Books: Bard of Erin

THE HARP THAT ONCE—Howard Mumford Jones—Holt ($3.50).

THE MINSTREL BOY—L. A. G. Strong— Knopf ($3.75).The middle half of the 18th Century, in Europe, was a kind of waiting time. Artistically an awkward bridge between classicism and the fierce romantics, politically a feudal afternoon of dying magnificence, it was a Golden Age gone tinsel without anyone quite realizing the change. Good and bad, wealth and poverty, freedom and tyranny seemed to have struck a permanent balance. It was a time of elaborate facades and filthy backstreets, of nearsighted perceptions and long-range emotions. If a gentleman, posting hastily through the slums, had a tear in his eye, it was not for the squalor and misery he saw around him, but for the sorrows of Goethe’s best-selling Young Wertker. It was only a truism when Edward Gibbon, concluding on the eve of the French Revolution his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, remarked that no such social upsets could possibly occur again in so well-ordered a world. Against this 18th Century background appeared last week two full-dress biographies of Poet Tom Moore. Author Jones’s was the more tricked’-out in period furbelows; Author Strong’s more sober-minded version was the better bet for serious readers.

Born late enough in this period to give him a running jump into the more stirring times that followed was Tom Moore, a short, bouncing, dandiacal Irish poet, whose life and work expressed the age’s contradictions perhaps as well as any man’s. Son of a prosperous Dublin greengrocer, he was schooled at Trinity College, where he was a classmate and familiar of the great Robert Emmet, was involved with him in such seditious pranks that the pair escaped arrest and imprisonment only by the narrowest of margins. It was not until Moore had settled in England, some time after, that he wrote his Irish Melodies, the series of poems which, set to music by Sir John Stevenson and containing such songs as Believe Me If All Those Endearing Young Charms, Oh, Breathe Not His Name.* The Harp That Once Through Tara’s Halls, comprise the work for which he is chiefly remembered. Though the Melodies are filled with romantic, hazy references to the woes of Erin, in practical fact the fires of revolutionary ardor in the poet himself had burned very dim. A favorite with fashionable London, he had seen one book of his verses honored by the patronage of the pleasure-seeking Prince of Wales (later George IV). On a visit to the U. S. soon after, he came away from the fledgling republic holding his nose from the ”wretched” hostelries. “barbarous” inhabitants, “squalling children, stinking Negroes”; . . . “every step I take not only reconciles, but endears to me, not only the excellencies but even the errors of Old

England.” Though Lalla Rookh, a lushly exotic verse-chronicle of Oriental tribesmen and their passions, testified indirectly to a revival of his libertarianism and brought him his greatest contemporary success, he outlived his fame. Harassed by financial difficulties, weakened mentally in his last years, he died in 1852. A statue, raised to his memory by popular subscription in Dublin, turned out after its erection to have been cast in inferior metal, soon rusted ignobly inthe Irish rains.

Though Tom Moore’s life was both disappointed and disappointing, it was lively and varied; if for that reason only, both of last week’s biographies make interesting reading. A little carried away himself by the brilliant instability of his subject’s period, Author Jones adopts the method of Guedalla and Strachey, devoting much space to contemporary modes and fashions, interspersing brisk epigrammatic surveys of political movements, quoting newspapers, hotel menus indiscriminately, in the effort to keep not only his subject but his background alive in the reader’s mind. The method adds sparkle but leads to trivia (example: Moore’s “duel” with the Reviewer Jeffrey which, interrupted by the police, ended in Bow Street station, and gave rise to malicious rumors that the pistols hadn’t been loaded anyway).

Most readers will find The Minstrel Boy the more balanced, more understanding account. As Author Strong points out: if Moore sought preferment wherever he could get it, consorted with the lords and ladies, whose power his poetry was attacking, that was no more than the gracefully graceless way of the times he lived in. If he ran from the battles he fomented, that was because he was a poet, not a man of action. And if his poetry “glows at no great heat,” seems largely facile and sentimental now, it had a quality, incommunicable to present ears, which made the Irish take it passionately to their hearts, and so furthered the cause of Nationalism that was his one enduring conviction. For this. Strong concludes, Tom Moore deserves “his modest but permanent cottage on Parnassus.”

* Traditionally, a reference to Emmet’s valedictory utterance to his executioners: “Let no name write my epitaph.”