"When after whole pages of sorrow and shame
She saw History write,
With a pencil of light
That illumed the whole volume, her Wellington's name."
In one of the prefaces which Moore wrote, with ebbing faculties, for the collected edition of his works, readers will find him claiming for this lyric the spirit of prophecy, because Wellington ultimately "recommended to the throne the great measure of Catholic Emancipation." If indeed at last the Duke heeded the singer's closing injunction—
"Go, plead for the land that first cradled thy fame,"
it was with no good-will: and there is far more sincerity in Moore's note somewhere in the journals that his song had been wholly wasted on the recipient of the homage. Still, there is no good ground for bringing against the poet a reproach of time-serving. His state of mind, if one endeavours to realise it, must have been strangely complicated. In the victories of Wellington, so largely won by the bravery of Irish soldiers, he felt, no doubt, as did most Irishmen, a kind of proprietary gratification; but the dethronement of Napoleon caused him no unmixed joy. Like Byron, and many another man of that day, he had a fascinated admiration for this prodigious master of legions; and moreover, Napoleon's ruin meant the establishment of the Holy Alliance, and, as one of many corollaries, the perpetuation of helotry in Ireland. Ireland had reason to bless the movement towards liberty which came from France, and not less to execrate the excesses which strengthened the hands of liberty's opponents. There is nothing in the poem that requires defence; what requires either apology or condemnation is Moore's attempt to flavour with abuse of England's detested opponent an expression of his own convictions—involving, as they did, a condemnation of English rule.
The truth is that the business of adapting Irish nationalist sentiment to the taste of English drawing-rooms was perilous to sincerity; and, in this period of his life, Moore was steadily losing touch with Ireland. The number of the Melodies under discussion closed with the beautiful lyric in which the singer bade farewell to this way of poetry:—
"Dear Harp of my Country! farewell to thy numbers,
This sweet wreath of song is the last we shall twine."
The farewell, as it proved, was only temporary, but it indicates that Moore felt the inspiration failing him; and, as a matter of fact, the four later numbers of the Melodies are by far inferior to their predecessors. Their inferiority, however, was due to no lack of sympathy; it indicates only that the artist's instinct was right, and that Moore's thought about Ireland, in later days, took naturally other forms of expression.
But in 1815 he had been absent from his country for four long years, during which his life had been engrossed with other things; and the Catholic cause, which had always been foremost in his mind, was now losing its attraction, for two reasons, sufficiently indicated in his correspondence with Lady Donegal.
In the spring of 1815, his third child, a little girl, aged only a few months, died at Mayfield; and, in hopes to soothe the mother by change of scene, Moore decided to hasten on a long-projected visit to Ireland. Lady Donegal wrote that she heard this with regret, "for it is not a safe residence for you in any way"; and she pressed on him warnings against the "Irish democrats." Moore replied, certainly with sufficient emphasis:—
"If there is anything in the world that I have been detesting and despising more than another for this long time past, it has been those very Dublin politicians whom you so fear I should associate with. I do not think a good cause was ever ruined by a more bigoted, brawling, and disgusting set of demagogues; and, though it be the religion of my fathers, I must say that much of this vile, vulgar spirit is to be traced to that wretched faith, which is again polluting Europe with Jesuitism and Inquisitions, and which of all the humbugs that have stultified mankind is the most narrow-minded and mischievous; so much for the danger of my joining Messrs. O'Connel, O'Donnel, etc."