Thomas (1794-1869) was born to a middle-class merchant family with enough money to provide a university education for their brilliant son - and so sent him to Trinity College (Dublin), the university founded in that city by Queen Elizabeth in 1594 and, legally as well as traditionally, dedicated to the rites and beliefs of the Protestant Anglican faith. As a Roman Catholic, Moore was an outside but made himself very much an insider in the radical student group which attached itself to the ideals of the United Irishmen [q.v.]. Although Moore restrained himself and played no part in the United Irishmen"s Rebellion of 1798, he was a close friend of Robert Emmet - the doomed patriot who led a small and miserably unsuccessful rebellion in Dublin in 1803 and was hanged in consequence. (Moore wrote about him only obliquely in a poem called "She is Far from the Land" treating of Emmet"s fiancée Sarah Curran.)
This ambivalent attitude towards Irish cultural and political nationalism affected all his writings which tended to oscillate between a passionately separatist rhetorical and the language of literary unionism. In the former there is promise that Ireland will regain its historic independence or, at least, preserve its separate character in national memory. In the latter, the romantic peculiarities of Ireland as a western-most and relatively undeveloped country with large areas of scenic splendour, especially amid its mountains and valleys, become the material for a particularily saccharine kind of poetry which the English public loved and the English critics loved to hate.
Moore also wrote Asian romances such as "Lallah Rookh" and produced some bread-and-butter prose works
such as "The History of Ireland" - though his short tirade against the ferocious English repression of Irish land-reform activists in "Captain Rock", a portrait of an Irish terrorist of the period - is now taken as an indication of his fundamentally irrendentist outlook and his disbelief in the benefits of the British Union .. at least for Ireland! Moore made his chief mark with a large series of poem-songs called Irish Melodies - issued in a prolific series of 9 volumes (1808-34) -which were set to music by John Stevenson, an Irish composer of the day (d.1833). There success was enormous and they became a major institution of Irish literary cultural in the Romantic Age while their author came to be called “The Bard of Ireland“ and the Irish National Poet.
This was however a somewhat fictitious status since the historical tradition of Irish bardship and even the
tradition of native Irish poetry itself became virtually extinct with the shift from the Irish to English languages and Moore"s poetry was necessarily written as a form of premeditated nostalgia for "the glories that are lost". It is this character that he served as both an irish national poet and a decorative English writer and it is highly significant that, for his friend Lord Byron, he was also the author of Asiatic poems who, therefore, seemed to reveal the "oriental" origins of the Irish people.
Orientalism - as Edward Said has show - was one of the strategies of European empire - French as well as Britisn - bu which the Middle East was constructed as a land of sensuous excess. It was for the British to be rational and industrious and for the Turks and the Irish to indulge in "fancy" and to supply the riches of their overheated and impractical imaginations as a kind of tributary stream flowing into the main course of English literature. Indeed, in the 1960s the great English critic Matthew Arnold constructed a theory in which the Celtic strain was precisely that: a token of the colourful Irish mind at play amid its dreamy images while also exhibiting what he called its resistance to "the harsh despotism of fact" and its corresponding lack of ‘the skilful and resolute appliance of means to ends which is needed both to make progress in material civilisation, and [...] to form powerful states.’ (On the Study of Celtic Literature, ed., R. H. Super, Michigan UP, 1962, pp.345.)
While Arnold had all of ancient Irish poetry and legend in mind as much as present writers, this might almost be a criticism of Moore.
Opposite in termper to Thomas Moore was William Carleton who has emerged as the first Irish realist - albeit a hilarious and tragic story-teller as well - who documented to life of the "Irish peasantry" before the Great Famine of 1845-49. By peasantry was meant the agrarian under-class who were deprived of virtually ever form of wealth and lived a subsistence existence in complete dependence on the potato as their staple food. In each generation their rented plots of land got smaller and smaller and the "rack-rent" applied to their non-existent income seemed to get higher and higher - as much because of the extortionate middle-men as because of the heartles Anglo-Irish gentry who now owned the land. (Maria Edgeworth describes all of this in the spirit of a reformist, while Jonathan Swift described it with that spirit of bitter indigation which is his hallmark in literature. [See further under Carleton - q.v.] |
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