Thomas Moore- Collected Poetical Works

by Thomas Moore

  “And he himself one — antithesis.”

  I won’t say “vile,” because it is harsh; nor “mistaken,” because it has two syllables too many: but every one must fill up the blank as he pleases.

  What I saw of Mr. Bowles increased my surprise and regret that he should ever have lent his talents to such a task. If he had been a fool, there would have been some excuse for him; if he had been a needy or a bad man, his conduct would have been intelligible: but he is the opposite of all these; and thinking and feeling as I do of Pope, to me the whole thing is unaccountable. However, I must call things by their right names. I cannot call his edition of Pope a “candid” work; and I still think that there is an affectation of that quality not only in those volumes, but in the pamphlets lately published.

  “Why yet he doth deny his prisoners.”

  Mr. Bowles says, that “he has seen passages in his letters to Martha Blount which were never published by me, and I hope never will be by others; which are so gross as to imply the grossest licentiousness.” Is this fair play? It may, or it may not be that such passages exist; and that Pope, who was not a monk, although a Catholic, may have occasionally sinned in word and deed with woman in his youth: but is this a sufficient ground for such a sweeping denunciation? Where is the unmarried Englishman of a certain rank of life, who (provided he has not taken orders) has not to reproach himself between the ages of sixteen and thirty with far more licentiousness than has ever yet been traced to Pope? Pope lived in the public eye from his youth upwards; he had all the dunces of his own time for his enemies, and, I am sorry to say, some, who have not the apology of dulness for detraction, since his death; and yet to what do all their accumulated hints and charges amount? — to an equivocal liaison with Martha Blount, which might arise as much from his infirmities as from his passions; to a hopeless flirtation with Lady Mary W. Montagu; to a story of Cibber’s; and to two or three coarse passages in his works. Who could come forth clearer from an invidious inquest on a life of fifty-six years? Why are we to be officiously reminded of such passages in his letters, provided that they exist. Is Mr. Bowles aware to what such rummaging among “letters” and “stories” might lead? I have myself seen a collection of letters of another eminent, nay, pre-eminent, deceased poet, so abominably gross, and elaborately coarse, that I do not believe that they could be paralleled in our language. What is more strange, is, that some of these are couched as postscripts to his serious and sentimental letters, to which are tacked either a piece of prose, or some verses, of the most hyperbolical indecency. He himself says, that if “obscenity (using a much coarser word) be the sin against the Holy Ghost, he most certainly cannot be saved.” These letters are in existence, and have been seen by many besides myself; but would his editor have been “candid” in even alluding to them? Nothing would have even provoked me, an indifferent spectator, to allude to them, but this further attempt at the depreciation of Pope.

  What should we say to an editor of Addison, who cited the following passage from Walpole’s letters to George Montagu? “Dr. Young has published a new book, &c. Mr. Addison sent for the young Earl of Warwick, as he was dying, to show him in what peace a Christian could die; unluckily he died of brandy: nothing makes a Christian die in peace like being maudlin! but don’t say this in Gath where you are.” Suppose the editor introduced it with this preface: “One circumstance is mentioned by Horace Walpole, which, if true, was indeed flagitious. Walpole informs Montagu that Addison sent for the young Earl of Warwick, when dying, to show him in what peace a Christian could die; but unluckily he died drunk,” &c. &c. Now, although there might occur on the subsequent, or on the same page, a faint show of disbelief, seasoned with the expression of “the same candour” (the same exactly as throughout the book), I should say that this editor was either foolish or false to his trust; such a story ought not to have been admitted, except for one brief mark of crushing indignation, unless it were completely proved. Why the words “if true?” that “if” is not a peacemaker. Why talk of “Cibber’s testimony” to his licentiousness? to what does this amount? that Pope when very young was once decoyed by some noblemen and the player to a house of carnal recreation. Mr. Bowles was not always a clergyman; and when he was a very young man, was he never seduced into as much? If I were in the humour for story-telling, and relating little anecdotes, I could tell a much better story of Mr. Bowles than Cibber’s, upon much better authority, viz. that of Mr. Bowles himself. It was not related by him in my presence, but in that of a third person, whom Mr. Bowles names oftener than once in the course of his replies. This gentleman related it to me as a humorous and witty anecdote; and so it was, whatever its other characteristics might be. But should I, for a youthful frolic, brand Mr. Bowles with a “libertine sort of love,” or with “licentiousness?” is he the less now a pious or a good man, for not having always been a priest? No such thing; I am willing to believe him a good man, almost as good a man as Pope, but no better.

