It has often been said that the popularity of J. M. Barrie stands as a warning to those who think they understand the Edwardians and much the same is true of Tom Moore and the Age of Romanticism. With the exceptions of Byron and Scott, Moore was by far the most successful literary figure of his day, and if his success clearly had more to do with personality and charm than anything he actually wrote, just how much charm does a man have to have to get away with verse like this?
‘Alla illa Alla!’ — the glad shout renew —
‘Alla Akbar!’ — the Caliph’s in Merou.
Hang out your gilded tapestry in the streets,
And light your shrines and chaunt your ziraleets.
Thus and much more, Tom Moore — there are another five and a half thousand lines of Lalla Rookh in fact — and the depressing thing about them is that they are not entirely atypical of his work. There are certainly a handful of Moore’s songs that will always enjoy a deserved and widespread currency, but whether you take him as a poet or a prose writer, a diarist or a polemicist, a slightly arch Georgian Anacreon or a simpering religious versifier, a peddler of Oriental Tales or of a dangerously sentimental, Tourist Board Irishness, Moore’s total eclipse seems less of a mystery than his strange dominance over the age of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, Hazlitt, Jane Austen, Peacock, Jeffreys, Sydney Smith or even — in some uncomfortable ways the figure that brings Moore most to mind — Leigh Hunt.
The eclipse of Moore’s reputation as an artist has been matched since his death by a parallel fall in his stock as a patriot and man. There is nothing, of course, more fugitive than the kind of charm — not to mention voice — that brought Moore so much of his social success in Whig society, but if the backlash sometimes seems over- harsh, it is still hard to escape the feeling that for a committed democrat he was, as Byron put it, a mite too fond of a Lord; for a liberal strangely tepid on the subject of reform; for the most uxorious man of his day a curiously frequent absentee from home; for a man of such punctilious pride mired deep in a lot of financial scrapes; and — most damning for his reputation in his homeland — for such a great Irish patriot a good deal too much at his ease in English society.
And yet there must be something to be said for a man whom Byron liked so much — the only fault with Moore, Byron complained, was that he was not there — and in Linda Kelly Moore has found the biographer to say it. Her idea of criticism seems to be to bring up the various charges levelled at Moore and flatly deny them, but if affection, sympathy, generosity and loyalty can rescue a man from oblivion, then Tom Moore is well on his way to rehabilitation.
There is not very much that is new to be said, but the sources are rich, the period that stretches from the Irish rebellion of 1798 to Catholic Emancipation and beyond endlessly fascinating, and Linda Kelly tells the story with pace, clarity and an appropriately elegant touch. She is never going to convince the aggrieved Byronist or hard-headed nationalist that her Moore is their Moore, but if there are times when you feel that you could as accurately reflect an age of political, cultural, social and intellectual turmoil in Jane Austen’s Mr Woodhouse as Tom Moore’s poetry, Linda Kelly comes as close as you probably can to making the charm of his character live again.
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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