[In the following excerpt, Morgan discusses Martyn's major works and assesses his place in the development of modern Irish drama.]

The Irish Literary Theatre was founded by Mr. Yeats in conjunction with a few other enthusiasts. From the start Mr. Edward Martyn and Lady Gregory were valuable coadjutors, and the little band of enthusiasts were soon to be strengthened by the adhesion of Mr. George Moore. Mr. George Moore's dramatic contribution was not considerable, nor was it typically Irish, but the work of both Mr. Martyn and Lady Gregory was important.

Mr. Martyn's early Tale of a Town was not an auspicious start. It is no more than a transference to Ireland of the new realistic method which was becoming prevalent in England in the last decade of the nineteenth century. He treats of the petty snobbery in the social life of an Irish provincial town and lays bare the base motives and corruption which defile the stream of municipal affairs. But the characters are stiff-jointed puppets and the dialogue gives the impression of unreality. The play was unacceptable for performance; but it was rewritten by Mr. George Moore, and after undergoing metamorphosis it was produced by the Irish Literary Theatre in 1900 under the title of The Bending of the Bough.

Mr. Martyn's first real dramatic contribution was The Heather Field (1899), one of the earliest plays to be produced by the Irish Literary Theatre. In writing this play Mr. Martyn shows himself to be strongly moved by two influences. He is inspired by Irish nationalism, but he is also under the spell of Ibsen. The play deals with the life of the Irish gentry, those men who have for so long struggled with the hard agrarian conditions of a land divided against itself politically and depressed by economic difficulties. The drama of Mr. Yeats was set amidst the poetic figures of Irish folk-lore and heroic myth, Lady Gregory and Synge were to make popular the simple folk of the western isles and mountains, but Mr. Martyn in the early days of the revival used the life of the squireen and depicted it with a certain degree of realism. At the same time his imagination was not stifled by realism and a fanciful element runs through his work. He was to some extent under the spell of Irish folk-lore, and this influence was reinforced by the poetical symbolism of Ibsen.

Carden Tyrrell, the central figure of The Heather Field, is an idealist. Poetic in temperament he sees the ideal of beauty beyond mundane things and he tries to realize it. The ideal is symbolized by his heather field, a waste mountain side which he has spent his wealth to reduce to pasturage. Ireland is impoverished: and the rocks stare from her fields, the heather flourishes and the grass languishes. She needs sons who love her and have the imagination and the faith to risk all on her behalf. Carden believes that rich grass can spring where heather cumbers the ground. His belief becomes an ideal; under the opposition of his harder-headed and more practical wife and neighbours his ideal becomes an obsession and finally a mania. Slowly his money slips away: expense is added to expense and his financial difficulties crowd in on him. The final blow is not the foreclosing of the mortgages which burden his estate; what crushes him is a handful of flowers. His little son, Kit, comes in gay from the sun and the wind and gives him a bunch of heather plucked from the heather field. The luxuriant pasturage is reverting to its native wildness: all his effort has been futile, and the blow is greater than he can bear. To have spent his estate seemed a little thing, but to realize that his ideal was vanity is overwhelming, and his mind is engulfed in the dark waters of madness.

The symbolism of the play is double in its meaning. Indirectly it suggests the hopes and fears for Erin which inspired the ardent spirits of the day; but the picture has a wider significance. It is the universal human story of the man who is absorbed by an ideal. Strong in devotion to his purpose he will give all. So long as the issue is undecided he can bear the vicissitudes of fortune, buoyed on his bladder of hope. Destroy his faith in his ideal and despair overwhelms him.

The romantic element is enhanced by Tyrrell's love for his younger brother, Miles, who has been at once brother and son to him. His own son, Kit, is as it were a reincarnation of the boy brother of earlier years. The play is tinged deeply with sentiment which is embodied chiefly in this strong love for the brother on whom Tyrrell leans for emotional and spiritual support, and in his affection for his good friend and neighbour, Barry Ussher. The emotional element is given an appearance of falsity by the stilted, unreal dialogue in which it is conveyed. Mr. Martyn has not the power of making his characters live and express their character through natural speech. The dialogue does not proceed inevitably from the emotions and human nature from which it is supposed to spring. The consequence is to rob the play of the vitality essential for true drama.

Despite all these strictures one must grant the significance and importance of the play. It was the work of a man intent rather on studying the verities of human nature than on constructing an effective pièce de théâtre. Moreover the dramatist was a man with the poet's soul and outlook. He had studied Ibsen and he had seen beneath the hard surface of the realist and the satirist the poet's soul throbbing in unison with the mysterious and the beautiful element of life. He had drawn inspiration less from Hedda Gabler than from The Lady from the Sea; the poet of Rosmersholm rather than the satirist of The Pillars of Society prompted him: and he strove, though with only partial success, to extract beauty from the ordinary life which contemporary English dramatists regarded as plain matter of fact.

