English Lands Letters and Kings 16

English Lands Letters and Kings 16

And it was pretty sure to come: he delighted in giving his very feeling

and musical voice range over the heads of fine-feathered women. The

peacock’s plumes, the shiver of the crystal, the glitter of Babylon,

always charmed him.

 

Nor was it all only tinkling sound that he gave back. For proof I cite one

or two bits:--

 

“Then I sing the wild song, ’twas once such a pleasure to hear,

When our voices commingling breathed, like one, on the ear;

And, as Echo far off thro’ the vale, my sad orison rolls,

I think, O my love! ’tis thy voice from the Kingdom of Souls

Faintly answering still the notes that once were so dear.”

 

And again:--

 

“Dear Harp of my Country! farewell to thy numbers,

This sweet wreath of song is the last we shall twine.

Go sleep, with the Sunshine of Fame on thy slumbers,

Till touched by some hand less unworthy than mine.

 

“If the pulse of the patriot, soldier, or lover

Have throbbed at our lay, ’tis thy glory alone;

I was _but_ as the wind, passing heedlessly over,

And all the wild sweetness I wak’d was thy own.”

 

This is better than dynamite to stir Ireland’s best pulses, even now.

 

 

_Lalla Rookh._

 

Mr. Moore had his little country vacations--among them, that notable stay

up in the lovely county of Derbyshire, near to Ashbourne and Dovedale, and

the old fishing grounds of Walton and of Cotton--where he wrote the larger

part of his first considerable poem, _Lalla Rookh_--which had amazing

success, and brought to its author the sum of £3,000. But I do not think

that what inspiration is in it came to him from the hollows or the heights

of Derbyshire; I should rather trace its pretty Oriental confusion of

sound and scenes to the jingle of London chandeliers. Yet the web, the

gossamer, the veils and the flying feet do not seem to touch ground

anywhere in England, but shift and change and grow out of his Eastern

readings and dreams.

 

Moore married at thirty-two--after he was known for the Irish melodies,

but before the publication of _Lalla Rookh_; and in his _Letters and

Diary_ (if you read them--though they make an enormous mass to read, and

frighten most people away by their bulk), you will come upon very

frequent, and very tender mention of “Dear Bessie”--the wife. It is true,

there were rumors that he wofully neglected her, but hardly well founded.

Doubtless there was many a day and many a week when she was guarding the

cottage and the children at Sloperton; and he bowing and pirouetting his

way amongst the trailing robes of their ladyships who loved music and

literature in London; but how should he refuse the invitations of his

Lordship this or that? Or how should she--who has no robes that will stand

alone--bring her pretty home gowns into that blazon of the salons? Always,

too (if his letters may be trusted), he is eager to make his escape

between whiles--wearied of this _tintamarre_--and to rush away to his

cottage at Sloperton[52] for a little slippered ease, and a romp with the

children. Poor children--they all drop away, one by one--two only reaching

maturity--then dying. The pathetic stories of the sickening, the danger

and the hush, come poignantly into his Diary, and it does seem that the

winning clatter of the world gets a hold upon his wrenched heart

over-quickly again. But what right have you or I to judge in such matters?

 

There are chirrupy little men--and women, too,--on whom grief does not

seem to take a hard grip; all the better for them! Moore, I think, was

such a one, and was braced up always and everywhere by his own healthy

pulses, and, perhaps, by a sense of his own sufficiency. His vanities are

not only elastic, but--by his own bland and child-like admissions--they

seem sometimes almost monumental. He writes in his _Diary_, “Shiel

(that’s an Irish friend) says I am the first poet of the day, and join the

beauty of the Bird-of-Paradise’s plumes to the strength of the eagle’s

wing.” Fancy a man copying that sort of thing into his own _Diary_, and

regaling himself with it!

 

Yet he is full of good feeling--does not cherish resentments--lets who

will pat him on the shoulder (though he prefers a lord’s pat). Then he

forgives injuries or slights grandly; was once so out with Jeffrey that a

duel nearly came of it; but afterward was his hail-fellow and good friend

for years. Sometimes he shows a magnanimous strain--far more than his

artificialities of make-up would seem to promise. Thus, being at issue

with the publisher, John Murray (a long-dated difference), he determines

on good advisement to be away with it; and so goes smack into the den of

the great publisher and gives him his hand: such action balances a great

deal of namby-pambyism.

 

But what surprises more than all about Moore, is the very great reputation

that he had in his day. We, in these latter times, have come to reckon him

(rather rashly, perhaps) only an arch gossipper of letters--a butterfly of

those metropolitan gardens--easy, affable, witty, full of smiles, full of

good feeling, full of pretty little rhythmical utterances--singing songs

as easy as a sky-lark (and leaving the sky thereafter as empty); planting

nothing that lifts great growth, or tells larger tale than lies in his own

lively tintinnabulation of words.

 

Yet Byron said of him: “There is nothing Moore may not do, if he sets

about it.” Sydney Smith called him “A gentleman of small stature, but full

of genius, and a steady friend of all that is honorable.” Leigh Hunt says:

“I never received a visit from him, but I felt as if I had been talking

with Prior or Sir Charles Sedley.” It is certain that he must have been a

most charming companion. Walter Scott says: “It would be a delightful

addition to life if Thomas Moore had a cottage within two miles of me.”

