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Page 9
Steadfastness in mutability, that is the common need, a Rock of Ages.
Then 'gin I thinke on that which Nature sayd,
Of that same time when no more change shall be,
But stedfast rest of all things, firmely stayd
Upon the pillars of Eternity,
That is contrayr to Mutabilitie;
For all that moveth doth in change delight:
But thenceforth all shall rest eternally
With Him that is the God of Sabaoth hight:
O! that great Sabaoth God, grant me that Sabaoth's sight.
BESSY MOORE
"My best wishes and respects to Mrs. Moore; she is beautiful. I may
say so even to you, for I was never more struck with a countenance."
That is Byron, writing to Tom Moore in 1812, when he had been married
little more than a year--and Byron's opinion of woman's beauty
is worth having. In the eight volumes of Tom's memoirs, worthily
collected by his friend Lord John Russell, and in all the crowded
stage of it, I see no figure shining in so sweet and clear a morning
light as that of his little home-keeping wife, with her "wild, poetic
face," her fancy which rings always truer than Tom's own, and her
mother-love, which sorrow has to sound so deeply before she can leave
the scene. Her appearances are fitful; she keeps to the hearth when
the grandees hold the floor. You see nothing of her at Holland House,
which Tom may use as his inn, or at Bowood, if she can help herself,
which in the country is his house of call. She is the Jenny Wren of
this little cock-robin; she wears drab, too often mourning; but you
find that she counts for very much with Tom. He loves to know her at
his back, loves to remind himself of it. He is always happy to be home
again in her faithful arms. Through all the sparkle and flash, under
all the talk, through all the tinklings of pianos and guitars which
declare Tom's whereabouts, if you listen you can hear the quiet burden
of her heart-beats. I don't know what he would have done without her,
nor what we should have to say to his literary remains if she were
not in them to make them smell of lavender. Few men of letters, and no
wits, can have left more behind, with less in them.
There is a great deal less of Bessy in the memoirs than, say, of Lady
Donegal, or of Rogers, or of Lord Lansdowne, but somehow or another
she makes herself felt; and though her appearances in them are of
Tom's contrivance, a personality is more surely expressed than in most
of his more elaborate portraits. One gets to know her as indeed the
"excellent and beautiful person" of Lord John's measured approval, not
so much by what she says or does as by her reactions on Tom himself.
A study of her has to be made out of a number of pencil-scratches--one
here, one there--put down by the diarist with unpremeditated art; for
it is certain that, though Moore intended his diaries to speak for him
after his death, what he had to say of his wife was the last thing
in them he would have relied upon to do it. I am sure that is so;
nevertheless, with the exception of Tom himself, who, of course, holds
the centre of the stage, she is more surely and sensibly there than
any of his thousand characters, from the Prince Regent to the poet
Bowles; more surely and fragrantly there. We are the better for her
presence; and so is her Tom's memory, infinitely the better.
It was a secret marriage and, except in the minds of a few good
judges, an improvident.
"I breakfast with Lady Donegal on Monday," he writes to his
mother in May, 1811, "and dine to meet her at Rogers' on
Tuesday; and there is to be a person at both parties whom you
little dream of."
This person was Bessy, to whom he had been married some two months
on the day of writing, and of whom, when his family was notified, he
found that it had nothing good to say. He complains of disappointment,
of a "degree of coldness" in his father's comments; and neither is
perhaps very wonderful. For Miss Bessy not only had nothing a year,
but in the reckoning of the day, and in comparison with the young
friend of Lord Moira and Lady Donegal, she herself was nothing.
She was indeed a professional actress--Miss E. Dyke in the
play-bills--whom Tom had first met in 1808 when the Kilkenny Theatre
began a meteor-course. He had lent himself as an amateur to the
enterprise, was David in _The Rivals_, Spado (with song) in _A Castle
of Andalusia_. In 1809, for three weeks on end, he had been Peeping
Tom of Coventry to the Lady Godiva of Miss E. Dyke. The rest is easy
guessing, and so it is that Tom's parents were dismayed, and that
there was a "degree of coldness." Lady Godiva, indeed!
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