In Maeve (1900) the same characteristics are to be found. Here, however, Mr. Martyn took even greater liberties and gave still more rein to his poetic fancy. Queen Maeve, of legendary fame, and her fairy band actually appear in the play. Once more he contrasts the idealism of the visionary and the practical values of the ordinary worldling. As in The Heather Field the symbolism has a double significance. Maeve O'Heynes is inspired with love of Ireland and love of real beauty: Queen Maeve with her train is the incarnate spirit of Irish poetry and typifies the idea of super-sensuous beauty. This fairy Queen of eld sits eternally buried yet eternally alive in the grassy cairn. The keynote of the play is in Maeve O'Heynes's confession:

… I see them now, and I see others who lived long before them, and are buried in that green cairn. Oh, I am dying because I am exiled from such beauty.

Maeve's sister, Finola, and her broken-down father stand for the world to which idealism and a longing for absolute beauty are the foolish vanities of a morbid imagination. These plays both depict the eternal struggle between the world of reality and the world of imagination, the call of human life and the call of faery. In The Land of Heart's Desire Mr. Yeats treats of a similar theme, but in that play he also emphasizes the further popular Irish belief in the soullessness of the fairy world: it is a world of eternal joy, but of a joy from which the soul and religion are banished. What Mr. Martyn desires to show is the beauty and the spirituality of life which lie beyond the limits of our ordinary senses; he would have us catch a glimpse of the light that never was on sea or land. As Mr. George Moore says in his preface to the printed edition of these two plays, underlying the superficial facts which they present is the idea of “that silvery beauty which survives in the human heart, which we see shimmering to the horizon, leading our longings beyond the world, and we hear it in our hearts like silver harps and strings, sounding seemingly of themselves, for no hand is by. The morning light, the hoar frost, the moonlight wandering among the mountains are the natural symbols of this divine beauty. Therefore Maeve is made of moonlight and hoar frost and light of morning. We do not discover her among our acquaintances, but everyone discovers her when he wills to do so in his own heart.” This is the eternal theme of the poet. Mr. Martyn played his part in directing the Irish drama towards the realm of poetry.

In The Heather Field we have noticed that the poetic intention is apt to be frustrated by the realistic method; but in Maeve the play moves on an imaginative plane with the result that the effect is less incongruous. An Enchanted Sea (1902) has qualities in common with both those plays. Again we have the attempt to blend supernaturalism and realism, with incongruity as the result. This play is even more deeply indebted to Ibsen than its predecessors. Guy Font, the youthful squire, is not wholly human: he has fairy blood in his veins. The spirit of the waves holds him in thrall, like Ibsen's Lady from the Sea; and when he is drowned by the murderous act of his aunt he seems to be returning to a natural element. As in the preceding plays the interest rests on the romanticism with which the theme is saturated. The spirit of Irish folk-lore inspires the play: Lord Mask, young and imaginative, feeds his fancy on fairy myth like Maeve O'Heynes. The spirit of youth, which in much of the work of the Irish renaissance symbolizes the buoyant hopefulness of Erin's sons, is embodied in the wistful beauty of Lord Mask's friendship with Guy, the fairy lad; as in The Heather Field it irradiates the love of Carden Tyrrell for his brother Miles. Yet withal the characters are unreal and lifeless; and, although there is an element of crudely violent incident in the murder of Guy, the discovery of the crime and the suicide of his brutal aunt, the play lacks dramatic situations.

In his later work Mr. Martyn turned more and more to realism. The Place Hunters (1902) and Grangecolman (1912) are drab and rather dull stories of modern Ireland. Grangecolman depicts the sunless interior of an Irish country house, where the human spirit is stifled by misunderstanding and disappointment. It is a Heartbreak House in which the soul is choked for lack of a healthy breath of life. The picture reminds one of the nerveless, ineffective humanity that gasps out a merely negative existence in such a play as Tchekhov's Cherry Orchard. The catastrophic end of Catherine when she is shot by Clare Farquhar is momentarily thrilling, but it leaves the emotions unmoved. The characterization is stronger and the dialogue is more closely related to persons than is usual in Mr. Martyn's plays, but there is so much querulous talk that we welcome the end as a term to our fatigue.

The Dream Physician (1914) has certain qualities in common with the earlier plays; but it shows new characteristics. It is partly comic, but intermingled with comic absurdity are wistful pathos and a psychic, mysterious element that carry the mind back to An Enchanted Sea. It is a play of dreamers both comic and tragic, who in the end are all awakened from their dreams to the truth of actuality.

Mr. Martyn's work cannot be overlooked; yet it cannot claim to be highly significant in the development of the Irish drama. It was important as an assertion of beauty and imagination, and to that extent it was similar in its import to the work of Mr. Yeats; but it missed the mark because of its ineffective form and manner. Poetry established its sway over the Irish drama; imagination was given full scope. But the cause was won not by Mr. Martyn with his Ibsenesque intermixture of realism and symbolism. It was the frankly poetic method of Mr. Yeats and the still more triumphant conquest of common life by the poetic imagination of Synge that made the Irish dramatic revival a restoration of the poet to his rightful place of supremacy in the theatre.