SOURCE: Boyd, Ernest A. “Edward Martyn.” In The Contemporary Drama of Ireland, pp. 12-31. London: Little, Brown, and Company, 1928.

[In the following essay, Boyd surveys Martyn's major dramas from The Heather Field to The Dream Physician.]

George Moore's veracious essay in indiscreet autobiography, Hail and Farewell, contains no figure more interesting than Edward Martyn, who survives the ordeal of fictional reconstruction as successfully as A. E., and John Eglinton, in that all three emerge undiminished. Those three volumes of Irish literary history drew attention to the personality of many writers who would have preferred to let their own books speak for them, and Edward Martyn may be counted amongst their number. Biographically there is little to relate of him that bears upon his work for the Irish Theatre. A Nationalist of strong convictions, he has found himself involved in conflicts arising out of the clash of his political opinions with his social position as a landed gentleman and magistrate, in a country where these qualifications were traditionally dissociated from nationalism. He had long been a discriminating critic and lover of music, before the Dramatic Movement engaged his attention, a fact with which his country was made gratefully acquainted, when he donated fifty thousand dollars to found a Palestrina choir in the Catholic Pro-Cathedral, Dublin.

His artistic bent was not, however, solely in that direction which has provided the author of Ave with material for the exercise of a peculiar talent. When he left Dublin to complete his education at Oxford University, his fancy had turned to thoughts of poetry, and in 1885 he had prepared a book of verse for publication, but in spite of his twenty-six years and his Irish birth, he resisted the impulse, and destroyed the manuscript. It was not until 1890 that he made his first venture into literature, when he published Morgante the Lesser, under the pseudonym, “Sirius.” This extraordinary novel did not reveal anything of the future dramatist. It was a brutal satire, Swiftian in its manner, upon the scientifico-materialistic philosophy of that period when the omnipotence of Darwinian rationalism had not yet been rationally disputed. Written in the elaborate, discursive fashion of the eighteenth-century satirists, the book was not one to appeal to the average novel reader, but it deserves attention, if only because of a reflected interest which his subsequent works have conferred upon it. We shall see that his conception of the nature of satire did not materially alter when he came to project his fancies upon the stage.

In 1899 he published The Heather Field and Maeve in one volume, with a preface by George Moore, and these were the two plays which constituted the greatest successes of the Irish Literary Theatre, where they were almost immediately produced. So successful was The Heather Field that it was performed shortly afterwards in London and New York, and was translated for production in Germany. In confirmation of what has already been said as to the examples by which the founders of the Irish Literary Theatre were inspired, we find in George Moore's preface a characteristic analysis of the Independent Theatre movement in London. With considerable irony he describes his adventures with Mr. William Archer, the champion of Ibsen, and with the managers or actors who professed to be interested in literary drama. As he rightly says, the collapse of the theatre of ideas in London was mainly due to the indiscriminate enthusiasm of the critics, and the public led by them, for all plays which seemed in any way to depart from the conventional success of the Sardou-Rostand type. Pinero, in particular, is accused by Moore of having utterly demoralized the advocates of progress, who mistook his suburban audacities for advanced ideas, and his literary melodrama for a new technique. Incidentally, it transpires that neither the producers nor the critics could be induced by Moore to consider favorably The Heather Field. Obviously, we must conclude that Martyn's aim was to write for the existing London theatres open to literary plays, and not to found a theatre for the special purpose. Finding no encouragement he then bethought himself of a joint undertaking, with Yeats and Moore as his active supporters,—the former having experienced London production, when his Land of Heart's Desire was played at the Avenue Theatre in 1894, the latter having shared in the work of the Independent Theatre, where The Strike at Arlingford was produced in 1893.

