Thomas Moore

Stephen Gwynn

Description

Irish-born poet and lyricist Thomas Moore arose from a working-class background to make a name for himself as one of the foremost figures in the Gaelic cultural revival that began to take hold in the early nineteenth century. Stephen Gwynn's comprehensive biography of Moore traces his unlikely trajectory from grocer's son to a looming figure in Irish literary and popular culture.

Informations

• Publié par: The Floating Press
• Date de parution: 01 juillet 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781776584109
• Langue: English

Extrait

THOMAS MOORE

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STEPHEN GWYNN

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Thomas Moore First published in 1905 PDF ISBN 978-1-77658-410-9 Also available: Epub ISBN 978-1-77658-409-3 © 2013 The Floating Press and its licensors. All rights reserved.

While every effort has been used to ensure the accuracy and reliability of the information contained in The Floating Press edition of this book, The Floating Press does not assume liability or responsibility for any errors or omissions in this book. The Floating Press does not accept responsibility for loss suffered as a result of reliance upon the accuracy or currency of information contained in this book. Do not use while operating a motor vehicle or heavy equipment. Many suitcases look alike.

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Chapter I - Boyhood and Early Poems Chapter II - Early Manhood and Marriage Chapter III - Lalla Rookh Chapter IV - Period of Residence Abroad Chapter V - Work as Biographer and Controversialist Chapter VI - The Decline of Life Chapter VII - General Appreciation Appendix Endnotes

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Chapter I - Boyhood and Early Poems

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Sudden fame, acquired with little difficulty, suffers generally a period of obscuration after the compelling power which attaches to a man's living personality has been removed; and from this darkness it does not always emerge. Of such splendour and subsequent eclipse, Moore's fate might be cited as the capital example.

The son of a petty Dublin tradesman, he found himself, almost from his first entry on the world, courted by a brilliant society; each year added to his friendships among the men who stood highest in literature and statesmanship; and his reputation on the Continent was surpassed only by that of Scott and Byron. He did not live to see a reaction. Lord John Russell could write boldly in 1853, a year after his friend's death, that "of English lyrical poets, Moore is surely the greatest." There is perhaps no need to criticise either this attitude of excessive admiration, or that which in many cases has replaced it, of tolerant contempt. But it is as well to emphasise at the outset the fact that even to-day, more than a century after he began to publish, Moore is still one of the poets most popular and widely known throughout the English-speaking world. His effect on his own race at least has been durable; and if it be a fair test of a poet's vitality to ask how much of his work could be recovered from oral tradition, there are not many who would stand it better than the singer of the Irish Melodies. At least the

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older generation of Irishmen and Irishwomen now living have his poetry by heart.

The purpose of this book is to give, if possible, a just estimate of the man's character and of his work as a poet. The problem, so far as the biographical part is concerned, is not to discover new material but to select from masses already in print. The Memoirs of his Life, edited by Lord John Russell, fill eight volumes, though the life with which they deal was neither long nor specially eventful. In addition we have allusions to Moore, as a widely known social personage, in almost every memoir of that time; and newspaper references by thousands have been collected. These extraneous sources, however, add very little to the impression which is gained by a careful reading of the correspondence and of the long diaries in which Moore's nature, singularly unsecretive, displays itself with perfect frankness. Whether one's aim be to justify Moore or to condemn him, the most effective means are provided by his own words; and for nearly everything that I have to allege in the narrative part of this work, Moore, himself is the authority. Nor is the critical estimate which has to be put forward, though remote from that of Moore's official biographer, at all unlike that which the poet himself seems to have formed of his work.

Thomas Moore was born in Dublin on the 28th of May 1779, at No. 12 Aungier Street, where his father, a native of Kerry, kept a grocer's shop. His mother, Anastasia Clodd, was the daughter of a small provision merchant in Wexford. Moore was their eldest child, and of the brothers and sisters whom he mentions, only two girls, his sisters Katherine and Ellen, appear to have grown up or to have played any part in his life. His parents were evidently prosperous people, devoted to their clever boy and ambitious to secure him social promotion by giving scope to the talents which he showed from his early schooldays. The memoir of his youth,

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which Moore wrote in middle life, notes the special pleasure which his mother took in the friendship of a certain Miss Dodd, an elderly maiden lady moving in "a class of society somewhat of a higher level than ours"; and it is easy enough to understand why the precocious imp of a boy found favour with this distinguished person and her guests. He had all the gifts of an actor and a mimic, and they were encouraged in him first at home, and then at the boarding-school to which he was sent. Samuel Whyte, its head master, had been the teacher of Sheridan, and though he discovered none of Sheridan's abilities, the connection with the Sheridan family, added to his own tastes, had brought him into close touch with the stage. He was the author of a didactic poem on "The Theatre," a great director of private theatricals, and a teacher of elocution. Such a man was not likely to neglect the gifts of the clever small boy entrusted to him, and Master Moore, at the age of eleven, already figured on the playbill of some important private theatricals as reciting the Epilogue. He was encouraged also in the habit of rhyming, a habit that reached back as far as he could remember; and before his fifteenth year was far gone, he attained to the honours of print in a creditable magazine, theAnthologia Hibernica. The first of his contributions was an amatory address to a Miss Hannah Byrne, herself, it appears, a poetess. The lines, "To Zelia on her charging the Author with writing too much on love," need not be quoted (though the subject is characteristic), nor the "Pastoral Ballad" which followed in the number for October 1793. It is worth noting, however, that in 1794 we find Moore paraphrasing Anacreon's Fifth Ode; and further that in March of the same year he is acknowledging his debt to Mr. Samuel Whyte with verses beginning

"Hail heaven-taught votary of the laurel'd Nine"

—an unusual form of address from a schoolboy to his pedagogue.

