Thomas Moore Part 10

Tom's regiment was ordered to India, and to India also went the younger son, Russell, for whom a cadets.h.i.+p in the Company's Army had been secured. The younger boy sailed in April 1840, and, although the parting was a heartbreak (above all to the mother), Moore felt at every turn what he calls gratefully "the value of a friendly fame like mine."

Directors of the Company, officers aboard s.h.i.+p, governors of provinces, all vied with one another in services; and when the lad reached Calcutta, Lord Auckland, then Governor-General, gave him a room in Government House.

Little good came of all these good offices. Lord Auckland's sincere kindness could only manifest itself in looking after an invalid and writing cordial letters to the parents. Russell Moore's health was quite unequal to the profession he had chosen, and eighteen months after he had reached India, news came that he had been dangerously ill and was ordered home.

In the meanwhile the other son, though keeping his health, was incurring debts. There is a note from Bessy, copied into the Diary, surely as heartbroken a cry as could come from a wife and mother. Enclosing a bill for 120 drawn by Tom upon his father, she writes that she can hardly bring herself to send it:--

"It has caused me tears and sad thoughts, but to _you_ it will bring these and hard _hard_ work. Why do people sigh for children?

They know not what sorrow will come with them. How _can_ you arrange for the payment? and what could have caused him to require such a sum? Take care of yourself; and if you write to him, for G.o.d's sake, let him know that it is the very last sum you will or _can_ pay for him. My heart is sick when I think of you, and the fatigue of mind and body you are always kept in. Let me know how you think you can arrange this."

A second draft for 100 followed quick on it, and early in the next year, still worse news. The young man had sold his commission and was on his way home. 1500 in all had been spent in fitting him out and purchasing, first an ensigncy, then a lieutenancy; and this was the upshot of so much anxiety and outlay. And the second boy, who had done all that could be hoped of him, was on his way home too, to a sad meeting. "It seemed all but death," Moore writes, "when he stepped out of the carriage exhausted with the journey, and wasted with lung disease." There was a rally for a few months, during which Moore was busy trying to shape some new future for the prodigal Tom, who was remaining in France. Four hundred pounds would have preserved his lieutenancy (being the money actually paid down out of the price of his commission), but Moore refused to find it. He was already reduced to borrowing from a friend, Mr. Boyse, his Wexford host; and though Rogers, Lord Lansdowne, and probably many others would, as Lord John Russell regretfully comments, have willingly advanced the larger sum, they heard nothing of the need. Moore's own object was to secure his son a commission in the Austrian service, but Tom himself wrote from France suggesting the Legion etrangere. Interest was quickly made with Soult through Madame Adelaide, who received the prodigal and made much of him for his father's sake--"a continuation of that spoiling process," Moore writes sadly, "to which poor Tom (as my son) has been from his childhood subjected." The thing was settled accordingly, not without another draft for a hundred and odd pounds to enable the son to leave for Algiers. A few days before he set out for the new dangers and hards.h.i.+ps of Africa, his brother had died peacefully at home. It was only the last straw in a load of trouble that the one remaining child could not even get leave for a farewell visit home, before he launched, under no good omens, into a new career and clime.

The record of the nest year (1843) is short and uninteresting--notes of engagements for the most part. One is characteristic enough to quote:--

"_March_ 23. Breakfasted at Rogers's to meet Jeffrey and Lord John--two of the men I like best among my numerous friends.

Jeffrey's volubility (which was always superabundant) becomes even more copious, I think, as he grows older. But I am ashamed of myself for finding any fault with him."

_"Lenior et melior fit accedente senecta"_ is a phrase that has full application to this veteran of letters. The year closed with a cruel hoax (the crueller as it coincided with fresh demands from Tom). Some one in Ireland wrote to inform Moore that 300 had been left him as a testimony of regard. Moore had suspicions, but he adds:--

"There was an air of truth and reality which half lured my poor Bess and myself into hailing it as a providential G.o.d-send.

Already, indeed, her generous heart was apportioning out the different presents it would enable her to make to my sister, to the poor H----s, etc. Alas! alas! I wish no worse to the ingenious gentleman who penned the letter than an exactly similar disappointment."

