SOURCE: McFate, Patricia. “The Bending of the Bough and The Heather Field: Two Portraits of the Artists.” Eire-Ireland 8, no. 1 (spring 1973): 52-61.

[In the following essay, McFate discusses how “the complex psychological and imaginative kinships among the writers of the Literary Revival” are revealed in George Moore's The Bending of the Bough and Martyn's The Heather Field.]

For all his humor and pose, George Moore set forth in Hail and Farewell! a picture of the Irish Literary Revival that goes far deeper than mischievous portraiture. In presenting his allies and rivals, Moore recognized that they were fighting in a small arena the inevitable antagonisms that beset the larger Ireland. Quarrels, jealousies and devisiveness were the daily order on the Irish scene and the writers of the Literary Revival, so full of larger dreams of unity and fulfillment, were equally beset.¹ Furthermore, seeing others as they saw themselves, they tended to portray conflict in terms of their own rivalries and loyalties. Again and again in their works they drew from their own experiences to show the crippling of a natural leader in a mare's nest of pettiness, envy and unruly ambitions. The two plays discussed here [The Bending of the Bough and The Heather Field] provide a demonstration of my contentions.

The opening scenes of Moore's play, The Bending of the Bough, present the frustration to be found in every council in which the Irish worked for Ireland. The aldermen, recognizing the economic distress of the people and agreeing that the town has been swindled in its affiliation with another city, waste time in personal antagonism and the pursuits of self interest. Lacking any sovereign identity they cannot unite against the clearly exposed enemy without a leader. Young alderman Jasper Dean explains: “It is because we are becoming so independent that we understand the necessity of being united. (Cheers.) We are discovering that we can only escape from dependence on petty interests and petty animosities by sharing in the greater life of our race and of our town.”²

What is significant here is not Dean's speech, but that its occasion, indeed the action of the play as a whole, mirrors the very situation of the play's composition. The Bending of the Bough, which has as its theme the failure of unity, is the result of one of the most awkward collaborations in literature.

The composition of the play begins, of course, with The Tale of a Town. When Yeats and Lady Gregory read Edward Martyn's work, they found it unsuitable for production by their theatre company, but rather than reject it outright, Yeats and Moore set about revising and reconstructing it. The results of what was essentially a three-way collaboration were two poor plays and endless reverberations. Susan Mitchell, who observed the events, commented: “Edward Martyn's genuine dramatic talent proved in The Heather Field was a temptation to a born literary bandit like Mr. Moore, who prides himself on yielding to temptation, and in alliance with Mr. Yeats, always an unfortunate conjunction, Edward Martyn's play was tortured from its original intention and became no play at all, but a dramatic experiment doomed to failure.”³

According to Moore, Yeats was cruel in his denunciation of the play and his rejection of Martyn's revisions. In Moore's version of the story, Martyn's surrender of his script was a patriotic sacrifice: “Ireland has always been divided, and I've preached unity. Now I'm going to practise it. I give you the play.”⁴ Martyn, on the other hand, told Moore that he had not considered The Tale of a Town “fitting” for the Irish Literary Theatre, and, further, that he also found Moore's version “unfitting.”⁵ Yeats' version of the events is given in Dramatis Personae. Here, Moore is the first to object to Martyn's play, claiming it needs revision and volunteering to aid Martyn as he aided him with The Heather Field. In this version, Martyn gives the play away telling Yeats and Moore to do what they liked with it, and Moore asks for Yeats' help in revising it.⁶