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Briefly, one gathers the impression that Moore's schooldays were enlivened by many small gaieties, while his holidays abounded with the same distractions. The family was sent down to Sandymount, now a suburb, but then a seaside village on Dublin Bay, and there, in addition to sea-bathing, they had their fill of mild play-acting. Moore reproduces some lines from an epilogue written for one of these occasions when the return to school was imminent:—

"Our Pantaloon that did so agéd look Must now resume his youth, his task, his book; Our Harlequin who skipp'd, leap'd, danced, and died, Must now stand trembling by his tutor's side."

And he notes genially how the pathos of his farewell nearly moved him to tears as he recited the closing words—doubtless with a thrilling tremble in his accents. Moore was always [greek: artidakrous]. But he was a healthy, active youngster, and we read that he emulated Harlequin in jumping talents, as well as in the command of tears and laughter; and practised over the rail of a tent-bed till he could at last "perform the headforemost leap of his hero most successfully."

School made little break in these pleasures; for while the family were at the seaside, his indulgent father provided the boy with a pony on which he rode down every Saturday to stay over the Sunday; "and at the hour when I was expected, there generally came my sister with a number of young girls to meet me, and full of smiles and welcomes, walked by the side of my pony into the town." Never was a boy more petted. About this time, too, his musical gifts began to be discovered; for Mrs. Moore insisted that her daughter Katherine should be taught not only the harpsichord, but also the piano, and that a piano should be bought. On this instrument Moore taught himself to play; and since his mother had

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a pleasant voice and a talent for giving gay little supper-parties, musical people used to come to the house, and the boy had plenty of chances for showing off his accomplishments, accompanying himself, and developing already his uncanny knack of dramatic singing.

A young gentleman thus brought up was, one would say, in a fair way to be spoiled, and Moore, looking back, is quick to recognise the danger. Yet he is fully justified in the comment which closes his narrative of the triumphant entries into Sandymount with schoolgirls escorting his pony:—

"There is far more of what is called vanity in my now reporting the tribute, than I felt then in receiving it; and I attribute very much to the cheerful and kindly circumstances which thus surrounded my childhood, that spirit of enjoyment and, I may venture to add, good temper, which has never, thank God, failed me to the present time (July 1833)."

Moreover, if his parents were interested in his pleasures, they were no less concerned about his work. His mother, he writes, examined him daily in his studies; sometimes even, when kept out late at a party, she would wake the boy out of his sleep in the small hours of morning, and bid him sit up and repeat over his lessons. Her affectionate care met with that return from her son which was continued to the end of her life. There was nothing in his power that Moore would not do to please his mother.

Nevertheless, touching as the relation was, it had its weak side, and Moore in time realised it. In a notable passage of his diary, which describes the pleasant days spent by him at Abbotsford in 1825, we read how he congratulated Scott on the advantages of

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his upbringing—the open-air life, field sports, and free intercourse with the peasantry.

"I said that the want of this manly training showed itself in my poetry, which would perhaps have had a far more vigorous character, if it had not been for the sort of boudoireducation I had received." ("The only thing, indeed," he adds, "that conduced to brace and invigorate my mind was the strong political feelings that were stirring round me when I was a boy, and in which I took a deep and most ardent interest.")

Part of this stirring manifested itself in a secret association under John Moore's own roof; for the son had organised his father's two clerks into a debating and literary society, of which he constituted himself president. The meetings took place after the common meal of the household was over, when the clerks retired to their bedroom, and Master Thomas to his own apartment—a corner of the same bedroom, but boarded off, fitted with a table, chest of drawers, and book-case, and decorated by its owner with inscriptions of his own composition "in the manner, as I flattered myself, of Shenstone at the Leasowes." The secret society met at dead of night in a closet beyond the large bedroom, once or twice a week; and each member was bound to produce a riddle or rebus in verse, which the others were set to solve. And in addition to this more literary part of the proceedings, the members discussed politics—Tom Ennis, the senior clerk, being a strong nationalist.

Politics certainly played a great part in moulding Moore's feelings and imagination, and it should be observed that his nonage almost coincided with the duration of Ireland's independent Parliament. He was three years old when the Volunteers established the freedom of the legislature in College Green, and twenty-one when Pitt and Castlereagh purchased its extinction. His father, as a

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