  The truth is, that in these days the grand “primum mobile” of England is cant; cant political, cant poetical, cant religious, cant moral; but always cant, multiplied through all the varieties of life. It is the fashion, and while it lasts will be too powerful for those who can only exist by taking the tone of the time. I say cant, because it is a thing of words, without the smallest influence upon human actions; the English being no wiser, no better, and much poorer, and more divided amongst themselves, as well as far less moral, than they were before the prevalence of this verbal decorum. This hysterical horror of poor Pope’s not very well ascertained, and never fully proved amours (for even Cibber owns that he prevented the somewhat perilous adventure in which Pope was embarking) sounds very virtuous in a controversial pamphlet; but all men of the world who know what life is, or at least what it was to them in their youth, must laugh at such a ludicrous foundation of the charge of “a libertine sort of love;” while the more serious will look upon those who bring forward such charges upon an insulated fact as fanatics or hypocrites, perhaps both. The two are sometimes compounded in a happy mixture.

  Mr. Octavius Gilchrist speaks rather irreverently of a “second tumbler of hot white-wine negus.” What does he mean? Is there any harm in negus? or is it the worse for being hot? or does Mr. Bowles drink negus? I had a better opinion of him. I hoped that whatever wine he drank was neat; or, at least, that, like the ordinary in Jonathan Wild, “he preferred punch, the rather as there was nothing against it in Scripture.” I should be sorry to believe that Mr. Bowles was fond of negus; it is such a “candid” liquor, so like a wishy-washy compromise between the passion for wine and the propriety of water. But different writers have divers tastes. Judge Blackstone composed his “Commentaries” (he was a poet too in his youth) with a bottle of port before him. Addison’s conversation was not good for much till he had taken a similar dose. Perhaps the prescription of these two great men was not inferior to the very different one of a soi-disant poet of this day, who, after wandering amongst the hills, returns, goes to bed, and dictates his verses, being fed by a by-stander with bread and butter during the operation.

  I now come to Mr. Bowles’s “invariable principles of poetry.” These Mr. Bowles and some of his correspondents pronounce “unanswerable;” and they are “unanswered,” at least by Campbell, who seems to have been astounded by the title. The sultan of the time being offered to ally himself to a king of France because “he hated the word league;” which proves that the Padishan understood French. Mr. Campbell has no need of my alliance, nor shall I presume to offer it; but I do hate that word “invariable.” What is there of human, be it poetry, philosophy, wit, wisdom, science, power, glory, mind, matter, life, or death, which is “invariable?” Of course I put things divine out of the question. Of all arrogant baptisms of a book, this title to a pamphlet appears the most complacently conceited. It is Mr. Campbell’s part to answer the contents of this performance, and especially to vindicate his own “Ship,” which Mr. Bowles most triumphantly proclaims to have struc
k to his very first fire.

  “Quoth he, there was a Ship;

  Now let me go, thou grey-haired loon,

  Or my staff shall make thee skip.”

  It is no affair of mine, but having once begun, (certainly not by my own wish, but called upon by the frequent recurrence to my name in the pamphlets,) I am like an Irishman in a “row,” “any body’s customer.” I shall therefore say a word or two on the “Ship.”

