SOURCE: DeFord, Miriam Allen. “Verse Satire and Polemics.” In Thomas Moore,pp. 55-66. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1967.

[In the following essay, DeFord considers the quality of Moore's satirical poetry and examines the targets of his attacks.]

I THE TOPICAL VERSIFIER

It is doubtful if Moore ever understood entirely the exact nature of his talent. His enormous popularity justified him in his own mind as an aspirant to the first rank of English poetry: he had heard himself acclaimed often enough as the supreme English poet of his day. He knew in his more objective moments that he had not attained that rank and never could attain it. Still, he was apt to deprecate the very things that he could do better than any of his contemporaries—light, sentimental poems to be sung, and pungent irony and satire in verse. With the latter—though he was likely to slip from indignation into bombast—may be included his angry, nonsatiric polemic poems.

As time went on and weariness grew within him, the poetic spring dried and he turned more and more to topical verse. What he never lost was his technical expertise. The least of his squibs for The Times and The Morning Chronicle displayed to the end his old polish and sting. If so much of his satirical verse is no longer readable, it is not because of the writing but because the objects of his ridicule and wrath have faded into the shadows of old political history, which nobody but professional historians would care to grope about in today.

To the first reader who came upon it in his morning paper, or ink-fresh in a slender pamphlet, it was immediate, exhilarating, and (if he were a Tory, or an admirer of the Regent) maddening. Basically Moore's wit exploded in harmless fireworks and his humor was kindly; but when it came to the Irish cause or to one or two other subjects it could turn savage and the fireworks stung. Some of his attacks on the Established Church of Ireland were so vicious that he himself excluded them from his collected poems. Moore, who hated few things and few people, never lost his hatred for the Church which extracted tithes from starving Irish peasants to whom its tenets were rank heresy; or for Lord Castlereagh, who (himself Anglo-Irish) had, as a chief secretary, suppressed the United Irishmen's revolt in 1798, and who, until his suicide in 1822, was the leader and voice of the most extreme reaction at home and abroad. On these two subjects Moore could be and was venomous.

The Prince of Wales, whom as Regent Moore had believed in and flattered, had gone back on all his liberal promises when he succeeded as George IV. Eventually, Moore came to regard him as a figure of fun, rather than as an object of indignation. Other things—slavery, child labor, corruption, religious bigotry—could arouse him to anger; but most of his satirical poems display contempt rather than fury. He was a master of irony as well as of more obvious satire; and irony, though it may well be cutting, is seldom as heated as is the open lampoon.

Whatever other and different kinds of writing engaged his main attention, Moore continued to write satirical squibs and poems, prolifically up to Catholic Emancipation (1829), more sparingly up to passage of the Reform Bill (1832), and occasionally after that. But with the weakening of his political interests, and his increasing preoccupation with biography and history, his facility fell off. His later satires are labored, and lack the bite of the earlier ones.

II THE AMERICAN POEMS

Moore's first verse satire—or, with greater accuracy, his first verse polemic—was the least worthy of him. It was the antidemocratic verse inspired by his visit to the United States of America in 1803. It must be remembered that Moore, however liberal in some of his views, was always against demagoguery and rabble-rousing; and that his most cherished associations, at the beginning of his literary career, were with his noble patrons, who may have been enlightened in their opinions but were also fastidious aristocrats. Moore's first noble Whig friend, Lord Moira, had fought against the rebellious colonials in America; his earlier friend, Joseph Atkinson, had served under Moira.

Furthermore Moore was not made for rough provincial society. He was urban as well as urbane. He liked nothing in America except the nearest approximation it could offer to the English circles so dear to him—the well-mannered ladies and gentlemen, mostly of Federalist persuasion, whom he met particularly in Philadelphia. It was the orthodox reaction of British observers for fifty years to come. In the years when Moore could still hail the egregious Regent as “the bright future star of England's throne,” he could also indict American society as he saw it as “The apathy of wrong, the bosom's ice, / The slow and cold stagnation into vice.” And he could express his anti-Jacobin distaste for “That Gallic garbage of philosophy, / That nauseous slaver of these frantic times.”

