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into English. Those who still claim for Moore some recognition as a poet claim it mainly on account of his skill in metre, and on account of his tact in writing words for singing. With a good poet, good music can make good songs; with a bad poet, the best of all music cannot do as much, and Moore, in putting words to his 'Irish Melodies,' did not always give the tunes a ehance. We are told: 'He based his work upon Irish tunes, composed in the primitive manner, before poetry was divorced from music. One may say, virtually, that in fitting words to these tunes he reproduced in English the rhythms of Irish folk-song.' But we are told further, and then the case is altered: 'The thing was not done completely: for instance, in the first number of the "Melodies," the song "Erin, the smile and the tear in thine eye," is to the tune of "Eileen Aroon," and the Irish words. . . do not correspond in metre with Moore's. He has varied the tune, and is consequently using a different stanza.' If, further, one may judge from Dr. Hyde's translations in his beautiful book, "The Love Songs of Connacht,' Moore has come very far short of having 'reproduced in English the rhythms of Irish folk-song.' Certain cadences he has caught, like that cadence of

'At the mid hour of night, when stars are weeping, I fly,'

which we are told is 'a metrical effect wholly new in English.' To have introduced a new cadence into English is quite a creditable thing to have done, even without writing a good poem by its aid. And, though the poem beginning with this line may be 'the most beautiful lyric that Moore ever wrote,' I do not think it can be accepted as really a good poem. To be 'exquisite,' or to attain 'high poetry,' requires qualities which Moore never possessed, and neither in this nor in another popular lyric, 'The Light of Other Days,' graceful and plaintive as they are, can I find an exception to those qualities of strictly second-rate skill in verse-writing which he did possess. I find in both poems a facility which carries the tune and the

sense smoothly and quickly along; a prettiness, alike of sentiment and form; a certain elegance, yet a thin elegance, which covers nothing vital; and the sincerity of a superficial emotion which I can neither respect nor share, for it is fancy playing the part of feeling.

Moore's trot, gallop, and jingle of verse has, no doubt, its skill and its merit; but its skill is not seldom that of the circusrider, and its merit no more than to have gone the due number of times round the ring without slackening speed. It entertains the most legitimately when it carries mere folly on its back. But Moore had ideals and ideas, and only the same trained nag to carry them. 'Almost without knowing it,' says his biographer, 'he wrote primarily for his own countrymen'; and it was to his countrymen that he said: 'There exists no title of honour or distinction to which I could attach half so much value as that of being called your poet, — the poet of the people of Ireland.' First, and for long, he sang his patriotism to the strains of his own barrel-organ; and makes pity and anger jig to the same measures as 'endearing young charms. Gradually he gave up writing verse, and wrote prose, controversial prose, and was looked upon as 'the champion of the liberties of Ireland.' It is significant of the whole man, and of how small a segment of him was an artist, that for Moore to become really serious meant giving up verse. Only in prose could he conceive of people being quite serious, and writing nobly.

ROBERT EYRES LANDOR (1781-1869) 1

THE style and language of Robert Landor's plays were more interesting and original than the matter of them. In the preface to 'The Count Arezzi' he says that 'it was written de

1 (1) The Count Arezzi, 1824. (2) The Impious Feast, 1828. (3) The Earl of Brecon, Faith's Fraud, The Ferryman, 1841.

signedly with those qualities which were to render it unfit for representation.' We can read with pleasure:

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Here, and elsewhere, too careful a search after metaphor and elaborate speech tends to absorb the emotion, which is lofty, and to get in the way of the drama, which is not dramatic. In a narrative poem, "The Impious Feast,' there is a wild imaginative extravagance, and the experiment is not unsuccessful of 'a rhyme occasionally so close and so frequent as to rescue the stanza; or it may be rendered so lax as to have all the freedom of blank verse.' But it is in his prose that Landor excels, in 'The Fawn of Sertorius' and especially in 'The Fountain of Arethusa.' That fantastic romance, written to personify a strange philosophy, is the invention of a moralist and a poet. The style has something of the purity of his brother's, but is at times touched with eccentricity, in its expression of a calm persuasive satire. 'Figures of speech, which were originally intended to explain our reasons and opinions, like unpractised performers in a new dance, jostle against their partners, and confuse the rest': how like Landor that is! But here is the brother: 'Since it is much more pleasurable to carry the whip in your hand than to feel it upon your shoulder, who would not be a critic if he could, as the herring would be a shark, the rabbit a stoat, and the oyster an alderman?? The outlines of the narrative are ingeniously contrived, not without humour in its picture of a world peopled by dead Romans who had survived death, and remained

