And who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel? Moore might have been no Emmet, Tone or Fitzgerald, but he was never meant to be. The man Greville called a ‘super- annuated cherub’ — ‘musical snuff-box’ of a harp slung behind him — belonged in the Regency drawing-room. He could sing Ireland’s woes but his courage was not of the sort that runs to action or faces up to private bereavement. The worse things were — the death bed of a child, the disaster of the ’98 rebellion, the threat of debt — the more certain he was to be somewhere else. He did not, though, make extravagant claims for himself and in that, as in so many other things in this book, it is possible to see beyond the awful verse and the snobberies and compromises to the man Byron loved. Linda Kelly repeats a nice story of Edmund Gosse’s. Wordsworth was asked if he admired Moore’s songs:
‘Oh! yes, my friend Mr Moore has written a good deal of agreeable verse, although we should hardly call it poetry, should we, Mr Moore?’ To which the bard of Erin, sparkling with good nature, answered, ‘No! indeed, Mr Wordsworth, of course not!’ without exhibiting the slightest resentment.
The authentic Wordsworth, the authentic Moore, but the pity is that they are both right.
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