America to him was the place “Where every ill the ancient world could brew / Is mixt with every grossness of the new.” Some of his bias, it is true, arose from his detestation of chattel slavery. In “To the Lord Viscount Forbes” he denounced a land “where bastard Freedom waves / Her fustian flag in mockery o'er slaves.” Yet much of it must be credited (or debited) to his shrinking from the uncultured provincialism of rural and small town America in 1803. Later, when he had found subjects more worthy of his blade, he became ashamed of these youthful excesses, and apologized manfully for them.

As a matter of fact, most Americans knew nothing about them. They sang the Irish Melodies, and wept over Lalla Rookh, and were blissfully ignorant of the disgust and bitterness with which young Thomas Moore had greeted their country on his only visit to its shores.

III THE POLEMICIST

Moore learned in time the advantage of ridicule over denunciation. It left its victims helpless except to sputter back. They dared not risk becoming the laughing-stock of all England by imprisoning the most popular poet in the country, as they could imprison a mere impudent journalist or an impoverished printer. However, the earlier long satirical poems (as contrasted with short squibs or pasquinades) were polemic rather than satiric: they did not make fun; they struck out.

In this field Moore made rather an inauspicious beginning. Corruption, Intolerance, and The Sceptic were planned as the first of a considerable series; but Moore abandoned the scheme when they failed to arouse much interest. He had thought of them as “the imperfect beginning of a long series of [verse] essays addressed to an Englishman by an Irishman,” and the frank model was Pope's Essay on Man and Essay on Criticism. It was a clumsy device, and Moore lacked the staggering, wicked brilliance of Pope. The primary butt of Corruption was bribery in high places, but it fanned out to include attacks on both Tory reaction and demagoguery—always Moore's two bêtes noires. Intolerance applied the whip to bigotry and religious fanaticism. The Sceptic, which is subtitled “A Philosophical Satire,” is the weakest of the three. None of them is of great importance. A few excerpts will show their flavor.

In Corruption, Moore the Irishman voiced his scorn for England the Oppressor. (Moore the Anglophile was in abeyance.)

I coldly listen to thy patriot vaunts,
And feel, tho' close our wedded countries twine,
More sorrow for my own than pride in thine!

He could not forget or forgive the wrongs done his native land: “The dupéd people, hourly doomed to pay / The sums that bribe their liberties away.” He ends with an admonition, heartfelt but singularly unprophetic (England being then at the beginning of its greatest age): “Oh England, sinking England! boast no more.”

The Muse grows livelier in Intolerance: “When bigot zeal her drunken antics plays, / Bigots alike in Rome or England born”—And he condemns equally all religious intolerance, whatever creed may be its spokesman or its victim:

Yes,—rather plunge me back in Pagan night,
And take my chance with Socrates for bliss
Than be the Christian of a faith like this.

There speaks the son of the tolerant, anticlerical John Moore. And the same latitudinarianism emerges from The Sceptic: “As who is wise?—you'll find the self-same man / A sage in France, a madman in Japan.”

IV THE EDGE OF THE SWORD

With Intercepted Letters, or the Two-Penny Post-Bag, Moore found his satirical stride. The “letters” were immensely popular (among, of course, those who agreed with their political views); and they deserved to be. They were supposed to be private letters (though in verse) exchanged by Tory notables, and intercepted, presumably, by the pseudonymous “Thomas Brown the Younger,” and they parodied the public style of their alleged authors.¹ The volume carried in its fifth edition a preface by “a friend of the author”—the author being ostensibly “Brown” and the friend very plainly Moore: by this time it was a secret to few.

Many of the “letters” were parodies on popular poems of the time and some of them were parodies on songs and meant to be—and were—sung to the same tune. They are intensely topical, and to read them today with understanding would require a whole volume of explication. Yet they are neatly turned and sharply pointed, and some of them are still very amusing—good journalism rather than poetry in any serious sense.

For the most part, the “letters” were aimed at the Regent, the Tories, and the enemies of Ireland. A few, however, were more general in application, without political significance. The letter from a publisher to an author who has submitted a manuscript would arouse a sympathetic throb in the heart of any writer a century and a half later:

Per Post, Sir, we send your ms. …
Very sorry, but can't undertake. …
Clever work, Sir! …
Its only defect is—it never would sell.

