He wrote songs to be sung; and the best verse is not that which sings best. Language has to be softened down for singing, as it need not be for speech; and this softening approaches to emasculation. The habit of writing for music injured Moore's versification even when he wrote narrative verse; and we have the result in the excessive smoothness of Lalla Rookh.
Even more unfortunately did the medium of production affect his style. Moore's conception of singing was certainly not one in which the words were to be sacrificed to the music; but he wrote his words to be sung; and words for singing must carry their meaning easily through the ear to the intelligence—for what is sung can never be caught so easily as what is spoken. He was led, therefore, to use a strict economy of ideas; to expand rather than condense his meaning. Take such a verse as this (from "Farewell, but whenever you welcome the hour"):—
"Let Fate do her worst; there are relics of joy,
Bright dreams of the past, which she cannot destroy,
Which come in the night-time of sorrow and care,
And tiring back the features that joy used to wear.
Long, long be my heart with such memories fill'd!
Like the vase, in which roses have once been distill'd—
You may break, you may shatter the vase if you will,
But the scent of the roses will hang round it still"—
and set beside it Shelley's:—
"Music when soft voices die
Vibrates in the memory:
Odours when sweet violets sicken
Live within the sense they quicken;
Rose leaves when the rose is dead
Are heaped for the beloved's bed;
And so thy thoughts, when thou art gone,
Love itself shall slumber on."
There is no doubt of Shelley's superiority; but on the other hand Shelley's words, if sung, would not carry their sense so easily as Moore's. The mind would lose itself in the quick succession of metaphors; and it is noticeable in the Melodies how often the whole song is merely the skilful and deliberate evolution of a single metaphor—an art akin to the rhetorician's. This is true even of the famous "Oh breathe not his name"; and, indeed, it is not less true that Emmet's utterance was the real poem—Moore's only an ingenious amplification of the thought—or rather of a part of it.
One must bear in mind, then, that Moore's lyrics are verse written for public utterance, designed to produce their impression instantly, and not to sink slowly into the mind: and it is useless to compare them with the packed thought of Shakespeare's sonnets, Wordsworth's odes, or whatever else is in the highest category of lyric poetry.
There is, however, a class of verse to which hardly anything can be preferred, and in it are not only the songs of Shakespeare, but some of Scott's and many of Burns's; music as simple as a bird's, dealing in the simplest emotions, free from all taint of rhetoric. In that class I do not think that anything of Moore's can be placed. But one must remember when Moore wrote. He wrote under the influence of the eighteenth century, when the reaction towards a style less coloured by convention had barely set in. He wrote, it is true, when Scott did, and not long after Burns; but both Burns and Scott (whenever Scott is at his best) had the guiding inspiration of a perfect style in the Lowland vernacular poetry, never sophisticated by criticism, or by the intrusion of a dialect of polite prose. And if one compares Moore's lyrics with the best that Burns wrote in English, when liable to the influence of Gray and the rest, I do not think it is to Burns that the preference will be given—by the impartial arbiter, who should be neither Scot nor Irish.
It is, however, unreasonable to talk about Moore's lyrics as a whole, for the work falls into two distinct categories, and in one of these Moore must be pronounced the equal of any man who ever lived. The lighter numbers breathe the very spirit of gaiety, united to a real distinction of style:—
"Drink to her, who long
Hath waked the poet's sigh,
The girl who gave to song
What gold could never buy."