Sudden fame, acquired with little difficulty, suffers generally a period[Pg 1]of obscuration after the compelling power which attaches to a man'sliving personality has been removed; and from this darkness it does notalways emerge. Of such splendour and subsequent eclipse, Moore's fatemight be cited as the capital example.
The son of a petty Dublin tradesman, he found himself, almost from hisfirst entry on the world, courted by a brilliant society; each yearadded to his friendships among the men who stood highest in literatureand statesmanship; and his reputation on the Continent was surpassedonly by that of Scott and Byron. He did not live to see a reaction. LordJohn Russell could write boldly in 1853, a year after his friend'sdeath, that "of English lyrical poets, Moore is surely the greatest."There is perhaps no need to criticise either this attitude of excessiveadmiration, or that which in many cases has replaced it, of tolerantcontempt. But it is as well to emphasise at the outset the fact thateven to-day, more than a century after he began to publish, Moore isstill one of the poets most popular and widely known throughout the[Pg 2]English-speaking world. His effect on his own race at least has beendurable; and if it be a fair test of a poet's vitality to ask how muchof his work could be recovered from oral tradition, there are not manywho would stand it better than the singer of the Irish Melodies. Atleast the older generation of Irishmen and Irishwomen now living havehis poetry by heart.
The purpose of this book is to give, if possible, a just estimate of theman's character and of his work as a poet. The problem, so far as thebiographical part is concerned, is not to discover new material but toselect from masses already in print. The Memoirs of his Life, edited byLord John Russell, fill eight volumes, though the life with which theydeal was neither long nor specially eventful. In addition we haveallusions to Moore, as a widely known social personage, in almost everymemoir of that time; and newspaper references by thousands have beencollected. These extraneous sources, however, add very little to theimpression which is gained by a careful reading of the correspondenceand of the long diaries in which Moore's nature, singularly unsecretive,displays itself with perfect frankness. Whether one's aim be to justifyMoore or to condemn him, the most effective means are provided by hisown words; and for nearly everything that I have to allege in thenarrative part of this work, Moore, himself is the authority. Nor is thecritical estimate which has to be put forward, though remote from thatof Moore's official biographer, at all