



Produced by Andrea Ball and Marc D'Hooghe at
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THOMAS MOORE

By

STEPHEN GWYNN


ENGLISH MEN OF LETTERS


LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., Ltd.

1905




CONTENTS


CHAPTER I--Boyhood and Early Poems

CHAPTER II--Early Manhood and Marriage

CHAPTER III--"Lalla Rookh"

CHAPTER IV--Period of Residence Abroad

CHAPTER V--Work as Biographer and Controversialist

CHAPTER VI--The Decline of Life

CHAPTER VII--General Appreciation

APPENDIX

INDEX




THOMAS MOORE




CHAPTER I

BOYHOOD AND EARLY POEMS


Sudden fame, acquired with little difficulty, suffers generally a period
of obscuration after the compelling power which attaches to a man's
living personality has been removed; and from this darkness it does not
always emerge. Of such splendour and subsequent eclipse, Moore's fate
might be cited as the capital example.

The son of a petty Dublin tradesman, he found himself, almost from his
first entry on the world, courted by a brilliant society; each year
added to his friendships among the men who stood highest in literature
and statesmanship; and his reputation on the Continent was surpassed
only by that of Scott and Byron. He did not live to see a reaction. Lord
John Russell could write boldly in 1853, a year after his friend's
death, that "of English lyrical poets, Moore is surely the greatest."
There is perhaps no need to criticise either this attitude of excessive
admiration, or that which in many cases has replaced it, of tolerant
contempt. But it is as well to emphasise at the outset the fact that
even to-day, more than a century after he began to publish, Moore is
still one of the poets most popular and widely known throughout the
English-speaking world. His effect on his own race at least has been
durable; and if it be a fair test of a poet's vitality to ask how much
of his work could be recovered from oral tradition, there are not many
who would stand it better than the singer of the Irish Melodies. At
least the older generation of Irishmen and Irishwomen now living have
his poetry by heart.

The purpose of this book is to give, if possible, a just estimate of the
man's character and of his work as a poet. The problem, so far as the
biographical part is concerned, is not to discover new material but to
select from masses already in print. The Memoirs of his Life, edited by
Lord John Russell, fill eight volumes, though the life with which they
deal was neither long nor specially eventful. In addition we have
allusions to Moore, as a widely known social personage, in almost every
memoir of that time; and newspaper references by thousands have been
collected. These extraneous sources, however, add very little to the
impression which is gained by a careful reading of the correspondence
and of the long diaries in which Moore's nature, singularly unsecretive,
displays itself with perfect frankness. Whether one's aim be to justify
Moore or to condemn him, the most effective means are provided by his
own words; and for nearly everything that I have to allege in the
narrative part of this work, Moore, himself is the authority. Nor is the
critical estimate which has to be put forward, though remote from that
of Moore's official biographer, at all unlike that which the poet
himself seems to have formed of his work.

Thomas Moore was born in Dublin on the 28th of May 1779, at No. 12
Aungier Street, where his father, a native of Kerry, kept a grocer's
shop. His mother, Anastasia Clodd, was the daughter of a small provision
merchant in Wexford. Moore was their eldest child, and of the brothers
and sisters whom he mentions, only two girls, his sisters Katherine and
Ellen, appear to have grown up or to have played any part in his life.
His parents were evidently prosperous people, devoted to their clever
boy and ambitious to secure him social promotion by giving scope to the
talents which he showed from his early schooldays. The memoir of his
youth, which Moore wrote in middle life, notes the special pleasure
which his mother took in the friendship of a certain Miss Dodd, an
elderly maiden lady moving in "a class of society somewhat of a higher
level than ours"; and it is easy enough to understand why the precocious
imp of a boy found favour with this distinguished person and her guests.
He had all the gifts of an actor and a mimic, and they were encouraged
in him first at home, and then at the boarding-school to which he was
sent. Samuel Whyte, its head master, had been the teacher of Sheridan,
and though he discovered none of Sheridan's abilities, the connection
with the Sheridan family, added to his own tastes, had brought him into
close touch with the stage. He was the author of a didactic poem on "The
Theatre," a great director of private theatricals, and a teacher of
elocution. Such a man was not likely to neglect the gifts of the clever
small boy entrusted to him, and Master Moore, at the age of eleven,
already figured on the playbill of some important private theatricals as
reciting the Epilogue. He was encouraged also in the habit of rhyming, a
habit that reached back as far as he could remember; and before his
fifteenth year was far gone, he attained to the honours of print in a
creditable magazine, the _Anthologia Hibernica_. The first of his
contributions was an amatory address to a Miss Hannah Byrne, herself, it
appears, a poetess. The lines, "To Zelia on her charging the Author with
writing too much on love," need not be quoted (though the subject is
characteristic), nor the "Pastoral Ballad" which followed in the number
for October 1793. It is worth noting, however, that in 1794 we find
Moore paraphrasing Anacreon's Fifth Ode; and further that in March of
the same year he is acknowledging his debt to Mr. Samuel Whyte with
verses beginning