Yeats states that Moore provided construction and characterization for the new play, The Bending of the Bough, while he contributed “most of the political epigrams and certain bitter sentences put into the mouth of Deane [sic]. …”⁷ Yeats also contends that the leading character is modelled on Standish O'Grady.⁸ There are undoubtedly some parallels to be seen and the story of Jasper Dean does owe something to O'Grady's career. In discussing O'Grady, Yeats recalls the seismic reactions in Irish politics that followed the Royal Commission's disclosures in 1896 that Ireland has been overtaxed for a period of fifty years to the amount of “some three hundred millions.”⁹ It seemed at that time as if the old political groupings were about to break up. The Irish landlords—old apologists for English rule—began to shout like revolutionists. The suspense and expectations of a few months ended, however, with no hope for new politics. Whenever Protestant Ireland attempted some corporate action against English, “the show, however gallant it seemed, was soon over.”¹⁰ To Yeats, apparently, O'Grady appeared as the flashing possibility of a new Parnell, bearing the respectable credentials of a Protestant landlord who wrote for his equals and not for the mob. But O'Grady, after some success in rousing the gentry to a sense of duty, dissipated his effect in a trivial and silly argument, and his newspaper venture ended.

Surely Yeats and Moore discussed these political matters during the rewriting of Martyn's play. However, if Edward Martyn's published version of The Tale of a Town remains a fair copy of his play before Moore and Yeats took over, there is a good deal of Martyn's construction and some of Martyn's political epigrams retained in Moore's play. Further, if Yeats admits the characterizations are Moore's rather than his, it would seem less likely that Dean was intended as a dramatization of Standish O'Grady.

Moore has, in fact, almost removed the political play from politics. In Martyn's version the strife is clearly between a coastal town in Western Ireland and an English seaport, and the Lord Mayor and his niece are resolutely English in their attitudes. In Moore's play nationalities are never mentioned, and the two contending towns, Northhaven and Southhaven, are connected by railway.

If Moore has blunted the political, he has increased the literary aspect of the new play. In The Tale of a Town, Alderman Kirwan is unable to make speeches, and is dependent upon his friend, the more persuasive Dean, to set his ideas into motion. A selfless man who thinks only of his town, Kirwan is derided for his impractical ideas. On these points, the character seems very close to Martyn's conception of himself. Indeed, Kirwan's misogyny suggests Martyn; at one point he calls woman “the last wild animal that man will civilize.”¹¹

In Moore's play, Dean becomes an inspired purveyor of the Celtic Twilight under the influence of the mystic Kirwan. Furthermore, Kirwan's disdain for women has been raised several philosophical levels, adding a Schopenhauerian rationale to the Celtic argument. Martyn's Kirwan is a sincere and uncomplicated politician; Moore's character is more complex. Moore's character blends nationalism and spiritualism—by no means a difficult juggle for the writers of the Irish revival, but particularly suggestive of George Russell (AE). Russell was, among the writers of the Literary Revival, the most authentically spiritual and the most devotedly Irish. Like Kirwan, AE was known for the purity of his thoughts, and for his belief in the destiny of the Irish people.

In the third act of The Bending of the Bough, Kirwan speaks alone with Jasper, and the truths that drop into Dean's ear sound strikingly close to AE's. “It is a necessity of my being to believe in the sacredness of the land underfoot; to see in it the birthplace of noble thought, heroism, and beauty, and divine ecstasies. … Our gods have not perished; they have but retired to the lonely hills; and since I've known you, Kirwan, I've seen them there, at evening. …”¹² The gods on the lonely hills are AE's vision; he had written Yeats in 1896 that “the gods have returned to Erin and have centred themselves in the sacred mountains. …”¹³ Moore further encourages us to identify Kirwan with Russell in the character's lines on the “breathing of the earth,” a reference to AE's book of poems, The Earth Breath (1897). Dean and Kirwan are examples of the public and the private man. Dean is wealthy, educated, articulate; Kirwan is an ascetic, a preacher in the wilderness. The men recall Owen Asher and Ulick Dean in Evelyn Innes, characters who are modeled on Moore himself and AE. Dean's name would be pronounced “Dayne,” thus recalling the narrator of The Confessions of a Young Man.