The three acts of The Heather Field are devoted to a psychological analysis of Carden Tyrrell, the Irish landowner, whose world of reality is situated in the land of his own dreams, but who has been forced to grapple with the material factors of life in the administration of his estate. Although marriage has thrust the duties and responsibilities of his position upon him, Tyrrell is temperamentally incapable of abandoning himself wholly to everyday affairs. The idealist in him soon conceived the quixotic passion of reclaiming from the Atlantic a wild field of bog and heather, and when the play opens we find him immersed in the plans and difficulties attendant upon the realization of his dream. He has mortgaged his property heavily to obtain money for the work of draining and removing the rocks from the heather field, and his wife is anxious to secure control of the estate, in order to prevent him from utterly ruining their fortunes, by raising further loans to repair the damage caused to the adjoining land, in the course of improving the field in question. Tyrrell has allowed his passion so to possess him that he has become oblivious to everything, and clings with increasing desperation to what he feels is his lost ideal. He is in a state of intense exaltation, aggravated by the constant antagonism of a very matter-of-fact wife, whose sympathy for him was never deep, and is now turned to a mixture of fear and hatred, by the spectacle of the inevitable bankruptcy into which they are drifting.

The strangeness of her husband's manner, his visionary intensity, and the obvious calamity which threatens to engulf her and their child, serve to provide Mrs. Tyrrell with the weapon she requires. In the typical Strindbergian manner she sets herself to have her husband declared incompetent on the ground of insanity. The alienists are on the point of giving the verdict which will place the direction of Tyrell's affairs in his wife's hands, but are dissuaded by his close friend, Barry Ussher. The latter, knowing and loving Tyrrell, cannot accept the theory of madness, and although he appreciates the difficulty of Mrs. Tyrrell's position, he cannot permit an action whose effect would assuredly be to drive the idealist insane. Tyrrell is thus saved from being put under restraint, but the catastrophe feared by Ussher is merely postponed. His mortgages and debts have transformed the erstwhile lenient landlord into a hard taskmaster, who turns to eviction, as did so many of his fellows, as the way out of his own incapacity and bad management. The evicted tenants have resorted to the violence which was long the only expression of their side of the agrarian campaign in Ireland, and Tyrrell has been provided with a police escort to protect him from the vengeance of his tenantry. This protection is so repulsive to him that he prefers to remain indoors, brooding over his dream, and slipping farther away from contact with the present.

As he lives at home, thrown back upon himself and cherishing memories as a refuge from his unhappy present, Carden Tyrrell becomes ever more engrossed in the symbolic vision of the heather field, where the winds sang to him of youth and happiness, whose flowering represents the consummation of joy and success. But one day his little child comes to him with a handful of heather buds, the only flowers he could find while playing in that field of fate. These announce the triumph of nature over Tyrrell's efforts; the land he would reclaim has become waste once more, so that not even this ideal world is left in which he could wander in fancy. The blow destroys his dream and his reason, but only for a moment. In ecstatic vision he reasserts his idealism, for he has crossed forever the line which divides the material from the imaginative, and the curtain falls upon the man restored at last to the period of his youth, when the earth was fair and his spirit untroubled.

The part of Ibsen in the conception of The Heather Field seems perhaps more obvious than it really is. The leitmotiv derives something from The Wild Duck, and there is more than a suggestion of Ghosts in the closing scene, when Tyrrell turns to his child, whom he believes to be his brother and cries: “See, even now the sky is darkening as in that storm scene of the old legend I told you on the Rhine. See, the rain across a saffron sun trembles like gold harp strings, through the purple Irish Spring!” And then, as they watch the rainbow: “Oh, mystic highway of man's speechless longings! my heart goes forth upon the rainbow to that horizon of joy!” (With fearful exaltation.) “The voices—I hear them now triumphant in a silver glory of song.”

George Moore asserts that it was “the first play written in English inspired by the examples of Ibsen”, a fact of which he failed to convince Mr. Archer, who held, of course, that the great Scandinavian dramatist was essentially a social reformer. In that sense it is impossible to describe Edward Martyn as “an Irish Ibsen”, for he has never professed any didactic intention, and it would be hard to say wherein consists the “purpose” of The Heather Field. As Moore pointed out, we sympathized with Tyrrell, “although all right and good sense are on the wife's side.” This, however, was not the case in London, where, we have the authority of Yeats for saying, the audience approved of the proposal to lock up Tyrrell as a madman. In Ireland the doctors were hissed by the less sophisticated members of the audience, as a sign of their disapproval of Mrs. Tyrrell's intentions! The fact is, as further examination will prove, the work of Martyn may be described as essentially Ibsenite, or not,—according as one emphasizes the propagandist aspect of Ibsen's dramas. Inasmuch as the latter has been the point upon which his English disciples have insisted, their plays have all tended to become vehicles for the expression of social theories. As the Irish playwright avoided this procedure he cannot be termed a follower of Ibsen, as the expression is usually employed.

