When pleasure, like the midnight flower,
That scorns the eye of vulgar light,
Begins to bloom for sons of night,
And maids who love the moon.”
We can imagine the look of melancholy with which, after having finished his stanzas, Moore gave a moonlight glance to the woods and wilds, as he stood at his cottage door, and thought of the lively scenes at that moment glittering in London. Solitude may be the place of the philosopher, and universities the stronghold of science; but, for the knowledge of life, the play of character, the vigour of manly competitorship, and even the variety of views, events, and character, which make the true materials of the poetic faculty, association with our kind is indispensable. The poet in retirement either becomes the worship of a circle of women, who pamper him with panegyric, until he degenerates into silliness; or, living alone, becomes the worse thing—a worshipper of himself. Like a garrison cut off from its supplies, he lives on short allowance of ideas; like a hermit, thinks his rags sanctity, and his nonsense Oracles; or, like Robinson Crusoe, imagines his geese conversible, and his island an empire.
It is true, that Moore suffered less from this famine of poetic food than most of his race. His buoyancy of spirit never lost sight wholly of London, and his annual visit to the concerts and conversations of Berkeley Square, and other scenes of high life, refreshed his recollections. But when he tells us that Lalla Rookh was written “amid the snows of two or three Derbyshire winters,” and, in a phraseology which seems like apologising to himself for this exile, talks of his “being enabled by that concentration of thought, which retirement alone can give, to call up around him some of the sunniest of his Eastern scenes,” the very toil and turgidity of the language show us that he felt himself in the wrong place. In fact, now that naked necks, turned-down shirt-collars, and dishevelled hair, no longer make poets à la Byron—when even the white waistcoats of Young England are no longer proof of chivalry—we wish to save the innocent hearts and fantastic heads of the rising generation from the experiment which Don Quixote performed so little to the satisfaction of Sancho Panza in the desert. We never heard of a great poet living a hundred miles from a metropolis. Contiguity to the world of men and women was essential. All the leaders of the tribe lived as near London as they could. Cowley lived within a walk, Pope within a drive, Milton within sight, of the walls—Shakspeare saw London Bridge every day of his life—Dryden lived in the Grecian Coffeehouse—Byron, with his own goodwill, never would have stirred out of Bond Street; and when the newspapers and Doctors’ Commons at length drove him abroad, he nestled down in Venice, instead of singing among the slopes of the Apennines, or acting distraction among the pinnacles of the Alps. It is even not improbable that the last few and melancholy years of Moore’s life owed some of their depression to the weariness of this unnatural solitude.
On his return from America in 1803, we lose sight of him for a while. He was then probably harassed by government transactions connected with his luckless appointment; but in 1805 he gave unhappy evidence of his revival by the publication of Poems by Mr Thomas Little.
We have no desire to speak of this work. Perhaps “his poverty, but not his will,” was in fault. He made some kind of apology at the time, by attributing the performance “to an imagination which had become the slave of the passions;” and subsequently he made the better apology of excluding it from his collected volumes. Yet, in this work, he did less harm to society than injustice to himself. The graver classes, of course, repelled it at once; the fashionable world took but little notice of a book which could not be laid in their drawing-rooms; and the profligate could be but little excited by its babyisms, for Moore’s amatory poems were always babyish. They wanted, in a remarkable degree, the fervency of passion. They prattled rather than felt: they babbled of lips and eyes like an impudent child; their Cupid was always an Urchin, and the urchin was always in the nursery. His verses of this school were flowing, but they never rose above prettiness; they never exhibited love in its living reality—in its seriousness and power—its madness of the brain, and absorption of the soul—its overwhelming raptures, and its terrible despair. There is a deeper sense of the truth and nature of passion in a single ballad of Burns than in all the amatory poems that Moore ever wrote.
The injustice to himself consisted in his thus leaving it in the hands of every stranger, to connect the life of the man with the licentiousness of the author. Yet we have never heard that his life was other than decorous; his conversation certainly never offended general society—his manners were polished—and we believe that his mind was at all times innocent of evil intention. Still, these poems threw a long shade on the gentle lustre of his fame.
He now fell under the lash of the Edinburgh Review, never more sternly, and seldom so justly, exercised. Moore indignantly sent a message to the editor. Jeffrey, refusing to give up the name of the Zoilus in disguise, accepted the message, and the parties met. Fortunately some friend, with more sense than either, sent also his message, but it was to the Bow Street magistrates, and the belligerents were captured on the field. In conveying the instruments of war to Bow Street, the bullets had fallen out; and this circumstance was, of course, too comic to be forgotten by the wits. The press shot forth its epigrams, the point of which was the harmlessness of the hostilities. It was observed—