But the more typical “intercepted letter” makes bitter fun of the fat Regent and his penchant for equally fat and elderly mistresses:

So, let your list of she-promotions
Include those only, plump and sage,
Who've reached the regulation age;
That is (as near as one can fix
From Peerage dates) full fifty-six.

The eight Fables for the Holy Alliance² were, said Moore, designed to illustrate and make understandable that indefinite and rather mystical declaration. Each Fable is preceded by a Proem which explains its factual basis. The Fables themselves have sparkle and gaiety; but with no direct involvement with the Irish question, Moore's habitual good humor overcame him, and they lack sting. Occasionally he makes his point sharply, as in “The Fly and the Bullock,” where a common household fly occupies the dais and a bullock the sacrificial altar: “The Fly on the Shrine is Legitimate Right, / And that Bullock, the People that's sacrificed to it.”

In the Proems Moore's indignation comes out more clearly than in the Fables themselves. He bursts out in “Church and State” with

Religion, made,
'Twixt Church and State, a truck, a trade, …
'Twixt Cant and Blasphemy, the two
Rank ills with which this age is curst,

or, in “The Extinguishers,” remarks sardonically:

Even soldiers sometimes think—
Nay, Colonels have been known to reason,—
And reasoners, whether clad in pink
Or red or blue, are on the brink
(Nine chances out of ten) of treason.

Moore produced altogether a vast number of occasional satirical poems, ranging from easy ridicule to savage denunciation. They evoked laughter, but some of them also drew blood. Even George Saintsbury, who called Moore's lighter poems “great fun, … [marked by] acute observation, put into notable form by an accomplished man of letters,” was moved to call some of the more rancorous ones “turgid rant.”³

Technically, they show no great innovation; nearly all are in the familiar iambic tetrameter or pentameter, in couplets or an a-b-a-b rhyme-pattern. They have, however, style and finish; and the rhymes, though occasionally outrageous, for the most part are clever. Hazlitt, who was no friend of their viewpoint, yet conceded their adroitness and “delicate insinuation.”

Some of Moore's satirical poems are a mere voicing of amiable prejudice—such as his antifeminist dislike of bluestockings in “A Blue Love Song,” in which the “scribbling wife” is told:

Just think, my own Malthusian dear,
How much more decent 'tis to hear
“How is your book?” than “How's your baby?”

Others, like “Tory Pledges,” have sharp applicability even today:

I pledge myself thro' thick and thin
To labor still with zeal devout
To get the Outs, poor devils, in,
And turn the Ins, the wretches, out.

But in a few of the poems Moore rises to the heights of really wounding satire fired by honest anger. When Sir Robert Peel called the Public Debt a “Family Account,” Moore proffered, to be sung to a popular tune, a new “pastoral ballad” called “All in the Family Way”:

My labourers used to eat mutton,
As any great man of the state does;
And now the poor devils are put on
Small rations of tea and potatoes.
But cheer up, John, Sawney, and Paddy,(4)
The King is your father, they say;
So ev'n if you starve for your Daddy,
'T is all in the family way.

Again, in 1827 the Catholic Emancipation Bill was defeated once more. Immediately five million rounds of cartridges were rushed to all the garrisons in Ireland. Moore responded with “A Pastoral Ballad, by John Bull”:

She [Ireland] askt me for Freedom and Right,
But ill she her wants understood;—
Ball cartridges, morning and night,
Is a dose that will do her more good.

One of the bitterest, and one of the best, of Moore's truly satiric poems is the long “Epistle of Condolence from a Slave-Lord to a Cotton-Lord.” England abolished slavery in its overseas colonies in 1807, but it was 1811 before the slave trade was finally suppressed. The first feeble effort to regulate child labor in textile factories (not in mines or fields) was a law, a mutilated form of a bill introduced by the great reformer, Robert Owen, in 1819. Even this met with loud outcry from the mill-owners. Moore's slavelord expresses his sympathy:

Alas! my dear friend, what a state of affairs!
How unjustly we both are despoiled of our rights!
Not a pound of black flesh shall I leave to my heirs,
Nor must you any more work to death little whites. …
                                                                                                                                  Farewell to the zest
Which slavery now lends to each tea-cup we sip,
Which makes still the cruellest coffee the best,
And the sugar the sweetest which smacks of the whip.
Farewell too the factories' white pickaninnies—
Small living machines … flogged to their tasks.