I shall add the next entry in the Diary, Moore's farewell to the year 1843:--

"A strange life mine; but the best as well as pleasantest part of it lies _at home_. I told my dear Bessy, this morning, that while I stood at my study window, looking out at her, as she crossed the field, I sent a blessing after her. 'Thank you, bird,' she replied, 'that's better than money'; and so it is. Bird is a pet name she gave me in our younger days, and was suggested by Hamlet's words, 'Hillo, ho, ho, boy! come, bird, come'; being the call, it seems, which falconers use to their hawk in the air, when they would have him come down to them."

What one feels on reading these pa.s.sages, and contrasting them with many earlier ones, is perhaps best expressed by a.s.senting to the view of Miss Berry, recorded in the Diary. Moore had taken the liberty of an old friend in going unasked to one of her famous _soirees_, and on his saying something of this:--

"She reverted in her odd way to the early days of our acquaintance, and said, 'I didn't so much like you in those days. You were too-too--what shall I say?' 'Too brisk and airy perhaps,' said I.

'Yes,' she replied, taking hold of one of my grizzly locks, 'I like you better since you have got these.' I could then overhear her, after I left her, say to the person with whom I had found her speaking, 'That's as good a creature as ever lived!'"

The light and buoyant nature, which had been so sorely battered, received its final shock soon after the date to which I have brought this story. 1844 was spent in scriving over the _History_,--Moore repelling now the friendly advances even of his Bowood neighbours, yet with difficulty repelling them. The task was finished at last in the spring of 1845, but there remained the need of a preface, and Moore records that after various endeavours he left this, "in utter despair,"

to the publishers to provide. Later in the year, the annual visit from his sister Ellen made a brightness in the house, now so quiet; and after she had gone, there came letters from Tom asking for money for a trip home. It was sent, and he wrote back rejoicing at the prospect, but explaining that he should not come before spring owing to a cough which he had contracted. The words were ominous, and both his parents almost made up their minds that they were never to see him again.

The foreboding was only too well justified. But the first blow which fell was one little looked for. Ellen Moore died suddenly in her bed. A month later came from Africa "a strange and ominous-looking letter which we opened with trembling hands, and it told us that my son Tom was dead." I add one last quotation from the Diary.

"The last of our five children now are gone and I am left desolate and alone. Not a single relative have I now left in the world."

That is practically the end of Moore's life. A severe illness followed, and "when he recovered," says Lord John Russell, "he was a different man." "Nothing seemed to rest upon his mind," and, with his memory, his wit had gone also. He made an excursion to town in 1846 to superintend the production of the last volume of his history, and one year later still, to be the guest of Rogers, who was to Moore, at any rate, a most considerate, loyal, helpful, and constant friend. But what he wrote to this friend from Sloperton was true: "I am sinking here into a mere vegetable." So, peacefully at the last, after five years of mere breathing, in which neither joy nor sorrow touched him, he faded out of life; watched over to the last by the woman who had grown more necessary to him with every year.

He left her unprovided with money, yet not without provision. The Memoirs which he, himself a great lover and reader of such literature, had scrupulously kept for a period of close on thirty years, were always designed to be a posthumous resource; and he had confided them by a will made many years earlier to the care of Lord John Russell. Had he foreseen that the friend of whom he asked this office would be charged with the cares of an Administration, when it fell to be accomplished, the request would probably not have been made; but being made, it was duly honoured, and Moore, who had always liked impressive auspices for his children at the font,[1] had himself a Prime Minister for his biographer.

The work might perhaps have been better done by a man less fully occupied, but the purpose for which the Memoirs were written could not have been more fully served. The Longmans offered 3000 for the Memoirs, if Lord John would edit them, and it was found that for this sum an annuity could be bought, equal to the pension which had for the last part of Moore's life been the sole resource of the household. Bessy Moore lived and died in Sloperton, and was laid in the churchyard beside her husband and her children; and old men in the little Wilts.h.i.+re hamlet remember her and her good works--the only one of her lifelong pleasures and occupations which was left to this good woman, whom it is impossible to think of as lonely. The record of her life and her husband's--for the two are inseparable--may close with as touching a little attention as was ever paid by an elderly man to his elderly wife. In 1839, when money was no way plenty with him, Moore sent five pounds to a friend, which the friend was to forward anonymously to Bessy for her poor--thus giving her the pleasure which he judged she would most value, without the distress of thinking that he must labour more to make up the little outlay.

