Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 16.djvu/837

Rh MOORE 807 spurious Anacreontic sentiment, namby-pamby when not prurient; he wrote with full inspiration, unreserved sin cerity, and thoroughly roused faculty. Divorced from the music, many of them are insipid enough, but they were never meant to be divorced from the music ; the music was meant, as Coleridge felt when he heard them sung by the poet himself, to twine round them and overtop them like the honeysuckle. Moore accomplished this with exquisite art. His most conspicuous failures may be traced to his habit of taking as his starting-point not an emotional incident but some unmanageable intellectual con ceit. Hence arose intellectual discords, incongruous and imperfectly harmonized fancies, which even the music can hardly gloss over. The regent s desertion of the Whigs in 1812 cut them off from all hope of office for many years to come, and Moore from his last hope of a snug sinecure, when Lord Moira also was practically &quot; oblivious &quot; of him. There was at once a marked increase in his literary fertility, and he broke ground in a new field, which he cultivated with pre-eminent success political squib- writing. Moore was incapable of anything like rancour, but he felt the dis appointment of his hopes enough to quicken his fancy and sharpen the edge of his wit. The prince regent, his old friend and patron, who was said to have begged all Lord Moira s appointments for personal favourites, was his first butt. The prince s defects and foibles, his fatness, his huge whiskers, his love for cutlets and curacoa, for aged mistresses and practical jokes, were ridiculed with the lightest of clever hands. Moore opened fire in the Morning Chronicle, and crowned his success next year (1813) with a thin volume of &quot; Intercepted Letters,&quot; The Twopenny Post Bag. A very little knowledge of the gossip of the time enables us to understand the delight with which Moore s sallies were received in the year which witnessed the imprisonment of Leigh Hunt for more outspoken attacks on the regent. Moore received every encouragement to work the new vein. He was at one time in receipt of a regular salary from the Times ; and his little volumes of squibs published at intervals, The Fudge Family in Paris, 1818 ; The Journal of a Member of the Pococurante Society, 1820; Fables for the Holy Alliance, 1823; Odes on Cash, Corn, Catholics, and other Matters, 1828 ; The Fudges in England, 1835 went through many editions. The prose Memoirs of Captain Rock (1824) may be added to the list. Moore s only failure was Tom Cribb s Memorial to Congress (1819), for which he had made an elaborate study of thieves slang. It was of course on the side of the Whigs that Moore employed his pen, and his favourite topics were the system of repression in Ireland and the disabilities of the Catholics. He made rather too serious lash on the back of the bigot and the oppressor.&quot; It was not exactly a lash or a scourge that he wielded. It was in happy, airily malicious ridicule of personal foibles that his strength lay ; he pricked and teased his victims with sharp and tiny arrows. But, light as his hand was, he was fairly entitled to the enthusiastic gratitude of his country- jnen for his share in effecting Catholic emancipation. The disappointment of 1812, which started Moore on his career as a squib-writer, nerved him also to a more sustained effort in serious verse than he had before at tempted. Lalla Rookh would never have Vocn written if the author s necessities had not compelled him to work. To keep himself at the oar, he contracted with the Long mans to supply a metrical romance on an Eastern subject, which should contain at least as many lines as Scott s Rokeby, and for which the publishers bound themselves to pay three thousand guineas on delivery. The poem was not published till May 1817. Moore, as was his habit, made most laborious preparation, reading himself slowly into familiarity with Eastern scenery and manners. He retired to a cottage in Derbyshire, near Lord Moira s library at Donington Park, that he might work uninterruptedly, safe from the distractions of London society ; and there, &quot;amid the snows of a Derbyshire winter&quot; as he put it, he patiently elaborated his voluptuous pictures of flower- scented valleys, gorgeous gardens, tents, and palaces, and houris of ravishing beauty. The confidence of the publishers was fully justified. Moore s contemporaries were dazzled and enchanted with Lalla Rookh. It was indeed a wonderful tour deforce. There was not a single image or allusion in it that an ordinary Englishman could understand without a foot-note. High testimonies were borne to the correctness of the local colouring, and the usual stories were circulated of Oriental natives who would not believe that Moore had never travelled in the East. Moore was less successful in realizing Oriental character than he was in details of dress and vegetation. His fire-worshipper is an Irish patriot betrayed by an informer, his Zelica a piously nurtured Catholic maiden brooding over unpardoned sin, his Mokanna a melodramatic stage monster, though they are so thickly covered with Oriental trappings that their identity is considerably disguised. Of the four tales put into the mouth of Feramorz, the &quot; Veiled Prophet &quot; was the least suited to Moore s Turkey-carpet treatment. We can understand the enthusiasm with which Moore s Orien talism was received as &quot; the best that we have had yet,&quot; and we can honour the honest labour with which he achieved this success ; but such artificial finery, as the poet himself had the sense to suspect, could have only a temporary reputation. He deliberately sacrificed the higher qualities of poetry for accuracy of costume and soft melody of rhyme and rhythm, and he had his reward. His next Orientalism, the Loves of the Angels, published in 1822, was hardly less popular than Lalla Rookh. The artificiality of the manufacture was shown by the ease with which, after a few editions, he changed his angels from Jews into Turks, to evade a charge of impiety which was supposed to impede the sale of the work. Immediately after the completion of Lalla Rookh Moore changed his residence to Sloperton Cottage in Wiltshire, to be near Lord Lansdowne and the library at Bowood, his next literary project being a life of Sheridan. His plans were inter rupted by the consequences of the rascality of his deputy at Bermuda, which has been already mentioned. To avoid arrest for the sum embezzled, Moore retired to the Continent, and fixed his residence at Paris. He could not return till November 1822, when the affair was com promised. His friends lamented that the attractions of Paris occupied so much of his time, but, though his diary contains almost daily records of visits to operas, fetes, and fashionable entertainments, it shows also that be was busier than he seemed. He wrote a goodly number of squibs during his exile, besides composing the Loves of the Angels and accumulating materials for his prose tale of the Epicurean a fair amount of production consider ing his slow and painstaking habits of composition. His alertness of mind, self-possession, and steadiness of purpose enabled him to work as few men could in the midst of diver sions and distractions ; and, although he himself took a brilliant part in conversation, we can see, from a compari son of his diary with his published writings, that he kept his ears open for facts and witticisms which he afterwards made his own. The darling of the drawing-room was as much bee as butterfly. On his return to England he resumed work steadily at his memoirs of Sheridan, writing Captain Rock as &jeu d 1 esprit by the way. The Sheridan triumphantly despatched in the autumn of 1825, Moore s next important work was the Life of Byron. The first
 * a claim for his pasquinades when he spoke of &quot;laying the