It is I think mainly as an artist in metre that Moore still holds an importance in the history of English poetry; and any one considering the poems just quoted will see how individual and original were his achievements. But the admirable qualities in his verse by which he impressed his contemporaries were rather those of lightness and swiftness: its sweetness, of which much was made, is a good deal less admirable. For this, however, the nature of his best lyric work was largely responsible.
He wrote songs to be sung; and the best verse is not that which sings best. Language has to be softened down for singing, as it need not be for speech; and this softening approaches to emasculation. The habit of writing for music injured Moore"s versification even when he wrote narrative verse; and we have the result in the excessive smoothness of _Lalla Rookh_.
Even more unfortunately did the medium of production affect his style.
Moore"s conception of singing was certainly not one in which the words were to be sacrificed to the music; but he wrote his words to be sung; and words for singing must carry their meaning easily through the ear to the intelligence--for what is sung can never be caught so easily as what is spoken. He was led, therefore, to use a strict economy of ideas; to expand rather than condense his meaning. Take such a verse as this (from "Farewell, but whenever you welcome the hour"):--
"Let Fate do her worst; there are relics of joy, Bright dreams of the past, which she cannot destroy, Which come in the night-time of sorrow and care, And tiring back the features that joy used to wear.
Long, long be my heart with such memories fill"d!
Like the vase, in which roses have once been distill"d-- You may break, you may shatter the vase if you will, But the scent of the roses will hang round it still"--
and set beside it Sh.e.l.ley"s:--
"Music when soft voices die Vibrates in the memory: Odours when sweet violets sicken Live within the sense they quicken; Rose leaves when the rose is dead Are heaped for the beloved"s bed; And so thy thoughts, when thou art gone, Love itself shall slumber on."
There is no doubt of Sh.e.l.ley"s superiority; but on the other hand Sh.e.l.ley"s words, if sung, would not carry their sense so easily as Moore"s. The mind would lose itself in the quick succession of metaphors; and it is noticeable in the _Melodies_ how often the whole song is merely the skilful and deliberate evolution of a single metaphor--an art akin to the rhetorician"s. This is true even of the famous "Oh breathe not his name"; and, indeed, it is not less true that Emmet"s utterance was the real poem--Moore"s only an ingenious amplification of the thought--or rather of a part of it.
One must bear in mind, then, that Moore"s lyrics are verse written for public utterance, designed to produce their impression instantly, and not to sink slowly into the mind: and it is useless to compare them with the packed thought of Shakespeare"s sonnets, Wordsworth"s odes, or whatever else is in the highest category of lyric poetry.
There is, however, a cla.s.s of verse to which hardly anything can be preferred, and in it are not only the songs of Shakespeare, but some of Scott"s and many of Burns"s; music as simple as a bird"s, dealing in the simplest emotions, free from all taint of rhetoric. In that cla.s.s I do not think that anything of Moore"s can be placed. But one must remember when Moore wrote. He wrote under the influence of the eighteenth century, when the reaction towards a style less coloured by convention had barely set in. He wrote, it is true, when Scott did, and not long after Burns; but both Burns and Scott (whenever Scott is at his best) had the guiding inspiration of a perfect style in the Lowland vernacular poetry, never sophisticated by criticism, or by the intrusion of a dialect of polite prose. And if one compares Moore"s lyrics with the best that Burns wrote _in English_, when liable to the influence of Gray and the rest, I do not think it is to Burns that the preference will be given--by the impartial arbiter, who should be neither Scot nor Irish.
It is, however, unreasonable to talk about Moore"s lyrics as a whole, for the work falls into two distinct categories, and in one of these Moore must be p.r.o.nounced the equal of any man who ever lived. The lighter numbers breathe the very spirit of gaiety, united to a real distinction of style:--
"Drink to her, who long Hath waked the poet"s sigh, The girl who gave to song What gold could never buy."
Still more characteristic perhaps is another, so melodious and so roguish:--
"The young May moon is beaming, love, The glow-worm"s lamp is gleaming, love, How sweet to rove Through Morna"s grove, When the drowsy world is dreaming, love!
Then awake!--the heavens look bright, my dear, "Tis never too late for delight, my dear, And the best of all ways To lengthen our days Is to steal a few hours from the night, my dear."
Neither Prior nor Praed, nor any other master of the lighter lyric, has equalled these; and better still, perhaps, is the well-known verse:--
"The time I"ve lost in wooing, In watching and pursuing The light that lies In woman"s eyes, Has been my heart"s undoing.