Kirwan reminds Dean that as a leader he is only an agent of destiny, the mouthpiece of ideas not an interpreter: “Our lowlands are full of these merry gentlemen, and our skies are full of meteors. (Pause.) If the moment has arrived, you will suffice. … Your ideas are merely personal. … You are their voice of the moment.”¹⁴ Moore, too, was always ready to disclaim any more than a reporter's role in the service of Ireland's imperishable gods, a man called in to do a job. The contrast between AE, steadfast, sincere and unworldly, and Moore's acknowledged potential for backsliding suggests a possible—and comic—reality behind the Kirwan-Dean story. Dean (Moore) arriving from Southhaven (London), a stranger to the cause (Irish Literary Revival) but with a convert's vigor, brings with him the worldly temptations that lead to his defection (Moore's trailing mistress gave hint he would soon be off again on his pursuit of the eternal feminine).

The point here is that we are witnessing an example of the unique manner in which the international animosity between two nations becomes a tug of war between two Irish writers or two points of view. No wonder that what Yeats described as “the first dramatisation of an Irish problem,” had on opening night so little political force that, of the most volatile audiences in Europe, Lady Gregory wrote, “no one is really offended.”

Every writer uses autobiographical matter, but what is significant is that Moore's play is a demonstration of the way in which the group of writers who were part of the Irish Revival read analogues of their experiences with each other in the events of their world or interpreted the events of that world in terms of their relationships.

Edward Martyn's The Heather Field provides a second example of this situation and it has very close connections to Moore's play. The Heather Field, the first dramatic success of the Irish Theatre, deals with the struggles of a land owner to cultivate some wild land in the West of Ireland. Carden Tyrrell is thwarted by the task, by the land itself, by lack of sufficient capital for such a vast undertaking and by a wife whose social ambitions exceed his depleted income. The unhappy marriage in The Heather Field is reflective of the reality facing Jasper and Millicent in The Bending of the Bough: the disastrous engagement between man's idealism and narrow womanly ambitions. Millicent Fell has many of the same demanding qualities of Grace Tyrrell; both women are unsympathetic to the idealistic notions of their lovers, and both summon outside help in their attempts to subvert Dean and Tyrrell's plans.

But the struggles in The Heather Field are symbolic of more than the plight of the Irish landowner. In Carden Tyrrell and Barry Ussher, we find partial portraits of George Moore and Edward Martyn.

To argue that Moore is the model for Carden Tyrrell requires one to face certain obvious incongruities between the two. First of all, The Heather Field was completed before 1894, although not published until 1899. If the play is read as the story of a frustrated redeemer in the Irish wasteland, Carden's ambitions might seem an earlier account of the same despair Moore finds in The Untilled Field. Clearly Carden's ambitions stretch beyond the fields of his own farm; he yearns to reclaim every inch of wild land in Ireland, but in 1894 Moore would hardly suggest a toiler in the Irish wasteland. Furthermore, the voices in the wind that Carden hears on his heath predate Moore's claimed experiences of “echo augury.” And Moore, of course, was not married, as Carden is.

None of these objections need be conclusive, however, if the play is not really about Ireland's reclamation. It is, as Moore calls it in his introduction, a psychological drama owing more to Ibsen than to the teaching of AE or Yeats.¹⁵ It is the study of a man who ruins himself by going through the motions of doubling his fortune. Carden Tyrrell exhibits the gambler's syndrome, throwing good money after bad in a scheme that assures its defeat by requiring an ever increasing monetary and moral outlay. He is a man whose dreams are in conflict with reality—thus he wins our sympathies, although, as Moore observes, we admit that reason and good sense are on the side of Grace Tyrrell.

