“Trade and Poesy” in Moore’s Lalla Rookh: an oriental romance

[…] orientalizing poets […] imagined such empires as lightly allegorized, defamiliarized versions of the British state» [BUTLER 1994, p. 399]. Two years earlier Nigel Leask had already explored the complications in these allegories of empire, arguing that while they often did relocate features of contemporary British military and commercial domination to exotic Middle Eastern or Indian settings, they also represented cultural differences and political struggles in the east from perspectives that were either ultimately supportive of British and European hegemony or dependent upon western values disguised as universal liberatory principles.
Thomas Moore’s extraordinarily successful venture into «Oriental Romance», Lalla Rookh (1817), is an ambiguous and understudied instance of this broader development.Moore explicitly invites his readers to see the poem as more than just an orientalized version of the cleverly turned erotic poetry for which he had became famous (or notorious, in the minds of conservative Regency readers and reviewers).In the Preface to Lalla Rookh written for the 1841 collected edition of his  Poetical Works, Moore observes that at least one of the «easy and “light o’love” fictions» that make up this text embodies a serious political motivation.[1]In «founding a story on the fierce struggle so long maintained between the Ghebers, or ancient Fire-worshippers of Persia, and their haughty Moslem masters […] a new and deep interest in my whole task took possession of me.The cause of tolerance was again my inspiring them; and the spirit that had spoken in the melodies of Ireland found itself at home in the East» [MOORE 1862, p. 5].Beneath the veil of «fanciful Romance» [MOORE 1862, p. 6] is a narrative of Irish struggle for self-determination and freedom from British colonial impression.And the impulse motivating this part of Lalla Rookh, «The Fire-Worshippers», had, Moore says, a pervasive and compelling effect on «my whole task» – even, we are left to infer, on the second and fourth parts of the text, «Paradise and the Peri» and «The Light of the Harem», which appear to fit Moore’s own characterization of these pieces as «’light o’love’ fictions».
Many questions remain, however, about how the political allegory of Lalla Rookh is to be read, as Leask’s pioneering analysis made evident.In the most detailed political and historical reading of Lalla Rookh yet published, Jeffrey Vail sees «The Veiled Prophet of Khorassan» and «The Fire-Worshippers» as allegorical narratives linking the degeneration and failure of the French Revolution to the United Irishmen’s 1978 rebellion and defeat at the hands of the British army.Vail advances an informative and comprehensible perspective:Moore writes as a liberal Irish nationalist, steadfastly opposed to British colonial control and sympathetic even to militant resistance, yet mistrustful of both Jacobin radicalism and Napoleonic opportunism and their efforts to appropriate the cause of Irish liberation and self-determination.But seeing Mokanna, the veiled prophet who proclaims «Freedom to the World» while cynically duping and exploiting his desperately oppressed followers, as a Jacobin revolutionary leaderinvolves a great deal of historical distortion.It also links Moore not just to the liberal Whig position he obviously identified with in important respects, but to the reactionary counterrevolutionary exaggerations of Burke, Coleridge, and Gilray.