Naturally, Edward Martyn was subjected to the Norwegian influence, and so far as the latter has colored modern dramatic technique, he is truly a product of the period. He seems, nevertheless, to have given a more personal imprint to his rendering of the lesson learned by his contemporaries from Ibsen. Instead of merely seizing upon the facilities for propaganda afforded by the abolition of worn-out conventions, he applied Ibsen's method to the portrayal of national character and the interpretation of Irish life. Consequently, his plays resemble those of his master much more than does anything written by the author of the Quintessence of Ibsenism, who has been so instrumental in obscuring the true purpose of the dramatist. While Shaw has read into Ibsen a most interesting commentary upon contemporary social problems, he has caused us to lose sight of the original spirit in which that commentary was presented. There have been innumerable minor variations upon such themes as The Doll's House, but none of the later English playwrights has approached a local theme in the Ibsen manner. In Martyn we get the essence of Ibsenism, rather than that quintessence extracted by Bernard Shaw. He does not concentrate upon one aspect of Ibsen's genius, but envelops his subject in an atmosphere which we recognize as akin to that of Hedda Gabler or The Lady from the Sea.

A notable example of this adaptation is Maeve, the “psychological drama in two acts”, which followed The Heather Field in the published volume, as also on the stage of The Irish Literary Theatre. Maeve O'Heynes, daughter of The O'Heynes, hereditary Prince of Burren, County Clare, is an idealist of the same visionary race as Carden Tyrrell. She has submitted to betrothal with a wealthy Englishman, Hugh FitzWalter, from a sense of duty to the impoverished nobility of her father, who cannot occupy the rank to which he is entitled without the fortune which this marriage will bring. From the moment the curtain is raised, Maeve is revealed as a dreamy, high-strung girl, whose imagination is haunted by the fairy lore and legend of the countryside. She moves on a plane of vision far above the humdrum world of her impecunious family, whose sole thought is the marriage which will restore their social dignity. Maeve has nothing in common with her young English suitor, who shows himself, indeed, strangely tolerant of the indifference, amounting to aversion, with which she meets his expressions of sentiment. It is understood, however, that the girl is more than usually sensitive and moody, and much latitude is granted her in the expression of her temperament.

The confidant of Maeve's dreams is the old nurse, Peg Inerny, who has all the West Irish peasant's poetic faith in the existence of “the good people”, the superhuman beings of the Celtic land of faery. Peg is convinced that the lore of the peasantry identifying her with the Great Queen Maeve of Gaelic epic history is based upon the fact that she undergoes this metamorphosis at night upon the mountain side. She finds in Maeve O'Heynes one only too ready to follow her into this existence of the spirit, for Peg speaks to the visionary girl of things seen in moments of rapture. Thus, when the old nurse invites her out on to the mountain to meet the great figures of legend, and the noble lover revealed in her dreams, Maeve forgets her wedding eve and accompanies her. After several hours of trance on the hills, she returns to the old castle, her whole being disturbed by the ecstasy of vision. She seats herself at the open window, insensible of the piercing cold of the night, and as she broods, the spirit world opens to her, and before her eyes there passes the procession of Queen Maeve with her attendants, as they rise out of the mountain cairn and come towards the castle. On their return they are accompanied by the spirit of Maeve, which passes with the others into the mysterious realm of Tir-nan-ogue. When her sister comes to prepare her for the wedding she finds the bride sitting cold and lifeless at the window, her soul having gone out to meet that of the ideal lover—himself but a symbol of eternal beauty.