  Mr. Bowles asserts that Campbell’s “Ship of the Line” derives all its poetry, not from “art,” but from “nature.” “Take away the waves, the winds, the sun, &c. &c. one will become a stripe of blue bunting; and the other a piece of coarse canvass on three tall poles.” Very true; take away the “waves,” “the winds,” and there will be no ship at all, not only for poetical, but for any other purpose; and take away “the sun,” and we must read Mr. Bowles’s pamphlet by candle-light. But the “poetry” of the “Ship” does not depend on “the waves,” &c.; on the contrary, the “Ship of the Line” confers its own poetry upon the waters, and heightens theirs. I do not deny, that the “waves and winds,” and above all “the sun,” are highly poetical; we know it to our cost, by the many descriptions of them in verse: but if the waves bore only the foam upon their bosoms, if the winds wafted only the sea-weed to the shore, if the sun shone neither upon pyramids, nor fleets, nor fortresses, would its beams be equally poetical? I think not: the poetry is at least reciprocal. Take away “the Ship of the line” “swinging round” the “calm water,” and the calm water becomes a somewhat monotonous thing to look at, particularly if not transparently clear; witness the thousands who pass by without looking on it at all. What was it attracted the thousands to the launch? they might have seen the poetical “calm water” at Wapping, or in the “London Dock,” or in the Paddington Canal, or in a horse-pond, or in a slop-basin, or in any other vase. They might have heard the poetical winds howling through the chinks of a pigsty, or the garret window; they might have seen the sun shining on a footman’s livery, or on a brass warming pan; but could the “calm water,” or the “wind,” or the “sun,” make all, or any of these “poetical?” I think not. Mr. Bowles admits “the Ship” to be poetical, but only from those accessaries: now if they confer poetry so as to make one thing poetical, they would make other things poetical; the more so, as Mr. Bowles calls a “ship of the line” without them, — that is to say, its “masts and sails and streamers,”— “blue bunting,” and “coarse canvass,” and “tall poles.” So they are; and porcelain is clay, and man is dust, and flesh is grass, and yet the two latter at least are the subjects of much poesy.

  Did Mr. Bowles ever gaze upon the sea? I presume that he has, at least upon a sea-piece. Did any painter ever paint the sea only, without the addition of a ship, boat, wreck, or some such adjunct? Is the sea itself a more attractive, a more moral, a more poetical object, with or without a vessel, breaking its vast but fatiguing monotony? Is a storm more poetical without a ship? or, in the poem of the Shipwreck, is it the storm or the ship which most interests? both much undoubtedly; but without the vessel, what should we care for the tempest? It would sink into mere descriptive poetry, which in itself was never esteemed a high order of that art.

  I look upon myself as entitled to talk of naval matters, at least to poets: — with the exception of Walter Scott, Moore, and Southey, perhaps, who have been voyagers, I have swam more miles than all the rest of them together now living ever sailed, and have lived for months and months on shipboard; and, during the whole period of my life abroad, have scarcely ever passed a month out of sight of the ocean: besides being brought up from two years till ten on the brink of it. I recollect, when anchored off Cape Sigeum in 1810, in an English frigate, a violent squall coming on at sunset, so violent as to make us imagine that the ship would part cable, or drive from her anchorage. Mr. Hobhouse and myself, and some officers, had been up the Dardanelles to Abydos, and were just returned in time. The aspect of a storm in the Archipelago is as poetical as need be, the sea being particularly short, dashing, and dangerous, and the navigation intricate and broken by the isles and currents. Cape Sigeum, the tumuli of the Troad, Lemnos, Tenedos, all added to the associations of the time. But what seemed the most “poetical” of all at the moment, were the numbers (about two hundred) of Greek and Turkish craft, which were obliged to “cut and run” before the wind, from their unsafe anchorage, some for Tenedos, some for other isles, some for the main, and some it might be for eternity. The sight of these little scudding vessels, darting over the foam in the twilight, now appearing and now disappearing between the waves in the cloud of night, with their peculiarly white sails, (the Levant sails not being of “coarse canvass,” but of white cotton,) skimming along as quickly, but less safely than the sea-mews which hovered over them; their evident distress, their reduction to fluttering specks in the distance, their crowded succession, their littleness, as contending with the giant element, which made our stout forty-four’s teak timbers (she was built in India) creak again; their aspect and their motion, all struck me as something far more “poetical” than the mere broad, brawling, shipless sea, and the sullen winds, could possibly have been without them.