[1] Lady Donegal, Byron, Lord Lansdowne, Lord John Russell, and Dr. Parr were among the sponsors.

CHAPTER VII

GENERAL APPRECIATION

Of Moore's personal qualities not much remains to be said; but we may endeavour to account for the fact that he became the fas.h.i.+on when he was one-and-twenty, and retained an undiminished vogue for a matter of forty years.

His singing undoubtedly first brought him into notice; a late pa.s.sage in the Journal recalls, across a gulf of years, one evening at a musical a.s.sembly, when people laughed and stared to see a little Irish lad brought out to sing after some distinguished professionals; and how the contemptuous wonder was changed to wonder of a very different kind when the singer had produced his effect. Hard upon these successes, and helped by them to succeed, came his _Anacreon_, a volume of easy, springing and melodious verse, flushed with prodigal youth; and the combination of the two gifts excited such widespread admiration, that their fortunate possessor was much sought out. In these early days Moore was no doubt largely what is called a ladies' man, and the genius for friends.h.i.+p which he possessed showed itself a good deal with women. From these years dates the long intimacy with Lady Donegal and her sister, Miss G.o.dfrey--an intimacy which his marriage in no way ended. These friends continued for years to correspond with him and to advise on his affairs. But after marriage, he formed no new friends.h.i.+ps with women.

His delight in feminine society never left him, but it was of a special order.

Moore was by universal consent the very best of company; a talker who delighted in the give and take of conversation, and was at least as well pleased with other people's wit as his own. He had perhaps the less occasion to be jealous, having in his singing a resource which made him unrivalled. This talent, however, he would only use in a mixed company--"hating this operation with he-hearers," as he notes somewhere of a men's dinner when he was forced to depart from his habit. To women and for them he sung, while his singing powers lasted; but it is not unfair to say that he valued women in society chiefly as decorative accessories and as an audience. Among the innumerable good things noted in his Diary, hardly one is credited to a woman. And, well as he liked singing to a mixed audience, it is clear that his chief pleasure, as he advanced in life, lay in the society of men.

With men, his intimacies were numerous enough, for Moore was as popular in clubs as in drawing-rooms, and most of his intimates were persons of t.i.tle. Byron said that "Tommy dearly loved a lord"; and a hundred people know this saying, for one who has seen Byron's sincerer utterance (not published in Moore's edition of the _Life and Letters_):--"I have had the kindest letter from Moore. I do think that man is the best-hearted--the only _hearted_ being I ever encountered; and his talents are equal to his feelings." It is therefore worth while to note that Moore by no means loved any or every lord. He did, however, certainly desire to a.s.sociate with those who possessed hereditary station and had the brains to make a generous use of it, both in acquiring power and in drawing to their houses men like Moore himself--or Sydney Smith, whom Moore loved better to meet than any lord, except perhaps Lord John Russell. His deliberate opinion, stated more than once in the Diary, was that in his time the most agreeable and also the purest tone of society was to be found at the top of the social ladder. And in point of fact he was admitted to intimacy with the Whig aristocracy in its most brilliant day. Bowood and Holland House, as Moore knew them, were probably the best things of their kind that England has ever seen.

For a description of the charm which made him not only welcome but courted in these great houses, it would be hard to better that set down by Haydon the painter, in his autobiography:--

"Met Moore at dinner, and spent a very pleasant three hours. He told his stories with a hit-or-miss air, as if accustomed to people of rapid apprehension. It being asked at Paris who they would have as G.o.dfather for Rothschild's child, 'Talleyrand,' said a Frenchman. _'Pourquoi, Monsieur?' 'Parce qu'il est le moins chretien possible.'_ Moore is a delightful, gay, voluptuous, refined, natural creature; infinitely more unaffected than Wordsworth; not blunt and uncultivated like Chantrey, or bilious and s.h.i.+vering like Campbell. No affectation, but a true, refined, delicate, frank poet, with sufficient air of the world to prove his fas.h.i.+on, sufficient honesty of manner to show fas.h.i.+on has not corrupted his native taste; making allowance for prejudices instead of condemning them, by which he seemed to have none himself; never talking of his own work from an intense consciousness that everybody else did; while Wordsworth is talking of his own productions from apprehension that they are not enough matter of conversation. Men must not be judged too hardly. Success or failure will either destroy or better the finest natural parts. Unless one had heard Moore tell the above story of Talleyrand, it would have been impossible to conceive the air of half-suppressed impudence, the delicate light-horse canter of phrase, with which the words floated out of his sparkling anacreontic mouth."