Like too many of Moore's poems, this loses its vigor toward the end and peters out in near inanity; he would have benefited by the stern editor he never had. But it is evidence that it was not the wrongs of Ireland alone that could awaken his indignation, and that he was capable of verse that slashed deep and left a scar.

V THE FUDGES

Howard Mumford Jones calls The Fudge Family in Paris “the most readable of Moore's satires.”⁵ It was certainly the most ambitious. In the guise of a series of letters from members of the family to correspondents in England, while (soon after Waterloo) they are enjoying a holiday in Paris, so long forbidden by the Napoleonic Wars to English tourists, it makes fun of both English and Continental politics and economics. Phil Fudge, the father, who seems to be a widower, has been a Tory informer in Ireland, and although now retired is still acting discreetly for Lord Castlereagh. His son Bob is what would then have been called a “noodle”—a dandy whose only interests are in food and clothing—not in girls, thanks to Moore's streak of Irish Puritanism where sex was concerned. The daughter, Biddy, is a light-headed scatterbrain and a naïve snob; but despite himself Moore could not keep from giving her a bit of charm, and her letters are by far the best. There is also a tutor, Phelim Connor, a solemn and hortatory young man whose philosophical disquisitions are altogether unreadable; he is a poor relation of the Fudges, and, Biddy confides to her friend Dolly, “entre nous, too, a Papist—how liberal of Pa!” What story line there is is Biddy's—her sad awakening when the admirer she had taken for an exiled king or at the very least an army officer turns out to be a shop-clerk.

A good part of The Fudge Family in Paris (omitting Phelim's long, drawn-out dissertations, and discounting Phil Fudge's epistles, in the familiar vein of Moore's topical satire) is absolutely first-ratee light verse, witty, colloquial, full of verve and gaiety and too good-natured to sting very hard. It displays a masterly command of rhymes, including some dazzling French-English ones. This kind of amiable raillery is, together with his flair for singable lyrics, Moore's real forte. Even the pedantic footnotes, telling his readers things they must already have known, cannot spoil it.

This, like other poems of its sort, Moore brought out as by “Thomas Brown the Younger,” but in a facetious preface he reveals openly that “Brown” is Thomas Moore—by way of a Greek pun on his name.⁶

Even boring, rhetorical Phelim Connor occasionally gets off a good line, such as “Hating Napoleon much, but Freedom more.” And Phil Fudge, heavy as he is, remarks that

Europe at the moment
Enjoys a peace which like the Lord's
Passeth all human understanding.

But it is Biddy who is given the best role. Here she is, explaining to Dolly that Lord Castlereagh has suggested that Papa write a book:

A good orthodox book is much wanting just now
To expound to the world the new—thingummie—science,
Found out by the—what's-its-name—Holy Alliance;
And prove to mankind that their rights are but folly,
Their freedom a joke (which it is, you know, Dolly).

In these poems the iambics march and the anapests skip instead of swooning. Technically, Moore's humorous and satirical verse is often tighter and better controlled than his serious poetry. There are rhymes worthy of Ogden Nash—“dagger a … Niagara,” “ecstasy … neck to see.”

Altogether, The Fudge Family in Paris was a resounding success and went into edition after edition. The Tory journalists, naturally, did not join in the praise. The Literary Gazette said sourly that the poem combined “a flowing versification and a seasoning of witticisms [with] the defamation of statesmen, the insult of monarchs, and the calumny of country.” (It did not note that the country “calumniated” was not Moore's own!) An anonymous critic delivered himself of “The Fudges Fudged,” to which he wisely did not sign his name:

A Ballad-singer who had long
Strummed many a vile lascivious song …
Worn out and impotent become,
Beats, as he can, sedition's drum.

