at all if it is done no better. Read the little complimentary verses to ladies, and think of Lovelace; read 'The BeechTree's Petition,' with its nice feeling and words without atmosphere, and think of Marvell's garden-verses, in which every line has perfume and radiance. The work is so neat, so rounded and polished; like waxen flowers under glass shades; no nearer to nature or art. In the 'Valedictory Stanzas to Kemble' there is a definition of 'taste,' which shows us something of Campbell's theory and aim in art: 'Taste, like the silent dial's power, That, when supernal light is given, Can measure inspiration's hour, And tell its height in heaven.' And he defines the mind of the actor as 'at once ennobled and correct.' Always labouring to be 'at once ennobled and correct,' Campbell is never visited by any poetic inspiration, except in those few poems in which he has not been more sincere, or chosen better, than usual, but has been more lucky, and able to carry an uncertain technique further. That, and not emotion, or sincerity, or anything else, is what distinguishes what is good from what is bad in his work, even in those poems which have given our literature its greatest war-songs. THOMAS MOORE (1779-1852) 1 MOORE as a poet is the Irishman as the Englishman imagines him to be, and he represents a part of the Irish temperament; 1 (1) Odes from Anacreon, 1800. (2) The Poetical Works of the Late Thomas Little, 1801. (3) Epistles, Odes, and other Poems, 1806. (4) Irish Melodies, with Music by Sir James Stevenson, i, 1807; ii, 1807; iii, 1810; iv, 1811; v, 1813; vi, 1815; vii, 1818; viii, 1821; ix, 1824; x, 1834. (5) Corruption and Intolerance, 1808. (6) The Sceptic. (7) Intercepted Letters, or The Two-penny Post Bag, 1813. (8) Sacred Songs, 1816, 1824. (9) Lalla Rookh, 1817. (10) National Airs, 1818, 1826. (11) The Fudge but not the part which makes for poetry. All the Irish quicksilver is in him; he registers change with every shift in the weather. He has the spirits of a Dublin mob; and it is the voice of the mob, prettily refined, sweetened, set to a tune, which we hear in his songs. But the voice of the peasant is not in him; there is in him nothing of that uneasy, listening conscience which watches the earth for signs, and is never alone in solitude. He is without imagination, and his fun and his fancy are but the rising and sinking of the quicksilver, and mean no more than a change in the weather. The imagination, which made the great Irish legends, is still awake in the peasant; education has not yet robbed him of the best part of his birthright; and in Mr. Yeats, and in A. E., and in Dr. Douglas Hyde, we see the Irish imagination again creating nobly after its kind. Moore prattled of 'the harp that once through Tara's halls the soul of music shed'; but the harp to which his ears really listened was modern and gilded, and played by a young lady in a drawing-room. He sang to it with an agreeable voice, and he delighted his contemporaries. In considering the question of any individual popularity, it is needful, I think, to take into account the general level of taste which can be distinguished in the public which has created that popularity. Sophocles was popular in his time, and if we scrutinise all that is known of the Athenian public which appreciated his plays, we shall see that the general level of that public's taste was very high, and we shall not be surprised by the popularity of so great a poet and so severe an artist. The public which delighted in Shakespeare was the public which had a more vivid appreciation of strange and Family in Paris, 1818. (12) The Loves of the Angels, 1823. (13) Fables for the Holy Alliance, 1823. (14) Evenings in Greece, 1826, 1832. (15) Odes upon Cash, Corn, Catholics, and other Matters, 1828. (16) Legendary Ballads, 1828. (17) The Summer Fête, 1831. (18) Vocal Minstrelsy, 1834, 1835. (19) The Fudges in England, 1835. (20) Alciphron (added to a new edition of The European, a prose romance), 1839. (21) Poetical Works, 10 vols., 1840-41. stirring things, a more lively sense of personal adventure, and a more friendly and intimate love and cultivation of music, than the public of any other century in England. What, then, was the general level of taste in art at the time when Thomas Moore was (in the words of Byron's dedication of 'The Corsair') 'the poet of all circles and the idol of his own'? Blake was living, and, when known, known only to be mocked, when Moore's career as a poet was practically over; the 'Lyrical Ballads' appeared two years before the 'Odes of Anacreon' and three years before the 'Poetical Works of the Late Thomas Little, Esq.,' and Wordsworth and Coleridge were probably little more than uncouth names, just known enough to be scorned, to the 'princely' circles in which Moore was an idol and the world-wide circles of whom he was the poet; Keats and Shelley, both younger men, died thirty years before Moore, and we find Shelley in the year of his death, speaking of 'Hellas' (he might have spoken for 'Lamia' as well) as 'the last of my orphans,' and asking a friend if it was he who was 'introducing it to oblivion, and me to my accustomed failure.' Scott, an older man, and Byron, a younger man, were Moore's only serious rivals in the affection of the public; and Byron was loved more for his defects than for his qualities, and Scott, as a poet, was scarcely less overrated than Moore. What, then, can be said of the general level of taste of the public which Moore intoxicated? Can we argue from what we know of it that Moore's popularity was greatly to his credit? 