There are additional poignancies in Tyrrell's effort to recapture his youthful, idyllic companionship with his brother Miles. It is the relationship between the two brothers that struck Moore most particularly in Martyn's play, or at least that scene in which Miles and Carden recall an earlier, happier time: “What fairie towns we came to—Boppart on the Rhine with its quaint old houses. Then we sailed our boat through the hills to Lorlei, and watched where the river nymphs used long ago to glide, laughing, through the gold-lit depths of the stream.”¹⁶ The dialogue grows thick, but for Moore it seemed a scene unmatched in modern drama for its essential humanity. Moore is clearly moved: “… we are face to face with that primal melancholy which is at the root of human existence, we look into its eyes, infinite as the sky, and are absorbed in pity for all things that live, and we feel in our soul the truth that man was not intended to be happy.”¹⁷

Nothing in the youth of Moore and his brother Maurice would suggest such warmth between them, nor did they travel together in young manhood, but Moore had grown inordinately fond of Maurice in the 'nineties; his rare affection reaches its peak, perhaps, about 1894 when Maurice was serving in India. On the birth of his nephew, Moore wrote to Maurice: “I am glad to be his godfather. I see you are full of your little son. I have always heard married men say there is no happiness like children. All the love I have for giving I give to you my dear Maurice, and my regret is that we seem condemned to live our lives apart. There is no one like you—no one so loyal, so good.”¹⁸ Moore was always treacherous in his affections and in later years quarrels drove the brothers apart but in the ‘nineties it must have seemed to the solitary Martyn that the deepest of brotherly love was shared by Maurice and George.

If Moore idealized and idolized his younger brother for a short time, The Heather Field would indicate that Martyn also remembered something in his association with Moore stronger than the mutual contempt that most critics have ascribed to their relationship. When Martyn recalled the days of their early association in Paris—the period in which Moore tutored the green youth from Mayo in art and introduced him to the larger world—he must have said with his hero: “I suppose I had troubles then, as now; but memory has idealised those past scenes, till only their beauty remains, wafted back to me like an aroma from some lost paradise.”¹⁹ The places Tyrrell remembers are places that Moore and Martyn had visited together: “And do you remember that Sunday morning in Cologne Cathedral when all the boys sang Palestrina so divinely?”²⁰ What Martyn has done is to combine in Carden's relationship with his younger brother Miles the relationship between Moore and Maurice, plus the memory of Martyn's earlier association with his cousin George.

But Martyn has added something of his own life to Carden Tyrrell as well. Yeats recognized the self portraiture in the duel between Carden and his wife; the hero driven to madness by a too practical wife reminded the poet of Mrs. Martyn's attempts to find a wife for her son.²¹ Moore described Tyrrell as a man who “might have lived in some quiet library or some dim museum, happy in antiquarian research, but attracted by her beauty he marries a narrow-minded conventional woman of the world, and his dreams, instead of being expended in art, turn to the reclamation of the Heather Field.”²²

Tyrrell's madness does not have its cause in Mrs. Tyrrell, but its occasion. His madness is in his conflict with reality; woman, here, represents nagging reality rather than the ideal—as Moore preferred to symbolize his own pursuit. Often vicious and coarse with women, Moore saw them continously as symbols of the unknown, the beyond to be sought. Martyn reverses Moore and creates a hero who stands for both of them—an idealist, tormented by woman. Interestingly enough, Martyn claimed that it was Moore who conceived of the play's action in which Grace Tyrrell's plans to have her husband committed; in a letter to Moore, Martyn complained that after he yielded to Moore's suggestion, he had to face charges of “cribbing” from Strindberg's The Father which he had not read.²³ It is clear, however, that Martyn's willingness to accept Moore's suggestion is a reflection of his own anxieties.

If Martyn's fear of marriage is one ingredient in the characterization of Carden, he has presented himself full length in Barry Ussher. It is an admiring portrait: a lean Martyn without Moore's motley, envied by Carden and Miles for his unencumbered estate, his fine house—where he lives like “a sage” absorbed in his books and his ideas—his freedom to travel, his bachelorhood. Yet the philosopher must demur: “our natures remain much the same at their root. There is always the original pain.”²⁴ Ussher is the generous friend; open-handed with money, he promises to save the family from the ruin to which Carden's dream has brought them. Martyn also could never resist a worthy appeal, whether it was for stained glass, the Irish theatre, a Palestrian choir, or the Dublin orchestra.