Indeed, he was always quick to scent anything that might amuse, and to

store it up. His diaries overflow with these bright specks and bits of

talk, which may kindle a laugh, but do not nestle in the memory.

 

But considered as a poet whose longish work ought to live and charm the

coming generations, his reputation certainly does not hold to the old

illuminated heights. Poems of half a century ago, which _Lalla Rookh_

easily outshone, have now put the pretty orientalisms into shade. Nor can

we understand how so many did, and do, put such twain of verse-makers as

Byron and Moore into one leash, as if they were fellows in power. In the

comparison the author of the _Loves of the Angels_ seems to me only a

little important-looking, kindly pug--nicely combed, with ribbons about

the neck--in an embroidered blanket, with jingling bells at its corners;

and Byron--beside him--a lithe, supple leopard, with a tread that

threatens and a dangerous glitter in the eye. Milk diet might sate that

other; but this one, if occasion served, would lap blood.

 

In the pages that follow we shall, among others, more or less notable,

encounter again that lithe leopard in some of his wanton leaps--into

verse, into marriage, into exile, and into the pit of death at

Missolonghi.

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER V.

 

 

We opened our budget in the last chapter with the _Quarterly Review_,

which was just getting upon its legs through the smart, keen, and hard

writing of Mr. William Gifford. It throve afterward under the coddling of

the most literary of the Tory gentlemen in London, and its title has

always been associated with the names of John Wilson Croker, of Dr.

Southey, and of Mr. Lockhart. It is a journal, too, which has always been

tied by golden bonds to the worship of tradition and of vested privilege,

and which has always been ready with its petulant, impatient bark of

detraction at reform or reformers, or at any books which may have had a

scent of Liberalism. Leigh Hunt, of course, came in for periodic

scathings--some of them deserved; some not deserved. Indeed, I am

half-disposed to repent what may have seemed a too flippant mention of

this very graceful poet and essayist. Of a surety, there is an abounding

affluence of easy language--gushing and disporting over his pages--which

lures one into reading and into dreamy acquiescence; but read as much as

we may, and as long as we will, we shall go away from the reading with a

certain annoyance that there is so little to keep out of it all--so little

that sticks to the ribs and helps.

 

As for the poet Moore, of whom also we may have spoken in terms which may

seem of too great disparagement to those who have loved to linger in his

 

“Vale of Cashmere

With its roses, the brightest that earth ever gave.

Its temples, and grottos, and fountains as clear

As the love-lighted eyes that hang over their wave,”

 

no matter what may become of these brilliant orientalisms, or of his life

of Byron, or of his diaries, and his “Two-penny Post Bag,” it is certain

that his name will be gratefully kept alive by his sparkling, patriotic,

and most musical Irish melodies; and under that sufficient monument we

leave him.

 

As for Landor--surely the pages in which we dealt with him were not too

long: a strange, strong bit of manhood--as of one fed on collops of bear’s

meat; a big animal nature, yet wonderfully transfused by a vivid

intellectuality--fine and high--that pierced weighty subjects to their

core; and yet--and yet, singing such heart-shivering tributes as that to

Rose Aylmer: coarse as the bumpkins on the sheep wolds of Lincoln, and yet

with as fine subtleties in him as belonged to the young Greeks who

clustered about the writer of the _Œdipus Tyrannus_.

 

 

_The “First Gentleman.”_

 

King George IV. was an older man than any of those we have commented on;

indeed, he was a prematurely old man at sixty-five--feeling the shivers

and the stings of his wild life: I suppose no one ever felt the approaches

of age more mortifyingly. He had counted so much on being the fine

gentleman to the last--such a height, such a carriage, such a grace! It

was a dark day for him when his mirror showed wrinkles that his cosmetics

would not cover, and a stoop in the shoulders which his tailors could not

bolster out of sight. Indeed, in his later years he shrunk from exposure

of his infirmities, and kept his gouty step out of reach of the curious,

down at Windsor, where he built a cottage in a wood; and arranged his

drives through the Park so that those who had admired this Apollo at his

best should never know of his shakiness. Thither went his conclave of

political advisers--sometimes Canning, the wonderful orator--sometimes the

Duke of Wellington, with the honors of Waterloo upon him--sometimes young

Sir Robert Peel, just beginning to make his influence felt; oftener yet,

Charles Greville, whose memoirs are full of piquant details about the

royal household--not forgetting that army of tailors and hair-dressers who

did their best to assuage the misery and gratify the vanities of the gouty

king. And when he died--which he hated exceedingly to do--in 1830, there

came to light such a multitude of waistcoats, breeches, canes,

snuff-boxes, knee-buckles, whips, and wigs, as I suppose were never

heaped before around any man’s remains. The first gentleman in Europe

could not, after all, carry these things with him. His brother, William

IV., who succeeded him, was a bluff old Admiral--with not so high a sense

of the proprieties of life as George; but honester even in his badnesses

(which were very many) and, with all his coarseness and vulgarity,

carrying a brusque, sailor-like frankness that half redeemed his