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 fashion 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 passage in the Journal recalls, across a gulf of years, one evening at a musical assembly, 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 friendship which he possessed showed itself a good deal with women. From these years dates the long intimacy with Lady Donegal and her sister, Miss Godfrey—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 friendships 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 title. 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 associate 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 godfather for Rothschild's child, 'Talleyrand,' said a Frenchman. 'Pourquoi, Monsieur?' 'Parce qu'il est le moins chrétien possible.' Moore is a delightful, gay, voluptuous, refined, natural creature; infinitely more unaffected than Wordsworth; not blunt and uncultivated like Chantrey, or bilious and shivering like Campbell. No affectation, but a true, refined, delicate, frank poet, with sufficient air of the world to prove his fashion, sufficient honesty of manner to show fashion 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 analyse 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 Shelley. But throughout his Diary, one finds him manifesting, in many passages, 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 Shelley 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 Shelley (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 anapæstic 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.