was “quitte pour la peur,” and sent to receive the plaudits of his friends for his firmness, and the cautions of his own common sense with respect to his intimacies for the future.
Moore’s want of stature was an actual misfortune to him through life, which, though not shown with the bitterness of Byron on his lameness, must have been a source of perpetual vexation in society. He was one of the smallest men, perhaps, in existence, above a dwarf. Yet he was well-proportioned; and his lively countenance, which looked the very mirror of good-nature, aided by his manners, which had by instinct the grace of good society, made his figure, after the first introduction, almost forgotten. When he had established his fame, of course, none adverted to defects of any kind, and the “little Tom Moore” of Ireland became the Mr Moore of England, by the consent of all circles. He possessed, also, those gifts which create popularity. The people of Ireland have a remarkable fondness for music, and Moore was a musician by nature. Of music he knew nothing as a science, but he felt its soul. The heavy harmonies of Germany—in which the chief object is to show the toil of the performer and the patience of his auditory, to press discords into the service, and to crush the very sense of pleasure—would not have been endured by the Irish, who, like all lovers of the genuine art, prefer songs to musical problems, and to be bewitched rather than be bewildered. Moore, accordingly, cultivated the finer part—its feeling. He has been heard to say, “that if he had an original turn for anything, it was for music;” and he certainly produced, in his earliest career, some of the most original, tender, and tasteful melodies in existence for the Piano, which he touched with slight, but sufficient skill; and, sung to his own soft and sweet lines, he realised more of the magic of music than any performer whom we ever heard.
This subject, however apparently trivial, is not trifling in a Memoir of Moore; for, independently of its being his chief introduction into society, it was a characteristic of the man. He was the originator of a style, in which he had many imitators, but no equal; and after he abandoned it for other means of shining, almost no follower. It was neither Italian, nor, as we have observed, German; it had neither the frivolity of the French school nor the wildness of the Irish; it was exclusively his own—a mixture of the playful and the pathetic; sweet, and yet singular; light, and yet often drawing tears. This effect, the finest in music—for what taste would compare a Sinfonia to a song?—he accomplished by the admirable management of a sweet voice, though but of small compass, accompanied by a few chords of the instrument, rather filling up the intervals of the voice than leading them: the whole rather an exquisite recitation than a song; the singer more the minstrel than the musician.
This description of his early powers, however extravagant it may seem to strangers, will be recognised as literally true by those who heard him in Ireland, and in the budding of his talent. He was an inventor; his art required the united taste of the composer and the poet, and this accounts for its having perished with him.
But a larger field was soon to open before Moore. The Rebellion of 1798 was a death-blow to the hopes of all those sanguine speculators who longed to become Presidents of the new republic. It drained the national resources—it disgusted the national understanding—it made Ireland disunited, and England at once contemptuous of Irish feeling, and suspicious of Irish loyalty. The safety of the empire obviously rendered it impossible to leave in its rear a nation which might throw itself, at a moment’s notice, into the arms of France, Spain, or America—which had actually solicited a French army, and which still carried on transactions amounting to treason at home, and alliance abroad. Thus, the regenerators of Ireland, instead of raising her to a republic, sank her into a province. Even the dream of national independence was at an end; her Parliament was extinguished, and the only reality was the Union.
Still, though the national pride was deeply hurt by the measure, the graver judgment of the nation acquiesced in the extinction of the Legislature. This was the fruit of those concessions which had been made by the ignorance of Government, and demanded by the intrigues of the Opposition. From the period of lowering the franchise to the Roman Catholic forty-shilling freeholder, the votes of the Romish peasantry became to the Government a terror, to the Opposition a snare, and to both, the sources of a new policy. In a few sessions more, the Parliament must have become almost totally Papist. Thus, after much declamation in the clubs, and much murmuring in the streets—after threats of declaring the mover of the measure “an enemy to his country”—and after a duel between the celebrated Grattan, the head of the Opposition, and Corry, the Chancellor of the Irish Exchequer, the diadem was taken off the head of Ireland, and quietly lodged in Whitehall. England thenceforth became the field of Irish ambition, and the mart of Irish ability.
Moore came to London apparently for the purpose of commencing his studies as a barrister. Whether his volatile and fanciful spirit would have relished the details of a profession demanding so much labour in its rudiments, and so much perseverance in its pursuit, is now not worth a question, for he probably never opened a book of law; but he had brought with him a book of a more congenial kind; a translation of Anacreon, to be published by subscription, and dedicated “by permission” to the Prince of Wales, (George IV.,)—an honour obtained, like all his early popularity, through his musical accomplishments.
Moore was not a scholar, in the sense of a Markland or a Bentley; but he had the best part of scholarship, the spirit of his author. The elegance of this versification of the old Greek lover of “smiles and wine” was universally acknowledged. All former translations of Anacreon were poor and pedantic, to the richness and grace of the volume then offered to the public eye.
Whether the original was the work of Ionia or Athens; whether one-half of the Odes were not imitations in later Greek, with Gregory Nazianzen and a dozen others for their authors; whether Polycrates or Hipparchus was their patron—in short, the questions which still perplex Oxford, and break the rest of Cambridge—which drive both into the logomachies of Teutonic criticism, and waste English pens and patience on the imported drudgeries of the Leipsic press—were matters which gave the translator but slight trouble. Nature had created him for the translation—the praises of wine and beauty, of flowers and sunshine, were a language of his own; they formed his style through the greater part of his life; and Cupid and Bacchus never had a laureate more devoted, and more successful.
After lingering for some years in London, fêted by the great and followed by the little, Moore was appointed to an office in the West Indies. Thus was harshly hazarded the life of a man of genius; and the talent which was destined to distinguish his country was sent to take its chance of the yellow fever. The guest of princes and the favourite of fashion must have felt many a pang at finding himself consigned to Bermuda. The poetic romance of the “still vext Bermoothes” was probably insufficient to console him for the pavilion at Brighton, and the soirees of Portman Square. But necessity must not deliberate—the res angusta domi was imperative—and the bard submitted to banishment with the grace and gaiety that never forsook him. The appointment was unfortunate. Connected with the public revenue, it had been transacted by deputy; and Moore, on his arrival, found himself answerable for the chasms in the official chest. No one charged him with those chasms. But, as the lawyers hold, “the Crown makes no bad debts,” the unlucky poet was responsible in a sum which would have mortgaged all Parnassus, and made the Nine insolvent. The appointment was finally resigned, and Moore, solutus negotiis, shook off the dust of his feet against the gates of the West Indies.