His next work was an opera. This attempt did not encourage him in trial of the stage. It had but a brief existence. Moore, though lively, was not a wit; and though inventive, was not dramatic. The inimitable “Duenna” of the inimitable Sheridan has expelled all Opera from the English stage, by extinguishing all rivalry.
But a broader opportunity now spread before him. A musical collector in Ireland had compiled a volume of the Native melodies, which, though generally rude in science, and always accompanied by the most aboriginal versification, attracted some publicity. Moore, in his happiest hour, glanced over these songs, and closed with the proposal of a publisher in Ireland to write the poetry, and bring the melodies themselves into a civilised form. The latter object he effected by the assistance of Stevenson, an accomplished musician, and even a popular composer: the former might be safely intrusted to himself.
It is to be remembered (though Ireland may be wroth to the bottom of its sensibilities) that its most remote musical pedigree falls within the last century; that all beyond is shared with Scotland; and that the harmonies which Ossian shook from his harp, and which rang in the palaces of Fingal, and the nursing of Romulus and Remus, have equal claims to authenticity. Beyond the last century, the claims of Ireland to music were disputed by Scotland; and there was a species of partnership in their popular airs. But the true musician of Ireland was Carolan, a blind man who wandered about the houses of the country gentlemen, like Scott’s minstrel, except that his patriotism was less prominent than his love of eating and drinking. He thought more of pay than of Party, and limited his Muse to her proper subjects—Love and Wine. But he was a musician by nature, and therefore worth ten thousand by art; and the finest melodies in Moore’s portfolio were the product of a mind which had no master, and no impulse but its genius.
Time had not weaned Moore from the absurdity of imagining that every rebel must be a hero, or that men who universally begged their lives, or died by the rope, were the true regenerators of the country. His early connection with the Emmett family had been distressingly renewed by the execution of Robert Emmett, justly punished for a combination of folly and wickedness, perhaps without example in the narratives of impotent convulsion. Emmett was a barrister, struggling through the first difficulties of his difficult profession, when somebody left him a luckless legacy of five hundred pounds. He laid it all out in powder and placards, and resolved to “make a Rebellion.” Without any one man of note to join him, without even any one patron or member of faction to give the slightest assistance, without any one hope but in miracle, he undertook to overthrow the Government, to crush the army, to extinguish the Constitution, to remodel the Aristocracy, to scourge the Church, to abolish the throne, and, having achieved these easy matters, to place Mr Robert Emmett on the summit of Irish empire.
Accordingly, he purchased a green coat with a pair of gold epaulettes; rushed from a hovel in a back street, at the head of about fifty vagabonds with pikes; was met and beaten by a party of yeomanry going to parade; ran away with his army; hid himself in the vicinity of Dublin for a few days; was hunted out, and was tried and hanged. Those are the actual features of the transaction, where poetry has done its utmost to blazon the revolt, and partisanship has lavished its whole budget of lies on the heroism of the revolter; those are the facts, and the only facts, of Mr Robert Emmett’s revolution.
Moore made his full advantage of the disturbances of the time; and it must be allowed that they wonderfully improved his poetry. Their strong reality gave it a strength which it never possessed before, and the imaginary poutings of boys and girls were vividly exchanged for the imaginary grievances of men. What can be more animated than these lines:—
“Oh, for the swords of former time!
Oh, for the men who bore them!
When, armed for Right, they stood sublime,
And tyrants crouched before them.