, the young poet immediately availed himself of his opportunity. The year following his admission, while still a child, he wrote and published a paraphrase of Anacreon’s fifth ode, and then proceeded to the translation of other odes by the same poet, for which he vainly hoped the university board might deem him “deserving of some honour or reward.” Disappointed in his expectation he nevertheless continued his task, and occupied himself in improving his verses and illustrating them by learned annotations, until he reached his 19th year, when he quitted Ireland for the first time, and set out for London “with the two not very congenial objects of keeping his terms in the Middle Temple and publishing by subscription his translation of Anacreon.” The translation duly appeared in 1800. It was dedicated to George IV., then Prince of Wales, who, we may remark, received no further honour at the poet’s hands.
In 1803 Moore had the misfortune to obtain worldly advancement. He was promoted to an official situation in Bermuda. The duties of the office were performed by a deputy, and the consequence, was great personal anxiety and heavy pecuniary loss to the poetical principal …
Moore’s birth and origin made him a Liberal and something more. He came into the world one of a then oppressed race. He was the contemporary and schoolfellow of an ardent band who believed all things lawful to the struggler for liberty, and his spirit went with them in their most daring aspirations. The hapless victims of their own rash, ill conceived, and unwarrantable projects for national emancipation were his chosen and beloved associates, and when he saw them sacrificed to their wild enthusiasm he cherished the passion that had consumed them and embalmed their memory in matchless melody and verse. In middle life Moore, favoured by the friendship of the great Whig chiefs, soothed by the concessions that had been made to his country and his creed, and warned by sober experience of the vanity of egregious expectation, settled down into a constitutional Whig; but at the starting point of his career he had as little affection for Whigs as for Tories. In the preface to one of a series of solemn satires, he speaks of both “factions” as “having been equally cruel to Ireland, and perhaps equally insincere in their efforts for the liberties of England.”
Moore had no cause to remember with pleasure either the prose or the poetry of these satirical exercises. Serious satire was at no time his forte – his lively and delicate hand could hardly wield the heavy weaponry of Dryden and Pope. Greater success attended his efforts when at a later period of his life he divested himself of his sombre attire, and became as joyous in hate as he had been in love. The Fudge Family, written in 1817, The Twopenny Postbag, and similar productions full of point, wit, and polish, are unrivalled as political lampoons, and preserve to this hour, their first exquisite relish. The generous fancy of the Irish poet could not be happy steeped in bitterness, and to affect sternness was to languish and die. The objects of Moore’s squib warfare were no doubt sufficiently conscious of the sharpness of an airy weapon, never otherwise than most dexterously handled by their foe; but we question whether they suffered half as much pain as they enjoyed pleasure from his lively feats. How could men be seriously angry with an adversary who simply tickled when he pretended to strike?
The apprenticeship of Moore was served when he commenced The Irish Melodies which have rendered his name famous wherever music is cherished. From that hour his genius triumphed, and most deservedly. Moore attributes all his poetical success to his strong and inborn feeling for music. There can be no doubt that his obligations to nature in this respect were very great. Music and poetry were wedded in his heart, and were inseparable. So intimately, indeed, were they united, that the sight of The Irish Melodies crowded together in one volume, unaccompanied by the notes with which they were always associated in his own mind, inflicted upon him positive pain. It was as if he saw the skeletons of his children ranged before him, deprived of the warm flesh and breathing form. To the reader the verses have beauty of their own, and charm irrespective of the strains by which they were suggested. Moore could no more unbind melody and language than he could gaze on female beauty and separate the notions of body and soul.
The publication of The Irish Melodies commenced in 1807, and, continued at intervals, was concluded in 1834. They have been translated into Latin, Italian, French, and Russian, and are familiar as proverbs amongst the fellow-countrymen of the poet, and indeed wherever English is understood and music loved. It is difficult for the critic to refer to them in too high a tone of panegyric. It may be true that force and dignity are wanting to some of those lyrics, that occasionally fancy labours until art becomes too evident in strained and frigid similes, that ornament at times overlays sentiment until nature pants beneath the glittering encumbrance; but it is equally certain that universal literature does not present a lovelier and more affecting tribute to a nation’s minstrelsy than is found in The Irish Melodies of Thomas Moore. The love of country that pervades and inspires his theme, his simple tenderness of feeling, that at once strikes the heart as instantly to melt it, his facility of creation, linked vith the glad appreciation of all that is beautiful in nature – the grace, the elegance, the sensibility, the ingenuity, that are never absent – the astonishing and thoroughly successful adaptation of sense to sound, of sweetest