Ireland’s Minstrel: A Life of Tom Moore, Poet, Patriot, and Byron’s Friend, and: Robert Southey: Entire Man of Letters (review)

The Ireland that Thomas Moore came from would not seem to have been an environment conducive to writing easy, sentimental and mellifluous verse. Vindictive, materialist Protestant Christianity went side by side there not just with Catholicism but with virtual paganism. In her excellent new biography of Moore, Linda Kelly quotes a letter from Moore to James Dalton from Tipperary, dated 22 August 1815:

A sick house and a dull ugly country render our visit here rather a melancholy proceeding . . . the only stimulants here are the Shanavests [local banditti] who enter the houses here at noonday for arms and start out, by twenties and thirties, upon the tithe-proctors in the fields, stark naked and smeared all over with paint like Catabaws . . . The rector of this place has just passed the windows on a tithe-hunting expedition, with a large gun in his gig.

(Kelly, 120)

Catabaws are Native Americans from Virginia. In fact Moore is being unfair to the Shanavests, who were so called not because they eschewed raiment, but because they wore old waistcoats. Strictly speaking they weren't 'banditti' (the word is Kelly's): they were a Tipperary faction whose primary activity was attempting to bash out the brains of their enemies. Their enemies were not the English tithe-proctors, either, but another Tipperary faction called the Caravats (a corruption of 'cravat', i.e., 'noose'). No-one who lived locally was neutral, except a retired army doctor whose name really was Going, and who had great skill in the insertion of silver plates into fractured skulls.¹ No-one quite knew what the quarrel was about (modern economic historians have tried to dignify it with motives), but it was a central fact of cultural life in Tipperary at the time.

The style of patriotic poetry Moore wrote could bear little relationship to such a 'dull ugly country'. But that didn't stop him:

Erin, thy silent tear never shall cease,Erin, thy languid smile ne'er shall increase,  Till, like the rainbow's light,  Thy various tints unite,  And form in heaven's sight    One arch of peace!

(Irish Melodies I, third lyric)

His was an Ireland conceived with an eye to the market, and of course it was, in the market, an enormous success. In Ireland, partly as a consequence, he was esteemed a great patriot, and fêted wherever he went – or, whenever he went, for he lived in England. Even Byron was – in public print, at least – taken in by the bluff:

It is said among those friends, I trust truly, that you are engaged in the composition of a poem whose scene will be laid in the East; none can do those scenes such justice. The wrongs of your own country, the magnificent and fiery spirit of her sons, the beauty and feeling of her daughters, may there be found; and Collins, when he denominated his Oriental, his Irish Eclogues, was not aware how true, at least, was a part of his parallel.²

Byron never set foot in Ireland.

But, as Linda Kelly points out, when Moore's Oriental poem Lalla Rookh came out, Byron seemed unable to maintain the polite fiction, and was silent. As Jeffery Vail has written, the letter (of 15 September 1817), in which Byron reports his first reading of Lalla Rookh, is also the one in which he denounces 'Scott, Southey, Wordsworth, Moore, Campbell', and 'I', as having been on 'a wrong revolutionary poetical system'. Linda Kelly does not cover the full extent of Byron's reaction: 'Significantly', she writes, 'he [Byron] made no further comment on the poem' (137). The significance lies in the shame he felt in his association with Moore, both...