'It is Moore's great distinction,' we are told by his biographer, 'that he gave real pleasure to all sorts and conditions of men.' That is te, and it gave to his fame a pleasant flavour: 'my friendly fame,' he calls it. He pleased by his songs and by his singing of them: how is it that the songs to-day seem to us like last season's fashions, melancholy in their faded prettiness? He gave pleasure, but the quality of that pleasure must be considered, and it will be seen that it was not the quality of poetic pleasure. Moore, it may be said, wrote to please, not out of any deep inner need; yet, if he wrote what pleased others, it was mainly because it had pleased himself. No; what is poetry can be distinguished from what is not poetry by none of these tests, which are tests of probability, at the utmost; it can be distinguished only by the presence or absence in it of the qualities common to all genuine poetry: some quality of strangeness in its beauty, some gravity or gaiety beyond the mere sound or message of its words in the ear, and, in its sincerity to a mood, an emotion, or a sensation, 'One grace, one thought, one wonder, at the least, Herrick wrote drinking songs, and he left in them some of the mournful ecstasy of the vine. But, in the drinking songs of Tom Moore, only the lees are left. In the preface to his early poems we find Moore wishing himself Catullus. But did he ever quite realise what was said in that naked speech, that word like a flame of live coal, of the great lover and the great hater? It does not seem so, for he praises him for his 'exquisite playfulness,' his 'warm yet chastened description.' Even in Rochester and Sedley, whom he professes to have learnt from, he sees only the 'graceful levity,' and this as a mere 'dissipation of the heart,' set off by 'those seductive graces by which gallantry almost teaches it to be amiable.' What counts in Rochester is not that, but the sting; and the sting comes from some quintessential expression of a nature which at least paid the price of sincerity. Do Mr. Thomas Little's 'ten or twenty kisses,' however counted or however multiplied, fill up the millionth interval of Rochester's 'live-long minute' of fidelity, or even Sedley's regret that he cannot 'change each hour'? It is to the Cavalier Lyrics, no doubt, that Moore at his best comes nearest ; never within recognisable distance of any Elizabethan work, and never near enough to the good work of the Restoration for the comparison to be seriously made. He has their fluency, but none of their gentlemanly restraint; touches of their crudity, but none of their straightforwardness; and of their fine taste, nothing, and nothing of the quality of mind which lurks under all their disguises. In Moore's songs there is no 'fundamental brain-work'; they have no base in serious idea or in fine emotion. The sensations they render are trivial in themselves, or become so in the rendering; there is a continual effervescence, but no meditation and no ecstasy. Between this faint local heat of the senses and the true lyric rapture there is a great gulf. Moore brims over with feeling, and his feeling is quick, honest, and generous. But he never broods over his feeling until he has found his way down to its roots: the song strikes off from the surface like the spurt of a match; there is no deep fire or steady flame. He never realised the dignity of song or of the passions. In his verse he was amorous, but a foolish lover; shrewd, but without wisdom; honest, but without nobility; a breeder of easy tears and quick laughter. He sang for his evening, not his day; and he had his reward, but must go without the day's wages. In his 'Book of Irish Verse,' Mr. Yeats has made a cruel and just test of the essential quality of Moore's lyrical work by printing, one after the other, a song of Moore: 'You who would try The terrible track'; Théophile Gautier's close and heightened translation: 'Vous qui voulez courir La terrible carrière'; and Mr. Robert Bridges' translation back into English from Gautier: 'O youth whose hope is high, Who dost to truth aspire,' in which, as he rightly says, the lines are at last lifted 'into the rapture and precision of poetry.' A similar test might be made |