Both W. B. Yeats and George Moore have seen in Maeve, to quote the latter, “the spirit and sense of an ill-fated race.” “She portrays its destiny and bears the still unextinguished light of its heroic period.” Or as the editor of Beltaine expressed it, the play was a symbol of “Ireland's choice between English materialism and her own natural idealism, as well as the choice of every individual soul.” In a remarkable essay Yeats has discussed “Maeve and Certain Irish Beliefs”, in which he illustrates the background of experience from which such characterizations as that of Peg Inerny take their reality. Edward Martyn did not profess to have drawn this character from life, but, as Yeats shows, the peasant belief in women who are queens “when in faery” is widespread. As a footnote to the folklore of the play this essay from Beltaine is worth preserving. But, without any reference to such inquiries, Maeve is a noteworthy contribution to our dramatic literature. Spectacularly it is most effective, more especially in the scene where the vision of Queen Maeve comes to the young girl in her trance, a fitting climax to the cold, unearthly movement of the entire play, whose atmosphere is finely conceived and sustained.

In 1902 appeared a second volume of plays containing The Tale of a Town and The Enchanted Sea. The former was written for the second season of the Irish Literary Theatre, but was not produced in its published form. Instead of the latter was substituted The Bending of the Bough, a rewritten version by George Moore which appeared in book form in 1900, shortly after its production. Nothing in the preface indicated that the play was any other but Moore's invention, and it was not until the following year that he explained how he had revised The Tale of a Town:

In my re-writing … the two plays have very little in common except the names of the personages and the number of the acts. The Comedy, entitled The Bending of the Bough, was written in two months, and two months are really not sufficient time to write a five act comedy in; and, at Mr. Martyn's request, my name alone was put on the title page.

Since these lines were written in the 1901 issue of Samhain (the successor of Beltaine as the organ of the Dramatic Movement), readers of Hail and Farewell have been fully initiated into the circumstances of the transfer of authorship. It says a great deal for Edward Martyn's enthusiasm for the Irish Literary Theatre that he should have effaced himself to the extent of handing over his play to another.

It is a little difficult nowadays, when one reads the two versions, to understand why The Tale of a Town should have been rejected in favor of The Bending of the Bough, which has not added anything to the reputation of George Moore. Both plays are substantially the same, although four out of the five acts were rewritten in The Bending of the Bough. The action centers about the struggle of Jasper Dean, alderman of a coast town in the west of Ireland, to unite the members of the corporation in the defense of their municipal rights. The town is owed an indemnity by the municipality of Anglebury, an English watering place, whose line of steamers has secured the elimination of competition by promising to pay the Irish line compensation for the latter's retirement from business. Various social and political jealousies and influences have prevented the aldermen from effectively joining to enforce their lawful demands upon the city council of Anglebury. The author exposes in the crudest and most brutal fashion the sordid intrigues of municipal politics, showing how the interests of the public are sacrificed to the play of personal motives. Jasper Dean, however, is a patriot, and a man of caliber and intelligence, who eventually succeeds in dominating the situation. His obvious disinterestedness enables him to unite the whole council, with the exception of one opportunist, and it looks as if the Irish town were at last on the point of securing its rights. In the end Dean is corrupted by the influence of his intended wife, who is the niece of the mayor of Anglebury. Very subtly she is used to poison his mind with the sophistries which have ever appealed to the anti-patriotism of a certain class of Irishmen. The social advantages of preferring England to Ireland are once again demonstrated, and once again this appeal to class prejudice succeeds.

The difference between the two plays is one of manner, not of matter, for in both cases the conclusion is the same. Moore had the advantage of his craftsmanship as novelist to help him over the places where Martyn stumbled, but it is doubtful if his play reflects adequately the disparity of literary stature between the two authors. In spite of that youthful effort in tragedy, Martin Luther (1879), and notwithstanding the marked improvement between The Strike at Arling'ford (1893) and The Apostle (1911), Esther Waters (1913), and Elizabeth Cooper (1913), George Moore does not possess the gift of writing for the stage. His technique will not permit him to secure in the theatre those effects which are so great a charm of his fiction, autobiographical or otherwise. Consequently, while he has softened the harsh caricature of Martyn's picture of municipal politics, and made more universally intelligible the desertion of Jasper Dean, he has not made The Bending of the Bough a great play. In fact, for all its crudity, The Tale of a Town is more faithful in its interpretation of Irish conditions. So little did the latter concern Moore that he transported the setting to Scotland, thus ignoring the essential part of Martyn's satire. For the fundamental interest of the play as originally conceived is its symbolical interpretation of Irish political conditions, to which is added, of course, the satire of actual city politics. When The Tale of a Town was eventually performed in Dublin, in 1905, this aspect of the play at once caught attention and made it a success. The Bending of the Bough might stand as the type of political comedy in general, The Tale of a Town representing Irish political comedy in particular. The precise significance of Jasper Dean's betrayal is more intelligible to Ireland in Martyn's version than in Moore's, but in the latter it will be more easily understood by a public unfamiliar with local circumstances. For this reason foreign commentators have invariably preferred The Bending of the Bough; which is possibly a better written play, but is not, therefor, a better Irish play.