     "Hail heaven-taught votary of the laurel'd Nine"

--an unusual form of address from a schoolboy to his pedagogue.

Briefly, one gathers the impression that Moore's schooldays were
enlivened by many small gaieties, while his holidays abounded with the
same distractions. The family was sent down to Sandymount, now a suburb,
but then a seaside village on Dublin Bay, and there, in addition to
sea-bathing, they had their fill of mild play-acting. Moore reproduces
some lines from an epilogue written for one of these occasions when the
return to school was imminent:--

     "Our Pantaloon that did so aged look
      Must now resume his youth, his task, his book;
      Our Harlequin who skipp'd, leap'd, danced, and died,
      Must now stand trembling by his tutor's side."

And he notes genially how the pathos of his farewell nearly moved him to
tears as he recited the closing words--doubtless with a thrilling
tremble in his accents. Moore was always [greek: _artidakrous_]. But he
was a healthy, active youngster, and we read that he emulated Harlequin
in jumping talents, as well as in the command of tears and laughter; and
practised over the rail of a tent-bed till he could at last "perform the
headforemost leap of his hero most successfully."

School made little break in these pleasures; for while the family were
at the seaside, his indulgent father provided the boy with a pony on
which he rode down every Saturday to stay over the Sunday; "and at the
hour when I was expected, there generally came my sister with a number
of young girls to meet me, and full of smiles and welcomes, walked by
the side of my pony into the town." Never was a boy more petted. About
this time, too, his musical gifts began to be discovered; for Mrs. Moore
insisted that her daughter Katherine should be taught not only the
harpsichord, but also the piano, and that a piano should be bought. On
this instrument Moore taught himself to play; and since his mother had a
pleasant voice and a talent for giving gay little supper-parties,
musical people used to come to the house, and the boy had plenty of
chances for showing off his accomplishments, accompanying himself, and
developing already his uncanny knack of dramatic singing.

A young gentleman thus brought up was, one would say, in a fair way to
be spoiled, and Moore, looking back, is quick to recognise the danger.
Yet he is fully justified in the comment which closes his narrative of
the triumphant entries into Sandymount with schoolgirls escorting his
pony:--

     "There is far more of what is called vanity in my now reporting the
     tribute, than I felt then in receiving it; and I attribute very
     much to the cheerful and kindly circumstances which thus surrounded
     my childhood, that spirit of enjoyment and, I may venture to add,
     good temper, which has never, thank God, failed me to the present
     time (July 1833)."

Moreover, if his parents were interested in his pleasures, they were no
less concerned about his work. His mother, he writes, examined him daily
in his studies; sometimes even, when kept out late at a party, she would
wake the boy out of his sleep in the small hours of morning, and bid him
sit up and repeat over his lessons. Her affectionate care met with that
return from her son which was continued to the end of her life. There
was nothing in his power that Moore would not do to please his mother.

Nevertheless, touching as the relation was, it had its weak side, and
Moore in time realised it. In a notable passage of his diary, which
describes the pleasant days spent by him at Abbotsford in 1825, we read
how he congratulated Scott on the advantages of his upbringing--the
open-air life, field sports, and free intercourse with the peasantry.

     "I said that the want of this manly training showed itself in my
     poetry, which would perhaps have had a far more vigorous character,
     if it had not been for the sort of _boudoir_ education I had
     received." ("The only thing, indeed," he adds, "that conduced to
     brace and invigorate my mind was the strong political feelings that
     were stirring round me when I was a boy, and in which I took a deep
     and most ardent interest.")