critics of the living. Their arguments against a conventional Christianity are uncommon and irrefutable; against these Britons, who 'cannot have shown so much courage in subduing the world as in defying its Creator.'

EDWARD, BARON THURLOW (1781-1829) 1

1

ONE of Lord Thurlow's sonnets, the only good one, is known because Lamb praised and quoted it in a note to his essay on Sidney's Sonnets on the first appearance of that essay in the 'London Magazine.' He called it a sonnet which 'for quiet sweetness and unaffected morality has scarcely its parallel in our language.' If any reader goes further, and turns over the chill and elegant pages where there are other sonnets, addressed to 'very illustrious noblemen,' with pastorals done after old patterns, and Tasso tepidly imitated, he must remember that in a letter to Wordsworth Lamb himself complained of the fatigue of 'going through a volume of fine words by Lord Thurlow,' and that he was glad to turn from the 'excellent words' to Vincent Bourne, 'his diction all Latin and his thoughts all English.'

EBENEZER ELLIOTT (1781-1849) 2

A GREAT deal too much space in the collected poems of Ebenezer Elliott is filled with a series of rhymed and blank verse narrative and 'epical' productions, filled with fervid talk, not without vigour and a kind of rough eloquence, but result

1 (1) Verses on Several Occasions, 1812. (2) Ariadne, 1814. (3) Carmen Britannicum, 1814. (4) The Doge's Daughter, 1814. (5) Select Poems, 1821. (6) Angelica, 1822.

(1) The Vernal Walk, 1798. (2) Night, 1818. (3) Love, a Poem, 1823. (4) The Village Patriarch, 1829. (5) Corn-Law Rhymes, 1831. (6) The Splendid Village, etc., 3 vols., 1833–35. (7) Poetical Works, 1840, 1846.

ing in so much definite waste of a special talent, which could only work satisfactorily within certain limits. It is amusing to see the seriousness with which he measures himself, in his 'Spirits and Men,' against 'all that is transcendent in genius! which has dealt with similar material, Milton, Byron, Moore, and Montgomery. In 'The Village Patriarch' he is nearer to a suitable subject, and begins to express, though not yet with due concentration, his own message. He says of himself:

'But distempered, if not mad,

I feed on Nature's bane and mess with scorn.
I would not, could not if I would, be glad,
But, like shade-loving plants, am happiest sad.
My heart, once soft as woman's tear, is gnarled
With gloating on the ills I cannot cure.'

He proceeds to compare himself with 'Arno's bard,' whose music, he says, 'snarled.' That is but one instance of a radical lack of critical sense in literature, which leads him to dedicate his earliest compositions to Lord Lytton and to 'my great master, Robert Southey, who condescended to teach me the art of poetry,' and to characterise Byron as

'thrice a Ford, twice an Euripides,

And half a Schiller.'

His energy of speech in verse was natural to him from the first, and as soon as he began to subdue its buoyancy and give it that alloy, of prose perhaps, in a sense, which it required for due hardness, the work begins to become interesting. Realism has never perhaps been made more pardonable in verse than in some of Elliott's harsh but vivid, violent but pungent, delineations of country scenes and situations. In his earlier manner it is, like Crabbe, hurried, a little unceremoniously, into a quicker pace, and a more warm and ready observation. By 1848, 'The Year of Seeds,' the style in these would-be sonnets has turned into a more ragged but more muscular activity, coarsely and wonderfully alive. It is all

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