In The Enchanted Sea, the author returned to a theme more akin to his talent than political satire, which he again essayed, however, in 1902, when The Place Hunters was published in an Irish review, The Leader. This trifle is sufficiently indicated by its title and need not detain us. The Enchanted Sea, on the other hand, must be bracketed with Maeve, as an interesting application of Ibsen's method to the material of Irish life. More than any other work of Martyn's, this play bears the mark of the Scandinavian dramatist's influence, being, in fact, an Irish counterpart to The Lady from the Sea. Guy Font, like Ibsen's heroine, has been glamoured by the call of the sea. Living among the peasantry on the wild Atlantic seaboard of Ireland's west coast, the boy had imbibed their legends of the element by which he is fascinated. His strange, impractical disposition makes him an easy prey to the designs of his aunt, Mrs. Font, who has been deprived of her late husband's estates by the death of their son. The Font property has passed to her nephew Guy, to the intense chagrin of Mrs. Font, who had schemed and plotted during her husband's lifetime to advance their welfare at the expense of his honor. This erratic lad, heedless of everything but the voice of the sea, stands between her and her purpose of possession, and her one desire is to remove him.

Mrs. Font, could she encompass the death of Guy, would be able, she fancies, to realize a double purpose. Once she had secured the estates they would serve as sufficient dowry to attract Lord Mask into marrying her daughter, Agnes. Mask is the only friend of Guy in all this circle of commonplace or scheming individuals, for despite the difference in their ages, these two are united by the common fascination exercised upon them by the sea and its mystery. Mrs. Font decides to put this fascination to account in so far as it affects the boy, by hearkening to that peasant instinct in herself which hints that Guy Font is one of the sea fairies. She persuades him to show her a cave where he is in the habit of communing with the spirits of the sea, and they depart together. When she returns alone, some time later, suspicion falls upon her, but not before she has been disappointed of her last hope. Lord Mask, unbalanced by the death of his young friend, seeks to find Guy in the waves, which finally carry him off to join the young lad in another world. When the police come to arrest Mrs. Font, they find her hanging dead from the staircase of Fonthill, where she has used the child's swing to commit suicide.

When The Enchanted Sea was performed at the Ancient Concert Rooms, Dublin, in 1904,—the scene of the inauguration of the Dramatic Revival,—it was received with much attention, in spite of the inadequate interpretation it then was given. As published, it is marred by clumsiness of characterization which might easily be concealed by the performance of a good company. The characters are finely conceived and if presented by capable actors they would certainly lose something of the stiffness which renders them artificial or lifeless in the printed play. On the whole, it must be said that Edward Martyn has done very well by a theme which, in the nature of things, could be saved from melodrama only by the hand of a master dramatist.

A long interval separates these two volumes of plays from the next work for the theatre which Edward Martyn was to issue in book form. When the three experimental years of the Irish Literary Theatre expired, and the partnership of Yeats, Moore, and Martyn was dissolved, the last-mentioned writer found himself isolated in a literary community whose main interest was in the direction of folk-drama. He had, therefore, but little incentive to write, being dependent for the performance of his work upon amateur organizations, such as The Players Club, which produced An Enchanted Sea, and The National Players, who were responsible for The Tale of a Town. It was not until these spasmodic and unrelated forces, working for the advancement of intellectual drama, had crystallized into a more permanent form, that Martyn's creative activities were aroused. During many years he was a supporter of every kind of theatrical enterprise which promised to make Ireland acquainted with the better class drama of our time, an experience which we could not expect to enjoy at the hands of our Anglicized theatres of commerce. At last, The Independent Theatre Company promised to become an institution of the kind associated with the name of its English prototype of twenty years ago.

