by Thomas Moore
Moore’s position as a poet cannot be considered high in comparison with that of his great contemporaries. Nevertheless, alone among modern poets, he united the arts of poetry and music in the same person, and revived the traditions of the minstrel and the troubadour of the middle ages. This affords a sufficient answer to most of the objections which have been urged against his ‘Irish Melodies’ and similar pieces, except those of occasional false taste and false glitter, against which no defence is possible. They have been said to be of little value divorced from their music; but, replies Professor Minto, they were never intended to be divorced from their music. On the same ground, deep thought would have been out of place. Moore’s position as the national lyrist of Ireland is in some respects anomalous: endowed with the Celtic temperament in a high degree, he was entirely devoid of the peculiar magic, as Matthew Arnold describes it, which is the most infallible characteristic of Celtic genius. Apart from the conceits of his early lyrics, his is in an eminent degree the poetry of good sense; his highest flights are carefully calculated, he makes the best use of his material, and never surprises by any incommunicable beauty, or anything savouring in the remotest degree of preternatural inspiration. After the song, his most congenial sphere is the satiric epigram, where his supremacy is unquestionable. Everywhere else he appears as the poet of his day, adapting consummate talents to the description of composition most in vogue, as he might with equal success have adapted them to almost any other. He would have been a conspicuous figure in almost any age of poetry except a dramatic age, and many who have since depreciated him would find, were he their contemporary, that he greatly surpassed them in their own styles. Such ability is, of course, essentially second-rate.
As a man, Moore is entitled to very high praise. He was not only amiable, generous, and affectionate, but high-minded and inde- pendent to a very unusual degree. His history abounds with disinterested actions, and refusals of flattering offers which he feared might compromise his dignity or the dignity of letters. He has been unjustly blamed for neglecting his wife for London society. There can be no doubt that his principal motive for settling in the country was to exempt his wife from the mortification of vicinity to a society which would not have received her. This involved a great sacrifice on his part; to have renounced society himself would have been destructive of her interests as well as his. In truth, there seems little to censure or regret in Moore, except his disproportionate estimate of his own importance in comparison with some of his great ontemporaries, in which, however, he merely concurred with the general opinion of the time.
A portrait of Moore (aged 40), engraved by Holl after Thomas Phillips, is prefixed to vol. i. of the ‘Memoirs,’ and another portrait of him (aged 58), after Maclise, to vol. viii. of the same work. The author of ‘Lalla Rookh’ also forms one of the sketches in the ‘Maclise Portrait Gallery’ (ed. Bates, p-30), and there are other portraits by Shee and Sir Thomas Lawrence.
[The principal authority for Moore’s life is his Memoirs, Journals, and Correspondence in eight volumes, published in 1853–6 by Earl Russell, and consisting of an unfinished autobiography, extending to 1799, journals from 1818 to 1847, and about four hundred letters filling up the gap. The correspondence might easily have been made more copious, and the diary would have gained by abridgment. The want of an accompanying narrative is much felt. Earl Russell, it is to be presumed, was too much engrossed with public affairs to supply this, or to perform any of the duties of an editor as he should have done. The work is nevertheless the indispensable foundation of all short biographies, among which that by H. R. Montgomery and the excellent memoir prefixed by Mr. Charles Kent to his edition of the poems deserve special notice. The best criticisms on Moore will be found in Hazlitt’s Spirit of the Age, allowing for the political hostility with which this is coloured; Professor Minto’s article in the Encyclopædia Britannica, and an able paper in vol. iii. of the National Review. See also Moore’s autobiographic notices in the prefaces to his poems in the collected edition of 1840–2. Contemporary literary biographies abound with references to him, especially his own Life of Byron.]
R. G.
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