The Cambridge History of English and American Literature in 18 Volumes (1907–21).
Volume XII. The Romantic Revival.
§ 5. Irish Melodies; Lalla Rookh
One thing no competent and fair-minded enemy has ever denied him—an almost unique faculty of marrying words to music and music to words. Part of this skill, it may be said, has little or nothing to do with poetical merit, but another part of it has; and Moore has rarely received sufficient credit for the remarkable skill with which he effects strictly prosodic variations. But the still more purely poetical value, excluding even prosodic considerations, of the best of his songs in Irish Melodies, in National Airs and in half a dozen other collections has been strangely belittled by some good judges. Grant that to transfer Ben Jonson’s scorn from prose to verse, some of the most popular, such as The Minstrel Boy and The Last Rose of Summer, and a good many others are somewhat “flashy things,” only prejudice or that lack of freshness of taste which transfers its own faults to the things distasted, or sheer insensibility, can deny a true, if not the rarest or finest, poetic touch to Oft in the stilly night (however little fond one may be of forms like “stilly”), At the mid hour of night when stars are weeping (a wonderful rhythm), I saw from the beach and others yet which might be named almost by dozens. The notes to Lalla Rookh (which nobody need read) are said to bore a generation which thinks it knows everything already; and the verse-tale of this particular kind is wholly out of fashion. Yet, there are some who, after knowing the poem almost by heart in youth and reading it at different times later, have still found “The Veiled Prophet” a much more interesting person to read about than some others of their youthful acquaintances; while, in the way of light, sweet, meringue-like verse, “Paradise and the Peri” is still not easily to be beaten.
Moreover, even Moore’s lightest verse can only be neglected at no small loss. Our fathers well knew The Fudge Family in their French and English experiences, and The Two-Penny Post Bag and the cloud of minor satiric trifles; and scores of delectable tags which enliven other peoples’ work were borrowed from them. The felicitous impertinence, neither ill-natured nor ill-bred, which Moore had at command is, perhaps nowhere better shown than in the famous or should-be famous suggestion as to Rokeby (put quite properly in a publisher’s mouth) that Scott
We may list them alphabetically as follows: Beddoes, Hartley Coleridge, Darley, Hood, Richard Henry (fantastically Hengist) Horne, Praed, Sir Henry Taylor, Thomas Wade, C. J. Wells and Charles Whitehead. Their births date from that of Darley, in the same year with that of Keats, to Wade’s, ten years later, and group themselves symmetrically in a single decade, on either side of the parting of the centuries. They have all felt strongly the literary influences which helped to determine the work of the greater group before them—the recovery of older (especially Elizabethan) English literature; the discovery of foreign; the subtle revival of imagination that is not confined to “ideas furnished by the senses”; the extension of interest in natural objects and the like. If whatever influence may be assigned to the French revolution and the great war is less immediate with them, it has, in their case, the strength of retrospect and the fresh impetus of the unsettled state of politics, society and thought, which the revolution and the war left behind them. But there is still about them a great deal that is undigested and incomplete; and no one of them has a genius, or even a temperament, strong enough to wrest and wrench him out of the transition stage.