Endearing, fleeting charm

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.