To the personal notability which his social talent secured him, Moore owed much of his later successes as a prose writer: in part because of the access which it afforded to sources of information; in part because everybody knew him, and read with expectation whatever he wrote. But as a poet, his fame was a thing wholly independent of personal charm.

People knew that the writer whose songs they had by heart was courted in the most brilliant world; they knew also that he had shown in various difficult junctures a high spirit of honour and independence. But they knew these things mainly because they liked his poetry. Prom all this contemporary fame of the poet, one must try to a.n.a.lyse what remains.

Moore himself--except during his stay in Paris, when much adulation led him to question whether he might not perhaps really deserve to rank with Scott and Byron--always regarded his poetry as unlikely to last. His modesty was real; for not only did he feel himself overshadowed by Scott and Byron, but, placed in the difficult position of knowing himself popular and Wordsworth all but unread, he never hesitated in recognising Wordsworth's as by far the greater talent. His growing admiration for this poet is all the more remarkable, because at many meetings his sense of ridicule was frequently stimulated by Wordsworth's egotism and "soliloquacious" habit of conversation. Coleridge he could neither like nor understand, and it seems that he did not care much for Sh.e.l.ley. But throughout his Diary, one finds him manifesting, in many pa.s.sages, the conviction that these men, the unread, were better artists than himself; and he notes with exceptional pleasure any word of praise from them, as if he expected only dislike and disapprobation for his facile and popular verses. Not less should it be noted, that none of them praised his longer poems, but all (except of course Wordsworth) spoke with sincere enthusiasm of his lyrics. The opinion of Landor and of Sh.e.l.ley was, in effect, that expressed by Moore himself: that of his whole work the _Irish Melodies_ alone were likely to last into future times. But both Sh.e.l.ley (as reported by his wife) and Landor agreed in attributing to Moore's lyrics the highest poetical merit. How far critical opinion may ultimately bear out this estimate must remain to be seen; but probably the depreciation of Moore's work, which prevails at present, is hardly more judicious than Lord John Russell's extravagant over-praise.

The last century has been one of increasing virtuosity in the management of lyric metres. From Cowper and Crabbe to Mr. Swinburne, is a strange distance; and it has not been sufficiently realised that Moore is very largely responsible for the advance. Many critics have noted the change from the strictly syllabic scansion of Pope's school to metres like those of Tennyson's _Maud_, and a hundred later poems, in which syllabic measurement is wholly discarded. It has been noted also that, even in the freer metres of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, lyric writers confined themselves to variations of the trochee or iambic, and that an anapaestic or dactylic measure is hardly found before Waller. But it has hardly been recognised that till Moore began to use these triple feet, no poet used them with dexterity and confidence.

Coleridge, it is true, and Scott had employed a broken rhythm, subst.i.tuting the temporal for the syllabic ictus, to vary the monotony of the eight-syllabled narrative verse. But, to judge of the best that could be done before Moore's time with a purely anapaestic measure, one may refer to Wordsworth's "At the corner of Wood Street, when daylight appears." These verses are sufficiently dest.i.tute of the lyrical quality which is so constantly present in any work of Sh.e.l.ley's. But Moore had done all but all his best work, before Sh.e.l.ley had written six poems worthy of remembrance.

Going back, as we have seen, to the seventeenth century for his inspiration in style, Moore began by using only the trochaic and iambic measures. In the _Epistles and Odes_, we find one epistle (that to Atkinson) written in well-managed anapaeests, but more notable is the very delicate rhythm of the Canadian Boat Song--inspired by a tune. It is Moore's great distinction that he brought into English verse something of the variety and multiplicity of musical rhythms. When the _Irish Melodies_ began to appear, it is no wonder that readers should have been dazzled by the skill with which a profusion of metres were handled; and the poet showed himself even more inventive in rhythms than in stanzas.