So well received by most readers, however, was The Fudge Family in Paris that seventeen years later Moore followed it with The Fudge Family in England. It was a sad come-down. The sprightly gaiety is all gone; the satire is heavy-handed. Phil Fudge is dead; Bob is a self-indulgent old bachelor; Biddy is now a rich old maid hunting for a husband—preferably a young High Church clergyman, for “Time had reduced her to wrinkles and prayers, / And the Flirt found a decent retreat in the Saint.” The “saint,” however, still has plenty of worldly interests.

She has living with her a beautiful young niece, Fanny, who is a dedicated poetess—her poems sound like bad parodies of Moore himself in his most maudlin vein, and doubtless were deliberately intended to be so, for Moore could sometimes be an acute critic of his own work. Biddy sets her cap for young Patrick Mahan, an Irish gentleman, and deludes herself into thinking he is in love with her instead of (as is of course the case) with Fanny.

Brother Bob appears occasionally, until he has a stroke at news of Catholic Emancipation:

And whereas, till the Catholic bill,
I never wanted draught or pill,
The settling of that curséd question
Has quite unsettled my digestion.

There is also the Reverend Mortimer (né Murtagh) O'Mulligan, a renegade Irishman who is now a Protestant preacher. Moore is still incensed by the Church of Ireland and its tithes:

… Rude radicals hector
At paying some thousands a year to a Rector
In places where Protestants never yet were,
Who knows but young Protestants may be born there? …
And while fools are computing what Parsons would cost,
Precious souls are meanwhile to the Establishment lost.

Larry O'Branigan, who becomes O'Mulligan's servant, writes to his wife Judy in Irish brogue—the only time Moore attempted this and not too successfully; he himself never spoke with a brogue.

The new Biddy is absurd without being funny, though she does serve as voice for one or two sly digs—“Not this world's wedlock—gross, gallant, / But pure—as when Amram married his aunt.” Fanny is mostly silly, O'Mulligan is dull except for an occasional sally—

Ah happy time! when wolves and priests
Alike were hunted as wild beasts;
And five pounds was the price, per head,
For bagging either, live or dead.

(This is historically true.) Bob, Mahan, and Larry are tough going. By 1835 Moore was very tired, very sad, and lost in the mazes of Irish history. He finished the Fudges off perfunctorily: Mahan elopes with Fanny—first making her promise never to write poetry again—and goes back to Ireland, with Larry as his servant; a great-uncle never before mentioned leaves Fanny his fortune; and Biddy swallows her disappointment and marries O'Mulligan, who thereupon changes his name to the Reverend Mortimer O'Fudge.

Moore as a satirical poet was about finished. Moreover, by this time he thought of himself chiefly as a prose-writer, although his world had not yet forgotten him as a poet.

Notes

1. From 1812 to 1840, when Rowland Hill's postal reforms took place, postage charges were based on the distance the letter traveled. As it cost fourpence for fifteen miles, the Two-Penny Post must have been local—another example of the topical allusions that were clear to Moore's contemporary readers if not to us.

2. The Holy Alliance was a declaration of principles signed in 1815, after the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo, by Alexander I of Russia, Frederick William III of Prussia, and Francis I of Austria; it was followed by the less vague Grand Alliance. The object of both was to carve up Europe in the interest of the three dominant Continental powers, suppress the last traces of revolution in France, and in general clamp Europe in the grip of reaction. It was heartily approved by the English Tories, and as heartily excoriated by the Whigs.

3. [Saintsbury, George. Essays in English Literature. London: Rivington, Percival and Company, 1896], pp. 188-89.

4. John = England (John Bull); Sawney = Scotland; Paddy = Ireland.

5. [Jones, Howard Mumford. The Harp That Once. New York: Henry Holtand Company, 1937], p. 196.

6. ἐγὠ δ‘ ὀ MΩPOΣ (ego d' o MOROS): “thus I, the fool”—“Moros” is meant as a facetious play upon “Moore.” He couples this “confession” with that of authorship of the Two-Penny Post-Bag as well.