This association undertook to produce literary plays, irrespective of the national character, and one of its earliest performances was that of Edward Martyn's Grangecolman in 1912. Although it came so long after the author's previous work, this play showed in him the same preoccupation with the psychological drama as in the days of Ibsenism. Rosmersholm was suggested to several critics by this narrative of a daughter's jealousy, when she finds herself supplanted in the life of her father by the secretary whom he purposes to marry. Catharine Devlin is a typical product of the feminist movement, as it is revealing itself in the first moments of discontent and disillusionment. In order to escape the duties of her home, she introduces Clare Farquhar to act in her stead as amanuensis to her father, but she returns to find that he and Clare have found happiness in the reciprocal help of their relationship. While Catharine and her ineffective husband drift aimlessly along, cherishing barren ideals, they form a striking contrast to the quiet industrious contentment of the home which she once fled as a burden. Having failed in her career as a doctor, and disappointed in her demands upon life, Catharine is stirred, like another Hedda Gabler, by the spectacle of her father's dependence on, and trust in, Clare Farquhar. She must, at all costs, destroy the happiness which she herself has never known. Grangecolman is haunted by a family ghost, and she conceives the idea of impersonating this phantom for the purpose of frightening Michael Colman and Clare. But the latter is unimpressed by the bogey, in spite of the evident fears of the other members of the household, and when the white-robed figure makes its appearance, a revolver shot ends the fable and, at the same time, the existence of Catharine Devlin.

The faulty characterization and a certain amateurishness, noticeable in the earlier plays, are almost wholly absent from Grangecolman, which shows that the intervening years have left their experience of the stage upon Edward Martyn. The mystic, symbolic Ibsenism of Maeve and The Heather Field has made way for a cold realism, which holds the spectator by the intensity of its reflection of reality. The characteristic touch of Scandinavian melodrama is not wanting, but the author is able to carry it off as successfully as did Ibsen before him. When one sees how Martyn has triumphed over his natural tendency towards an overformal dialogue, one cannot but regret that his talent should have lain almost quiescent for want of an occasion for its exercise. He has had to content himself with amateur performances, where the defects inevitable in such associations have done little to render supple his dramatic speech. He has never enjoyed the inestimable good fortune which befell the successors of the Irish Literary Theatre. They found interpreters who were not only born to fit their parts, but whose histrionic powers have saved from oblivion many a play of no greater intrinsic merit than those of Edward Martyn.

Early in 1915, the reward of many years of waiting and patient effort came to the founder of the Irish Literary Theatre, when his original plan was resuscitated, this time under the title, “The Irish Theatre.” A satirical comedy by Edward Martyn, The Dream Physician, and two new works by young Irish playwrights were produced, in the course of the first two seasons, in addition to plays by Chekhov. To complete the illusion of former days, George Moore was among the spectators at one of the premières, a fact which he signalled in a letter to the press, announcing the resumption of his interrupted relations with Edward Martyn, and repeating the original terms of his dramatic creed. Clearly a case of history repeating itself. Yet, not quite, for there is every reason to suppose that this renewal of effort will not have the brief career of what was, after all, a mere experiment. There is felt to be an increasing need for a theatre in Ireland which will hold up to nature that half of the mirror which is not visible in the Irish National Theatre, where a too exclusive care for the folk drama has resulted in giving a one-sided appearance to our dramatic activities. This is precisely the rock upon which the first movement split, as we shall see in the next chapter. Meanwhile, it is satisfactory to note that the stand taken by Edward Martyn, nearly twenty years ago, has at last been translated into practical terms, by the creation of a theatre to carry on the work he has disinterestedly served in the face of much discouragement. Not the least of his disadvantages has been the phenomenal popularity of an enterprise representing the very opposite tendency to that which he championed from the beginning.