Though Wisdom oft has sought me, I scorn"d the lore she brought me.
My only books Were woman"s looks, And folly"s all they"ve taught me."
But it should be noticed that the gay metre, which fits this last humour like a glove, is on the very next page applied to a serious theme, which it dishonours, none the less for the refrain tacked on:--
"Oh, where"s the slave so lowly, Condemn"d to chains unholy, Who, could he burst His bonds at first, Would pine beneath them slowly?
What soul, whose wrongs degrade it, Would wait till time decay"d it, When thus its wing At once may spring To the throne of Him who made it?
Farewell, Erin,--farewell, all, Who live to weep our fall."
The tune no doubt demanded the double rhyme, and in Irish, it must be remembered, double rhymes do not involve a jingle, being only an a.s.sonance of the vowels ("weepeth" for instance would be a full rhyme to "meeting"). Moore, writing English, was profuse in double rhymes, and did not even shrink from the device, proper only, with few exceptions, to trivial and comic verse, of forming the rhyme with two words. Thus, for instance, we find him destroying a fine opening in the lyric:--
"Avenging and bright fall the swift sword of Erin On him who the brave sons of Usna betray"d-- For every fond eye he hath waken"d a tear in, A drop from his heart-wounds shall weep o"er her blade."
All this criticism is of course from the standpoint of a reader.
Considered as compositions to be sung, the _Melodies_ are probably little injured by this defect in style, and the rhetorical effect of--
"Where"s the slave so lowly Condemned to chains unholy,"
may even gain by the amplitude of the ending.
Throughout, I think, it can hardly be denied that the poetry of Moore"s lyrics lies very close to eloquence and is remote from that distinctive quality of the highest poetic expression which transcends rhetoric altogether. A proof lies in the fact that these songs are among the most translatable of all poetry--and among the most translated. Their charm lies, like that of French poetry (before the Romantic movement), in the felicitous expression of an apt or moving thought. It might be difficult to express the idea so well in another language; but no one would feel it impossible. Take such lines as:--
"To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow, Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,"
and the most careless will feel that, beyond the idea expressed, there is an accent, and a suggestion as if of gesture, somehow incorporated with the actual words and inseparable from them. An effect of this kind is rarely achieved by Moore. His words always clearly convey the definite thought, but they hardly ever convey anything more. We have, in the most characteristic examples of his art, a quite extraordinary eloquence, in such poems as those on Emmet and on Emmet"s betrothed, or that on Lord Edward ("When he who adores thee"), or "The Prince"s Song"
("When first I met thee"); or again in the fierce strain of "Sad one of Sion." The last stanzas of this may be quoted; they compare the fate that was Judea"s with the fate that may be Ireland"s.
"Yet hadst thou thy vengeance--yet came there the morrow, That shines out, at last, on the longest dark night, When the sceptre that smote thee with slavery and sorrow, Was shiver"d at once, like a reed, in thy sight.
"When that cup, which for others the proud Golden City Had brimm"d full of bitterness, drench"d her own lips; And the world she had trampled on heard, without pity, The howl in her halls, and the cry from her ships.
"When the curse Heaven keeps for the haughty came over Her merchants rapacious, her rulers unjust, And, a ruin, at last, for the earthworm to cover, The Lady of Kingdoms lay low in the dust."
Nothing could be more complete and rounded as the expression of an emotion than "The Harp that once"; but I find less rhetoric and even more poetry in the lovely address to the spirit of Irish music which closed the sixth number of the _Melodies_, and should have closed the series. Familiar as it is, Moore has become so far obsolete, for English readers, that it may be given here:--
"Dear Harp of my Country! in darkness I found thee, The cold chain of silence had hung o"er thee long, When proudly, my own Island Harp, I unbound thee, And gave all thy chords to light, freedom, and song!
The warm lay of love and the light note of gladness Have waken"d thy fondest, thy liveliest thrill; But so oft hast thou echo"d the deep sigh of sadness, That even in thy mirth it will steal from thee still.
"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 touch"d by some hand less unworthy than mine: If the pulse of the patriot, soldier, or lover, Have throbb"d at our lay, "tis thy glory alone; I was but as the wind, pa.s.sing heedlessly over, And all the wild sweetness I waked was thy own."
Except in the _Sacred Songs_ there is nothing in Moore"s work fit to stand beside such lyrics as these; and the finest of these _Songs_ breathes an inspiration very like that of the _Melodies_:--
"Fall"n is thy throne, O Israel!
