‘Bad are the rhymes
That scorn old wine.’
as my friend Barry sings. Poetry? hum! Claret? Prithee, call it claret!”
And Moore is mistaken! He draws his inspiration, it is true, with the stem of a glass between his thumb and finger, but the wine is the least stimulus to his brain. He talks and is listened to admiringly, and that is his Castaly. He sits next to Lady Fanny at dinner, who thinks him an “adorable little love,” and he employs the first two courses in making her in love with herself, i. e., blowing everything she says up to the red heat of poetry. Moore can do this, for the most stupid things on earth are, after all, the beginnings of ideas, and every fool is susceptible of the flattery of seeing the words go straight from his lips to the “highest heaven of invention.” And Lady Fanny is not a fool, but a quick and appreciative woman, and to almost everything she says, the poet’s trump is a germ of poetry. “Ah!” says Lady Fanny with a sigh, “this will be a memorable dinner—not to you, but to me; for you see pretty women every day, but I seldom see Tom Moore!” The poet looks into Lady Fanny’s eyes and makes no immediate answer. Presently she asks, with a delicious look of simplicity, “Are you as agreeable to everybody, Mr. Moore?”—“There is but one Lady Fanny,” replies the poet; “or, to use your own beautiful simile, ‘The moon sees many brooks, but the brook sees but one moon!’ ” (Mem. jot that down.) And so is treasured up one idea for the morrow, and when the marchioness rises, and the ladies follow her to the drawing-room, Moore finds himself sandwiched between a couple of whig lords, and opposite a past or future premier—an audience of cultivation, talent, scholarship, and appreciation; and as the fresh pitcher of claret is passed round, all regards radiate to the Anacreon of the world, and with that sanction of expectation, let alone Tom Moore. Even our “Secretary of the Navy and National Songster” would “turn out his lining”—such as it is. And Moore is delightful, and with his “As you say, my lord!” he gives birth to a constellation of bright things, no one of which is dismissed with the claret. Every one at the table, except Moore, is subject to the hour—to its enthusiasm, its enjoyment—but the hour is to Moore a precious slave. So is the wine. It works for him! It brings him money from Longman! It plays his trumpet in the reviews! It is his filter among the ladies! Well may he sing its praises! Of all the poets, Moore is probably the only one who is thus master of his wine. The glorious abandon with which we fancy him, a brimming glass in his hand, singing “Fly not yet!” exists only in the fancy. He keeps a cool head and coins his conviviality; and to revert to my former figure, they who wish to know what Moore’s electricity amounts to without the convivial friction, may read his history of Ireland. Not a sparkle in it, from the landing of the Phœnicians to the battle of Vinegar Hill! He wrote that as other people write—with nothing left from the day before but the habit of labor—and the travel of a collapsed balloon on a man’s back, is not more unlike the same thing, inflated and soaring, than Tom Moore, historian, and Tom Moore, bard!
Somewhere in the small hours the poet walks home, and sitting down soberly in his little library, he puts on paper the half-score scintillations that collision, in one shape or another, has struck into the tinder of his fancy. If read from this paper, the world would probably think little of their prospect of ever becoming poetry. But the mysterious part is done—the life is breathed into the chrysalis—and the clothing of these naked fancies with winged words, Mr. Moore knows very well can be done in very uninspired moods by patient industry. Most people have very little idea what that industry is—how deeply language is ransacked, how often turned over, how untiringly rejected and recalled with some new combination, how resolutely sacrificed when only tolerable enough to pass, how left untouched day after day in the hope of a fresh impulse after repose. The vexation of a Chinese puzzle is slight, probably, to that which Moore has expended on some of his most natural and flowing single verses. The exquisite nicety of his ear, though it eventually gives his poetry its honied fluidity, gives him no quicker choice of words, nor does more, in any way, than pass inexorable judgment on what his industry brings forward. Those who think a song dashed off like an invitation to dinner, would be edified by the progressive phases of a “Moore’s Melody.” Taken with all its rewritings, emendations, &c., I doubt whether, in his most industrious seclusion, Moore averages a couplet a day. Yet this persevering, resolute, unconquerable patience of labor is the secret of his fame. Take the best thing he ever wrote, and translate its sentiments and similitudes into plain prose, and do the thing by a song of any second-rate imitator of Moore, one abstract would read as well as the other. Yet Moore’s song is immortal, and the other ephemeral as a paragraph in a newspaper, and the difference consists in a patient elaboration of language and harmony, and in that only. And even thus short, seems the space between the ephemeron and the immortal. But it is wider than they think, oh, glorious Tom Moore!
And how does Barry Cornwall write?
I answer, from the efflux of his soul! Poetry is not labor to him. He works at law—he plays, relaxes, luxuriates in poetry. Mr. Proctor has at no moment of his life, probably, after finishing a poetic effusion, designed ever to write another line. No more than the sedate man, who, walking on the edge of a playground, sees a ball coming directly towards him, and seized suddenly with a boyish impulse, jumps aside and sends it whizzing back, as he had not done for twenty years, with his cane—no more than that unconscious school-boy of fourscore (thank God there are many such live coals under the ashes) thinks he shall play again at ball. Proctor is a prosperous barrister, drawing a large income from his profession. He married the daughter of Basil Montague (well known as the accomplished scholar, and the friend of Coleridge, Lamb, and that bright constellation of spirits,) and with a family of children of whom, the world knows, he is passionately fond, he leads a more domestic life, or, rather, a life more within himself and his own, than any author, present or past, with whose habits I am conversant. He has drawn his own portrait; however, in outline, and as far as it goes, nothing could be truer. In an epistle to his friend Charles Lamb, he says:—
“Seated beside this Sherris wine,
And near to books and shapes divine,
Which poets and the painters past