Thomas Moore Part 1

Thomas Moore.

by Stephen Gwynn.

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 surpa.s.sed 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 att.i.tude 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 ma.s.ses 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 cla.s.s 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 aged 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 Sat.u.r.day 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 circ.u.mstances which thus surrounded my childhood, that spirit of enjoyment and, I may venture to add, good temper, which has never, thank G.o.d, 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 pa.s.sage 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 a.s.sociation 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 const.i.tuted 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 enfranchis.e.m.e.nt, 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 cla.s.s-fellows in Latin and Greek--he taught his pupil more than the cla.s.sics. 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 enfranchis.e.m.e.nt pa.s.sed 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 a.s.sociates. 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 cla.s.ses, 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 pa.s.sages. 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 p.r.o.nounced 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 circ.u.mstance 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 circ.u.mstances, 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 ap.r.o.n-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 a.s.sume 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 a.s.sociates. No such question was asked, and his fort.i.tude 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 gra.s.s 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 pa.s.sage 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 pa.s.sion. 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 pa.s.sage:--

"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 Ha.s.san 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 pa.s.sion 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 pa.s.sion, 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 circ.u.mstances 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."