Part of this stirring manifested itself in a secret association under
John Moore's own roof; for the son had organised his father's two clerks
into a debating and literary society, of which he constituted himself
president. The meetings took place after the common meal of the
household was over, when the clerks retired to their bedroom, and Master
Thomas to his own apartment--a corner of the same bedroom, but boarded
off, fitted with a table, chest of drawers, and book-case, and decorated
by its owner with inscriptions of his own composition "in the manner, as
I flattered myself, of Shenstone at the Leasowes." The secret society
met at dead of night in a closet beyond the large bedroom, once or twice
a week; and each member was bound to produce a riddle or rebus in verse,
which the others were set to solve. And in addition to this more
literary part of the proceedings, the members discussed politics--Tom
Ennis, the senior clerk, being a strong nationalist.

Politics certainly played a great part in moulding Moore's feelings and
imagination, and it should be observed that his nonage almost coincided
with the duration of Ireland's independent Parliament. He was three
years old when the Volunteers established the freedom of the legislature
in College Green, and twenty-one when Pitt and Castlereagh purchased its
extinction. His father, as a Catholic, had naturally a keen interest in
the great question of reform and Catholic enfranchisement, and Moore
remembered being taken by him to a dinner in honour of Napper Tandy,
when the hero of the evening noticed the small boy. The Latin usher at
Whyte's school too, Mr. Donovan, was an ardent patriot, and in the hours
of special instruction which he devoted to the young scholar--for Moore
had early outstripped his class-fellows in Latin and Greek--he taught
his pupil more than the classics. But these influences bred at most a
predisposition. It was Trinity College that made Moore a rebel--or as
nearly a rebel as he ever became.

The measure of partial enfranchisement passed in 1793 admitted Catholics
to study in the University of Dublin, though its emoluments were denied
them. A curious point should be noted here. The entry under June 2,
1794, reads: "Thomas Moore, P. Prot," _i.e._ Commoner (pensionarius),
Protestant. Now Moore himself states that it was for a while debated in
the family circle whether he should be entered as a Protestant to
qualify him for scholarship, fellowship and the rest; he does not seem
to know that a preliminary step was actually taken, quite possibly by
his school-master. John Moore's political friends were mostly Protestant
("the Catholics," his son writes, "being still too timorous to come
forward openly in their own cause"); the atmosphere into which the
student entered was strongly Protestant, the friends whom he made were
of the dominant religion. But neither then nor at any time was Moore
prepared to change creeds for material advantage. This is the more
remarkable because the family's religion was none of the strictest.
Moore notes that while at college he abandoned the practice of
confession, his mother, after some protest, "very wisely consenting."

Whether owing to the lack of incentive, or because he had no taste for
science, then a necessary part of any honours course, Moore troubled
little about academic successes, and, after gaining a single premium in
his first year, decided to "confine himself to such parts of the course
as fell within his own tastes and pursuits." Incidentally he earned
distinction for a composition in English verse sent in instead of the
prescribed Latin prose; and, needless to say, was busy with less
authorised verse-writing. He did, however, in his third year, 1797,
present himself for the scholarship examination and was (he says) placed
on the list of successful candidates, though his religion disqualified
him for enjoyment of the privileges. Records show that on Tuesday, 13th
June of that year, thirteen exhibitions were given, supplementary to the
list of scholars published on Trinity Monday (the 12th), and on this
list Moore stands first. The award was presumably a solatium.

But the serious and lasting part of his university education was gained,
as so often happens, not from his tutors but from his associates. The
recall of Lord Fitzwilliam in March 1795--"that fatal turning-point in
Irish history," as Mr. Lecky calls it--had shattered the hopes of Irish
Catholics and made civil war a result to be eagerly urged by extremists
on both sides. "The political ferment soon found its way within the
walls of our university," writes Moore; and among his personal friends
was a young man destined to tragic fame.

     "This youth was Robert Emmet, whose brilliant success in his
     college studies, and more particularly in the scientific portion of
     them, had crowned his career, as far as he had gone, with all the
     honours of the course; while his powers of oratory displayed at a
     debating society, of which, about this time (1796-7), I became a
     member, were beginning to excite universal attention, as well from
     the eloquence as the political boldness of his displays. He was, I
     rather think, by two classes, my senior, though it might have been
     only by one. But there was, at all events, such an interval between
     our standings as, at that time of life, makes a material
     difference; and when I became a member of the debating society, I
     found him in full fame, not only for his scientific attainments
     but also for the blamelessness of his life and the grave suavity of
     his manners."