Silence is o"er thy plains; Thy dwellings all lie desolate, Thy children weep in chains."
Another opens with a very beautiful verse:--
"The turf shall be my fragrant shrine; My temple, Lord! that arch of thine; My censer"s breath the mountain airs, And silent thoughts my only prayers."
But here, in the working out of the idea, one feels, as so often in Moore, rather sated with sweetness. For an extreme example of this cloying ornament, to which he owed so much of his popularity, one would quote:--
"Oh! had we some bright little isle of our own, In a blue summer ocean far off and alone, Where a leaf never dies in the still-blooming bowers, And the bee banquets on through a whole year of flowers; Where the sun loves to pause With so fond a delay, That the night only draws A thin veil o"er the day; Where simply to feel that we breathe, that we live, Is worth the best joy that life elsewhere can give."
There is no flaw in such work, but the taste is too florid.
Occasionally, however, we find his taste wholly at fault in the choice of a phrase, as in "Sir Knight, _I feel not the least alarm_," or the still worse "Believe me, if all those _endearing young charms_,"--a lapse into the worst dulcification of confectionery.
There is of course a fashion in verse as in anything else, and Moore"s excellences are precisely the least congenial to the current taste in criticism. There is a fashion for nakedness of expression, and Moore always shrank from brutality; there is a fashion for strained uses of language, and Moore was always studiously accurate and lucid. But it may be questioned whether, setting aside the opinion of professed and professional critics, Moore"s poetry would not be found to retain a vigorous life. He was never, and never wished to be, in the least esoteric; his object was to be understood by all. A poet who insists upon this aim must perhaps sacrifice something, but he may also achieve something not common. Oddly enough, there is no poet in English except Goldsmith who appeals to simple people so much as Moore. These two can often bring poetry home in triumph where even Shakespeare would never find an entrance.
But Moore"s importance in the history of literature lies in his connection not with English but with Irish literature. It was not for nothing that Ireland hailed him for her first national poet. Nowadays, even English readers probably know that poetry of a cla.s.s not inferior to Moore"s was being written in Ireland in Moore"s lifetime. He was the younger contemporary of Seaghan Clarach, the full contemporary of Raftery. But the nation which stood behind Grattan--that fused, bi-lingual people welded into a unity during the years that led up to 1782, yet not so closely welded but that a wedge could be driven in--accepted English as the language of political leadership; and it caught eagerly at any manifestation of its national unity. Deprived of a parliament, it found a poet of its own. It heard for the first time in the _Irish Melodies_ a song that came from the heart of Ireland, uttered in a language which nine out of every ten Irishmen could understand. A journalist, writing in 1810, says: "Moore has done more for the revival of our national spirit than all the political writers whom Ireland has seen for a century." The other Irishmen who had shown great literary talent--Burke, Goldsmith, and Sheridan--belonged body and soul to English letters. Moore"s case was different. Almost without knowing it, he wrote primarily for his own countrymen, and in return they honoured him, not perhaps on this side idolatry, but with a sane instinct, because he had done for Ireland, what neither Seaghan Clarach nor Raftery, nor all the bards of Munster and Connaught, could at that moment do for her. He had given a voice to Ireland; he had put into her mouth a song of her own.
Standing apart now, from the times and circ.u.mstances in which Moore wrote, we can see that what Ireland got from him was not all gain. The literature produced so profusely in the days of Young Ireland, and modelled mainly upon him, echoes only too faithfully his declamatory tone; and worse than that, it is flooded by the exuberance of sentiment, which was Moore"s besetting weakness. Other models, and, it is to be hoped, better ones, now are rapidly replacing those of Moore and his followers; with the younger generation, even in Ireland, he has lost his hold. But in Ireland his poetry is still, as a matter of course, familiar to all Irishmen of the nationalist persuasion, young and old.
And for the older men, he has lost none of his magic. To them such criticism as is found in this book will seem, one must fear, a kind of impiety and certainly of ingrat.i.tude; for they remember the days when many and many an Irish peasant, leaving his country for the New World, carried with him two books--_Moore"s Melodies_ and the _Key of Heaven_.
And certainly it is no small t.i.tle to fame for a poet that he was in his own country for at least three generations the delight and consolation of the poor. Tattered and thumbed copies of his poems, broadcast through Ireland, represent better his claim to the interest of posterity than whatever comely and autographed editions may be found among the possessions of Bowood and Holland House.