But The Heather Field provides more than idealized portraiture. Tyrrell is not merely the pitiful victim of a noble dream and a common wife. His single-minded drive is full of suicidal vigor. The affairs of his estate are neglected in all practical things; his impatient ignorance of the situation with the peasants and his insistence on full rents are reminiscent of the mismanagement of Moore Hall that brought the estate close to ruin. Moore's father was an absentee landlord in later years, living in London with his family while serving in Parliament. A kind landlord, but one who “clung to a feudal idea of his relationship with his tenants,” he was determined to evict those tenants who refused to pay his rent in full.²⁵ George Moore's neglect of his estate in the pursuit of his doubtful talent in painting and the squandering of money in Paris cafes was his individual form of a monomania that made the Moores famous in Mayo for disaster.

George Moore was perhaps the major preoccupation of Martyn's literary imagination, the very fascinating symbol of all that was worldly, a Catholic boy's idea of the devil. He brooded over the complex nature of his cousin in much of his art. In The Heather Field he conceived of him sympathetically. In other portraits, for example, George Augustus Moon in The Dream Physician, he gave a more venemous opinion. As Yeats and others have observed, Moore stirred mixed and alternating emotions among those who knew him well; yet even his most outrageous behavior was rarely enough to extinguish a relationship. Moore also strove with the character of his cousin unceasingly. Martyn appeared in a number of roles in Moore's fiction. The most unattractive picture was “Hugh Monfert”; the most immortal, the “dear Edward” of Hail and Farewell!.

The Bending of the Bough and The Heather Field, then, are samples of a number of Moore and Martyn's portraits of themselves and their contemporaries. The characters created are never simple imitations, of course, but rather combinations and permutations. Jasper Dean combines qualities of Yeats and Moore; Ralf Kirwan recalls both AE and Martyn. Aspects of Martyn are found in both Carden Tyrrell and Barry Ussher. The companionship of Carden and Miles Tyrrell is a fusion of Moore's past relationships with his brother and his cousin.

Thes portraits, in turn, are examples of the extensive way in which many Irish writers presented their colleagues in roles that reveal tangles of affections and animosity. In Hail and Farewell! Moore has used as dramatis personae himself, his friends and his enemies. This practice was continued in other works by him and his contemporaries, including The Bending of the Bough and The Heather Field. In these plays are revealed the complex psychological and imaginative kinships among the writers of the Literary Revival.

Notes

1. Moore attributed to AE a definition of a literary movement: “… five or six people who live in the same town and hate each other cordially.” Vale (London: William Heinemann, 1937), p. 117.

2. The Bending of the Bough (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1900), pp. 24-25. Hereafter cited as B. B.

3. George Moore (Dublin and London: Maunsel, 1916), pp. 103-104.

4. Ave (London: William Heinemann, 1937), p. 219.

5. ALS dated 28 September 1900 in the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection. Permission for quotation has been obtained from The New York Public Library; Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

6. Dublin: The Cuala Press, 1935, pp. 50-51. Hereafter cited as D.P.

7. D.P., p. 51.

8. Ibid.

9. Ibid., p. 41.

10. Ibid.

11. The Tale of a Town and An Enchanted Sea (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1902), p. 10.

12. B.B., pp. 58-59.

13. Letter dated 2 June 1896. Letters from AE, ed. Alan Denson (London: Abelard-Schuman, 1961), p. 17.

14. B.B., pp. 59-60.

15. Edward Martyn. The Heather Field and Maeve (London: Duckworth, 1899), p. xxii. Hereafter cited as H.F.& M.

16. Ibid., p. 18.

17. Ibid., p. xxiv.

18. Letter dated 9 March 1894, quoted by Joseph Hone in The Life of George Moore (New York: Macmillan, 1936), p. 194.

19. H.F.& M., pp. 17-18.

20. Ibid., p. 19.

21. D.P., p. 40.

22. H.F.& M., pp. xxiv-xxv.

23. ALS dated 28 September 1900 in the Berg Collection.

24. H.F.& M., p. 5.

25. Hone, p. 36.