To this gift, nearer the actor's than either the musician's or the poet's, he owed probably the suddenness of his fame. It called attention to his literature; but the attention was well deserved, for this boyish production was notable, coming when it did.
In 1800, when the _Odes of Anacreon_ appeared, Wordsworth and Coleridge had, it is true, published _Lyrical Ballads_. The revolution in taste had begun. Yet these fighters in the van beat heavily upon an armed opposition; and for the moment the tradition of Pope, as modified in different directions by Gray and Goldsmith, was passionately upheld against them. Burns, indeed, had already made a great breach in the solid academic phalanx, and had won through to acceptance. But newcomers, who preached such doctrines as were set out in the preface to _Lyrical Ballads_, roused fierce hostility; they came with their mouths full of arguments. Moore, on the other hand, troubled no man with controversy, yet was hardly more academic than they. Like them, he boldly discarded the eighteenth-century manner, still flourishing in the hands of Crabbe. "The early poets of our language," says the preface to Little's Poems, "were the models which Mr. Little selected for imitation." A glance at the _Anacreon_ will show the truth of this observation. Take the third ode--
Listen to the Muse's lyre, Master of the pencil's fire! Sketch'd in painting's bold display, Many a city first portray, Many a city revelling free, Warm with loose festivity. Picture then a rosy train, Bacchants straying o'er the plain, Piping, as they roam along, Roundelay or shepherd-song. Paint me next, if painting may Such a theme as this portray, All the happy heaven of love Which these blessed mortals prove.
Here the suggestion, if not of Fletcher's manner, at least of some manner contemporary with Fletcher, is unmistakable. But since the verses were put forward without comment, no one thought of objecting. It is like the fable of the Wind and the Sun: Moore's genial example relaxed the bonds of 'correctness' by far more quickly than Wordsworth's austere theorising.
The easy way is seldom so good as the hard way, and no one would put Moore's early work into comparison with the wonderful volume that was the fruit of the years spent by Wordsworth and Coleridge at Nether Stowey. Yet it is only just to emphasise the fact that Moore was the first to bring back to English that note of song, natural even in its artificiality, which is heard all through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but, except by Blake, was never sounded during the eighteenth. One can readily imagine the delight with which a generation, nursed on Cowper and Crabbe, turned to these facile yet not vulgar harmonies. And the work, though seemingly so easy, was wrought with delicate care; Lord Moira noted, and Moore gratefully recorded the praise, that few among the best poets had been so strictly grammatical! Always a careful craftsman, Moore never worked harder than on this first attempt. But his labour detracted nothing from the flush of youth, the zest for enjoyment, which pervades the lines. 'The young people will like it,' probably in any generation, whenever they chance to read it.