In the beginning of 1797 this debating club came to an end, and Emmet as
well as Moore transferred his energies to the more important Historical
Society. Here Moore, by his own account, distinguished himself only as
the author of "a burlesque poem called an 'Ode upon Nothing, with Notes
by Trismegistus Rustifustius,'" which earned first a medal by general
acclamation, and then a vote of censure by reason of the broad licence
of certain passages. Emmet, however, was a member of a different kind,
and the speeches delivered by him attracted so much attention that a
senior man was detailed by the governing Board to attend meetings and
answer the young orator. About the same time a paper called _The Press_
was set up by Emmet's elder brother, Thomas Addis Emmet, and other
leaders of the United Irishmen; and in this Moore published anonymously
a "Letter to the Students of Trinity College." The letter was, by
Moore's account of it, treasonable enough, and when, according to
custom, he read out the paper to his father and mother at home, they
pronounced it to be "very bold." Next day a friend called and made some
veiled allusion to the matter, which Moore's mother caught at, and she,
says Moore, "most earnestly entreated of me never again to venture on so
dangerous a step." Her son promised, and a few days later Emmet's
influence was added to the mother's. Moore's account of the circumstance
is so characteristic that it must be quoted.

     "A few days after, in the course of one of those strolls into the
     country which Emmet and I used often to take together, our
     conversation turned upon this letter, and I gave him to understand
     it was mine; when, with that almost feminine gentleness of manner
     which he possessed, and which is so often found in such determined
     spirits, he owned to me that on reading the letter, though pleased
     with its contents, he could not help regretting that the public
     attention had been thus drawn to the politics of the University, as
     it might have the effect of awakening the vigilance of the college
     authorities, and frustrate the progress of the good work (as we
     both considered it) which was going on there so quietly. Even then,
     boyish as my own mind was, I could not help being struck with the
     manliness of the view which I saw he took of what men ought to do
     in such times and circumstances, namely, not to _talk_ or _write_
     about their intentions, but to _act_. He had never before, I think,
     in conversation with me, alluded to the existence of the United
     Irish societies in college, nor did he now, or at any subsequent
     time, make any proposition to me to join in them, a forbearance
     which I attribute a good deal to his knowledge of the watchful
     anxiety about me which prevailed at home, and his foreseeing the
     difficulty which I should experience--from being, as the phrase is,
     constantly 'tied to my mother's apron-strings'--in attending the
     meetings of the society without being discovered."

It will be seen that Moore makes no claim for heroic conduct. One may
assume with great certainty that in such a matter Emmet would not have
obeyed a mother's injunctions. But although Moore's parents desired that
their son should not go out of his way to incur risks, they were by no
means of opinion that he should seek safety at any price. In 1797, on
the eve of the rebellion, an inquisition was held within Trinity by Lord
Chancellor FitzGibbon. On the first day of the tribunal's sitting, one
of Emmet's friends, named Hamilton, refused to answer certain questions,
and was sent down with the sentence of banishment from the University,
carrying with it exclusion from all the learned professions. Moore went
home and discussed the situation that evening.

     "The deliberate conclusion which my dear, honest father and mother
     came to was that, overwhelming as the consequences were to all
     their prospects and hopes for me, yet if the questions leading to
     the crimination of others which had been put to almost all examined
     on that day, and which poor Dacre Hamilton alone refused to answer,
     should be put also to me, I must in the same manner and at all
     risks return a similar refusal."

Next day Moore was called, and, after objecting to the oath, took it
with the express reservation that he should refuse to answer any
question which might criminate his associates. No such question was
asked, and his fortitude was not put to the proof, nor does it seem that
after this Moore dabbled in rebellion. Five years later, in 1803, when
Emmet's abortive rising was nipped in the bud and the young leader went
to his death, Moore was in London, preparing to depart for Bermuda. None
of the letters preserved from that time contain any reference to this
tragedy; but Moore's writings show again and again that the capacity for
hero-worship was evoked in him by this friend of boyhood as by no other
figure of his time. In the first number of the _Irish Melodies_,
published in 1808, an early place is given to the lyric:--

     "O breathe not his name, let it sleep in the shade,
      Where cold and unhonoured his ashes are laid;
      Sad, silent, and dark be the tears that we shed,
      As the night-dew that falls on the grass o'er his head.

     "But the night-dew that falls, though in silence it weeps,
      Shall brighten with verdure the grave where he sleeps;
      And the tear that we shed, though in secret it rolls,
      Shall long keep his memory green in our souls."

Every one, in Ireland at least, who read these lines heard in them an
echo of the closing passage in Emmet's speech from the dock:--

     "I have but one request to ask at my departure from this world. It
     is the charity of its silence. Let no man write my epitaph. When my
     country shall