The most curious part of the matter is that Moore was really importing into English poetry some of the characteristics of a literature which he did not know. He had not a word of Gaelic, and (like O'Connell) desired to see it die out. He observes that Spanish alone of European metrical systems employs "a.s.sonantic" instead of consonantic rhyme, though he was bred in a country where rhyme of this order had been brought to an extraordinary pitch of perfection. But he based his work upon Irish times, composed in the primitive manner, before music was divorced from poetry. One may say, virtually, that in fitting words to these tunes, he reproduced in English the rhythms of Irish folk song.

The thing was not done completely: for instance, in the first number of the _Melodies_, the song "Erin, the smile and the tear in thine eye," is to the tune of "Eileen Aroon," and the Irish words (which survive in this instance and, I am told by my friend Mr. O'Neil Russell, in only one other), do not correspond in metre with Moore's. He has varied the tune, and is consequently using a different stanza, which corresponds with the Irish only in the last three lines of the refrain. In the other instance, that of "O blame not the bard," there is a general correspondence in metre, but here the Irish metre is one not very different from an ordinary English stanza--though, as usual in Irish folk-poetry, the line is measured by time and not by syllables.

The need for fitting metre to music forced Moore into employing a wide variety of stanzas; and his example was of service in a day which had been little used to anything but the couplet and quatrain of three or four well-worn types. But by far more remarkable was the achievement in three separate poems of a metrical effect wholly new in English. Of these, one is probably the most beautiful lyric that Moore ever wrote:--

"At the mid hour of night, when the stars are weeping, I fly To the lone vale we loved, when life shone warm in thine eye; And I think oft, if spirits can steal from the regions of air, To revisit past scenes of delight, thou wilt come to me there, And tell me our love is remember'd, even in the sky!

"Then I sing the wild song 'twas once such pleasure, to hear, When our voices, commingling, breathed, like one, on the ear; And, as Echo far off through the vale my sad orison rolls, I think, O my love! 'tis thy voice, from the Kingdom of Souls, Faintly answering still the notes that once were so dear."

In the second, the same structure is used for the line, but with a different and simpler stanza:--

"Through grief and through danger thy smile hath cheer'd my way, Till hope seemed to bud from each thorn that round me lay; The darker our fortune, the brighter our pure love burn'd; Till shame into glory, till fear into zeal was turn'd; Yes, slave as I was, in thy arms my spirit felt free, And bless'd even the sorrows that made me more dear to thee.

"Thy rival was honour'd, whilst thou wert wrong'd and scorn'd, Thy crown was of briers, while gold her brows adorn'd; She woo'd me to temples, while thou layest hid in caves, Her friends were all masters, while thine, alas! were slaves; Yet cold in the earth, at thy feet, I would rather be, Than wed what I love not, or turn one thought from thee.

"They slander thee sorely, who say thy vows are frail-- Hadst thou been a false one, thy cheek had look'd less pale, They say too, so long thou hast worn those lingering chains, That deep in thy heart they have printed their servile stains-- Oh! foul is the slander--no chain could that soul subdue-- Where s.h.i.+neth _thy_ spirit, there liberty s.h.i.+neth too!"

In these verses we have of course an allegory. By a fas.h.i.+on common in Irish poetry, the poet expresses as a love song his political allegiance--though here the Catholic Church, rather than Ireland, is the "Dark Rosaleen" or "Kathleen ni Houlihan," to whom the pa.s.sion is addressed. The third of this remarkable group has been quoted already: it is Moore's rebuke to Ireland, or to O'Connell, "The dream of those days when first I sung thee is o'er"; and it is very notable that for such an occasion he should have chosen his most distinctively Irish manner. The peculiarity of these metres--the dragging, wavering cadence that half baulks the ear--is the distinctive characteristic of Irish verse. No English poet, so far as I know, has caught it; but Mangan gave this character to some of his finest renderings from the Irish, and in our own day Mr. Yeats has shown an increasing tendency towards this subtle and evasive beauty.