  The Euxine is a noble sea to look upon, and the port of Constantinople the most beautiful of harbours, and yet I cannot but think that the twenty sail of the line, some of one hundred and forty guns, rendered it more “poetical” by day in the sun, and by night perhaps still more, for the Turks illuminate their vessels of war in a manner the most picturesque, and yet all this is artificial. As for the Euxine, I stood upon the Symplegades — I stood by the broken altar still exposed to the winds upon one of them — I felt all the “poetry” of the situation, as I repeated the first lines of Medea; but would not that “poetry” have been heightened by the Argo? It was so even by the appearance of any merchant vessel arriving from Odessa. But Mr. Bowles says, “Why bring your ship off the stocks?” for no reason that I know, except that ships are built to be launched. The water, &c. undoubtedly HEIGHTENS the poetical associations, but it does not make them; and the ship amply repays the obligation: they aid each other; the water is more poetical with the ship — the ship less so without the water. But even a ship laid up in dock, is a grand and a poetical sight. Even an old boat, keel upwards, wrecked upon the barren sand, is a “poetical” object, (and Wordsworth, who made a poem about a washing tub and a blind boy, may tell you so as well as I,) whilst a long extent of sand and unbroken water, without the boat, would be as like dull prose as any pamphlet lately published.

  What makes the poetry in the image of the “marble waste of Tadmor,” or Grainger’s “Ode to Solitude,” so much admired by Johnson? Is it the “marble” or the “waste,” the artificial or the natural object? The “waste” is like all other wastes; but the “marble” of Palmyra makes the poetry of the passage as of the place.

  The beautiful but barren Hymettus, the whole coast of Attica, her hills and mountains, Pentelicus, Anchesmus, Philopappus, &c. &c. are in themselves poetical, and would be so if the name of Athens, of Athenians, and her very ruins, were swept from the earth. But am I to be told that the “nature” of Attica would be more poetical without the “art” of the Acropolis? of the Temple of Theseus? and of the still all Greek and glorious monuments of her exquisitely artificial genius? Ask the traveller what strikes him as most poetical, the Parthenon, or the rock on which it stands? The COLUMNS of Cape Colonna, or the Cape itself? The rocks at the foot of it, or the recollection that Falconer’s ship was bulged upon them? There are a thousand rocks and capes far more picturesque than those of the Acropolis and Cape Sunium in themselves; what are they to a thousand scenes in the wilder parts of Greece, of Asia Minor, Switzerland, or even of Cintra in Portugal, or to many scenes of Italy, and the Sierras of Spain? But it is the “art,” the columns, the temples, the wrecked vessel, which give them their antique and their modern poetry, and not the spots themselves. Without them, the spots of earth would be unnoticed and unknown; buried, like Bab
ylon and Nineveh, in indistinct confusion, without poetry, as without existence; but to whatever spot of earth these ruins were transported, if they were capable of transportation, like the obelisk, and the sphinx, and the Memnon’s head, there they would still exist in the perfection of their beauty, and in the pride of their poetry. I opposed, and will ever oppose, the robbery of ruins from Athens, to instruct the English in sculpture; but why did I do so? The ruins are as poetical in Piccadilly as they were in the Parthenon; but the Parthenon and its rock are less so without them. Such is the poetry of art.

  Mr. Bowles contends again that the pyramids of Egypt are poetical, because of “the association with boundless deserts,” and that a “pyramid of the same dimensions” would not be sublime in “Lincoln’s Inn Fields:” not so poetical certainly; but take away the “pyramids,” and what is the “desert?” Take away Stone-henge from Salisbury plain, and it is nothing more than Hounslow heath, or any other unenclosed down. It appears to me that St. Peter’s, the Coliseum, the Pantheon, the Palatine, the Apollo, the Laocoon, the Venus di Medicis, the Hercules, the dying Gladiator, the Moses of Michael Angelo, and all the higher works of Canova, (I have already spoken of those of ancient Greece, still extant in that country, or transported to England,) are as poetical as Mont Blanc or Mount Ætna, perhaps still more so, as they are direct manifestations of mind, and presuppose poetry in their very conception; and have, moreover, as being such, a something of actual life, which cannot belong to any part of inanimate nature, unless we adopt the system of Spinosa, that the world is the Deity. There can be nothing more poetical in its aspect than the city of Venice: does this depend upon the sea, or the canals? —