Nevertheless, Moore’s contemporaries clearly understood Lalla Rookh not simply as reflecting his commitment to the Irish cause, but as an exposure and denunciation of French Jacobin fanaticism.In the eyes of the anonymous author of an assessment in the North American Review, Mokanna is «a thorough French Jacobin, in everything but his white flag» [NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW AND MISCELLANEOUS JOURNAL 1817, p. 8].Hafed, the Gheber hero of «The Fire-Worshippers», was seen on the other hand as the very image of the Irish freedom-fighter – a view that Moore openly encourages.In a footnote to the frame-passage introducing «The Fire-Worshippers» Moores confides that much as Voltaire «in his Tragedy, “Les Guèbres” […], was generally supposed to have alluded to the Jansenists […] I should not be surprised if this story of the Fire-worshippers were found capable of a similar doubleness of application» [MOORE 1862, p. 46].The issue is not whether a «doubleness of application» was intended by Moore and accepted by contemporary readers and reviewers of Lalla Rookh.It is, rather, that any «doubleness of application» when it comes to the political allegory of «oriental romance» may involve ambiguities and contradictions that trouble the implied binary correspondence between oppression and resistance in «the East» and oppression and resistance closer to home.
Beyond the complications broached in Leask’s discussion, there are questions about gender and the roles assigned to women in Lalla Rookh that bear significantly, as Susan Taylor has shown, on Moore’s broader «doubleness» of political «application.»Taylor explores the uncertain status of «two distinct but related images of British colonization»:Ireland-as-woman and the East-as-woman.Zelica in «The Veiled Prophet» and Hinda in «The Fire-Worshippers» are situated in relation to double struggles against coercive domination – the Persians against Arabian Islamic tyranny, the Irish against British colonial tyranny – in ways that reproduce stereotypes and prejudices about women, about Islam, about the Irish [TAYLOR 2000, para. 1-2].At the same time, Moore’s own handling of gendered conventions involves his turning them in unexpected directions.This is particularly true in «The Veiled Prophet», where it is the false insurrectionist Mokanna who appropriates and manipulates the veil, even as he also carries the cultural institution and practice of the harem to an extreme that borders on the parodic.Much remains to be understood about Mokanna:like some of the most compelling figures of evil in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, he is invested with an overdetermined array of corrupt, deceptive, and destructive power.When the North American Review implies that Mokanna’s «white flag» connects him not with the Jacobin cause he is otherwise taken to personify but with the counterrevolutionary forces in France loyal to the monarchy and the church, we may suspect that the Irish/British strand in Moore’s allegorical text is less one-dimensional than it has been made to seem.Gender conventions and popular political imagery are both less than stable and predictable in «The Veiled Prophet».When we learn that «every chosen blade / That fought beneath the sacred text» of Mokanna’s banner «Seem’d doubly edg’d» [MOORE 1862, p. 12], we may well suspect that «doubly» is suspectible of its own unsettling doubleness.
These questions about how to read the veiled politics of Lalla Rookh constitute a necessary context for exploring another dimension of the text which is both conspicuous and yet productive of a kind of double vision.I am referring to the ways in which Lalla Rookh, especially in the frame-narrative of the Mogul princess seduced by her future husbanddisguised as «a young poet of Cashmere», figures Moore’s own relationship to Regency literary culture – his own ambitious but disguised captivation of the reading public.Moore says a great deal about the latter relationship in the Preface, to which I will return momentarily.The place to begin, however, is with Byron’s now often-quoted letter to Moore of May 1813:

 

Stick to the East; – the oracle, Staël [Madame De Staël] told me it was the only poetical policy.The North, South, and West, have all been exhausted; but from the East, we have nothing but [Robert Southey’s] unsaleables – and these he has contrived to spoil, by adopting only their most outrageous fictions. . . . The little I have done in that way is merely a ‘voice in the wilderness’ for you; and, if it has had any success, that also will prove that the public are orientalizing, and pave the path for you.[BYRON 1974, vol. 3, p. 101]

 

Leask begin his chapter on Byron by commenting astutely on this letter.«Byron speaks like a Levantine or East India merchant who has tapped a lucrative course of raw materials in a newly opened up Orient, which he feels will makes a splash on the home market».«Byron’s advice», Leask continues, «that the two entrepreneurs could only benefit from the negative example of Robert Southey [in Thalaba the Destroyerof 1801 and The Curse of Kehama of 1810], would continue to pay off» [LEASK 1992, pp. 13-14].Of course Byron himself was only indirectly and paradoxically a literary entrepreneur:he refused to accept money from the unprecedented sales of Childe Harold and the «Eastern Tales», although these sales generated huge profits for his publisher, John Murray.But he does write as a fellow entrepreneur to Moore, who entertained no such aristocratic detachment from making money out of poetry and who labored during a substantial part of his career under the burden of a distinctive kind of debt.Moore had been appointed Admirality Registrar at Bermuda in 1803. Soon bored with this colonial appointment, he turned his duties over to a deputy and returned to London.When the deputy was later discovered to have embezzled a substantial amount of money and left his post in 1818, Moore was held responsible.This all took place the year following the initial publication of Lalla Rookh, but it nonetheless throws into relief the conditions and circumstances under which Moore made his most ambitious incursion into the literary market. Whatever Lalla Rookh meant to him in terms of its relation to contemporary politics, its significance as a commercial enterprise could hardly have been – or have become – more exciting.If the cause of Irish independence speaks through his version of «Oriental Romance», so does the cause of Moore’s own professional independence and cultural credibility.
It is hardly surprising, therefore, that the Preface Moore eventually constructs for Lalla Rookh places far more emphasis on the cultural and economic dimension of literary capital than on the commercial, military, and political terms of British colonialism, either in India or in Ireland.Moore represents his negotiations with Longman & Co., through which he was offered the remarkable advance of 3,000 guineas on the sales of a poem he was only beginning to imagine, as a drama of personal and professional risk, labor, and triumph.I want to look in detail at how this drama unfolds – first in Moore’s Preface, then in the frame fiction of Lalla Rookh itself.
Moore opens the Preface with the claim that he «was induced to attempt a Poem upon some Oriental subject» and «opened» a «negotiation […] with the Messrs. Longman» for its publication «about the years 1812» [Moore 1862, p. 3].So Moore begins his prefatory drama in the year in which the publication of the first two cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage gave orientalist poetry a new kind of claim on the attention and book-buying inclinations of Regency readers. There was, Moore continues, «no decisive result» from his negotiations with Longman until «a year or two after» when «an old friend of mine, Mr Perry, kindly offered to lend me the aid of his advice and presence in the interview which I was about to hold with the Messrs. Longman, for the arrangement of mutual terms» [Moore , p. 3].«Mr Perry» is James Perry, editor of The Morning Chronicle, who seems to have known that John Murray had already offered Moore a two thousand pound advance and believed that a poem like Lalla Rookh might attract an even higher initial investment from competitive London publishers.With «Mr Perry» now onstage, Moore proceeds with his reenactment of the interview with Longman, complete with quoted dialogue – and with flamboyant emphasis on what Perry is made to characterize as «’the largest price that has been given, in our day, for such a work’»:« ’That was,’ answered the Messrs. Longman [who speak as a chorus at this moment, literally with one voice], «’three thousand guineas’» [MOORE, p. 3].
Moore further elaborates this «transaction» between «Trade and Poesy» by having his friend Perry take «the romantic view» that, although Longman «had never yet seen a single line of the Poem», three thousand guineas was a fair price «as a tribute to reputation already acquired» [MOORE, p. 3]. The term «romantic» is interesting here.Moore embraces it more directly as he concludes the scene of negotiation:«to the honour and glory of Romance, – as well on the publisher’s side as the poet’s, – this very generous view of the transaction was, without any difficulty, acceded to, and the firm agreed, before we separated, that I was to receive three thousand guineas for my Poem». I know of no other instance in early nineteenth-century writing where commercial and aesthetic interests are made to converge so interdependently, all under the sign of «Romance.»
And Moore is by no means done with his prefatory fable of mutual advantage.As he began the actual writing of Lalla Rookh, we are told, «a strong desire not wholly to disappoint this ‘auguring hope,’ became almost a substitute for inspiration» [MOORE, p. 3].Moore’s allusion here to Pompey’s vaunt in Act 2, scene 1 of Antony and Cleopatra may be an anxious, or ironic, comment on his own imperious ambitions.So, after making some progress in composition, «I wrote to report the state of the work to the Messrs. Longman, adding, that I was now most willing and ready, should they desire it, to submit the manuscript for their consideration».Longman’s reply to Moore’s offer is framed as a testimony to his combined literary and moral integrity:« We are certainly impatient for the perusal of the Poem; but solely for our gratification.Your sentiments are always honourable». This affirmation enables Moore to extend the self-justifying logic of the Preface to include aspects of his poetic identity regarded in some circles as less than «honourable»:« I continued to pursue my task for another year, being likewise occasionally occupied with the Irish Melodies».
Longman’s generous response to Moore’s anxieties also enables Moore to link Lalla Rookh to a broader context of imperialist war in terms that have to be read as provocatively ironic.In the year after Waterloo, having written enough of Lalla Rookh to put himself in position to claim his opulent advance, Moore again gives Longman an opportunity «to reconsider the terms of their engagement with me» because:

 

[…]the state of distress to which England was reduced, in that dismal year, by the exhausting effects of the series of wars she had just then concluded, and the general embarrassment of all classes, both agricultural and commercial, rendered it a juncture the least favourable that could be conceived for the first launch into print of so light and costly a venture as Lalla Rookh.[MOORE 1862, p. 4]

 

Moore’s gesture raises a range of questions.Given the political thematics of «The Veiled Prophet» and «The Fire-worshippers», why would Moore apologize for «so light and costly a venture»? Are we to assume that the Messrs. Longman were oblivious to the «double application» of these narratives?And how does the earnest English patriotism enacted here square with the Irish nationalism allegorized, most evidently, in «The Fire-worshippers»? Is Moore reconstructing a version not only of the Lalla Rookh venture but of his entire career that idealizes the basic tension in his literary identity – that offers an Irish nationalist poet more determined to seduce than to challenge the British establishment?
There is more to Moore’s Preface: he goes on to display the charms of discarded strands of narrative, to justify and document the «industry» of his «reading» in Orientalist sources, to survey the tributes to Lalla Rookh’s success that have come in the form of critical appreciations, translations into other languages (including Persian!), adaptations for the stage.The focus of this brief essay, however, remains Moore’s dramatizing of the original venture, and now the relation of this self-dramatization to the frame narrative.
The prose narrative that frames the four verse tales of Lalla Rookh is fundamentally about poetic seduction – a poetic seduction that triumphs over the ridiculous prejudices of a reactionary critical establishment (parodied in the absurd fiddle-faddle of Fadladeen, «Great Nazier or Chamberlain of the Haram») and finally reveals its inherent nobility (in more than one sense of the word).Lalla Rookh and her retinue are captivated by Feramorz, whose name may well prompt us to ask just how fair a figure of Moore he is.The entire frame might be taken as a playful and often satirical joke, except that at the level of autobiographical allegory the story of Feramorz and Lalla Rookh raises all the difficult questions we needed to ask about Moore and Lalla Rookh in the Preface.In the frame as in the Preface Moore triumphs, but the status of the darker, more violent political elements in Feramorz’s four narratives remains uncertain.
There are, it would seem, two registers of socio-political allegory in Lalla Rookh, and while they are both importantly determined by Moore’s identity as colonized poet addressing his colonial readers, they stand in conflicting relation to each other.He wants to produce a version of «Oriental Romance» that sustains his identity as the «national poet» of Ireland but that also, at the same time, gives playful fictive expression to a desire to become a conqueror if not a colonizer in the Regency literary market. The contradictions in Moore’s achievement appear even more striking when we consider that his setting Lalla Rookh «in the eleventh year of the reign of Aurungzebe» (this would be 1669) establishes a series of potentially critical links to the history of Britain’s domination of Ireland: Cromwell’s brutal invasion and campaign against the Catholics of 1649-1658, followed after the Restoration by the period in which the Duke of Ormond ruled as Viceroy. Lalla Rookh mystifies the oppressive dimension of Aurungzebe’s regime and of the regimes of his British contemporaries, even as it allegorizes the Irish cause as noble, heroic, tragic. That Feramorz’s «romantic» winning of Aurungzebe’s daughter takes place within a context of actual imperial rule may be present as an unarticulated potential, but it no more becomes the subject of Lalla Rookh than does Moore’s success with London publishers and readers in relation to Britain’s exploitation of Ireland.The brilliance of a «transaction in which Trade and Poesy […] shone out so advantageously in each other’s eyes» turns out to be blinding when it comes to this particular allegory of empire