SOURCE: Hall, Wayne. “Edward Martyn (1859-1923): Politics and Drama of Ice.” Eire-Ireland 15, no. 2 (1980): 113-22.

[In the following essay, Hall examines the ways in which Martyn's political beliefs influenced his presentation of heroic ideals in The Heather Field and Maeve.]

In the novel he published in 1890 under the ponderous title of Morgante the Lesser: His Notorious Life and Wonderful Deeds, Edward Martyn described an island-city called Agathopolis, a “majestic iceberg which soars aloft in its cold purity amid the abominable seas of the world … the ideal commonwealth for uncloistered monks of all time.”¹ Martyn himself clung doggedly to an austere spiritual isolation and simplicity much like that of his utopia. In The Heather Field and Maeve, the plays for which he is best known, he created characters of heroic proportion who follow their visions of perfection even into madness or death; and for himself, in nearly all aspects of his personal life, he disdained compromise.

Martyn's career came to assume a curious mixture of attitudes. He became a central figure in the Irish Literary Revival, and his biographer Denis Gwynn writes, with considerable justice: “Without Edward Martyn, the modern Irish drama might never have been born.”² In spite of his ideals, however, the most tangible assistance Martyn could offer at the birth of the theatre came from the resources he valued least—his own material wealth. From writers like Yeats and George Moore his plays received more criticism than respect. His dogmatic Roman Catholicism occasionally became an annoying inconvenience for a theatre that produced modern versions of pre-Christian Irish legends. In Martyn's almost exclusively Protestant landlord class, as well, Catholicism marked him as a social rarity, just as his Home Rule stance singled him out as a political maverick. And his homosexuality, whether latent or overt, could find no place in his religion nor in his society.

Martyn's role as the Irish landlord is the easiest to locate within a broad social spectrum, and it created many of the pressures that drove him into a garrison mentality in which specific problems, such as demands for land reform, could then be translated into more metaphysical and thus, for him, more comprehensible equations. He assumed his place in 1879 as the young, wealthy lord of the manor and also accepted the almost automatic invitation to join the Kildare Street Club, the Dublin social headquarters for the Irish landholders and a bastion of the conservative Protestant Ascendancy. But the upper levels of Irish society failed to measure up to his ideal of an aristocracy. He saw his class as a weak and degraded realization of its true potential, contented with the mere trappings of nobility while in the Viceregal Court of Dublin Castle, and even more contented with the materialistic values of the lower classes while on the estates. In the face of mounting pressures from their tenants and from an urban middle class, the landlords seemed paralyzed by indecision and fear.

They also seemed only too willing to compromise: with Westminster, in the hope that the British connection would supply enough military force to protect them from their own people; and with the tenants themselves, in the hope that minor concessions like rent reductions and fixed tenure could head off a major revolution. Martyn felt that such tactics would only encourage and finally unleash a wave of barbarism in Ireland. Against this threat he settled into his own extreme position as both the harsh and unyielding landlord and the radical Home Ruler. In so doing, he simultaneously alienated himself from his tenants, who tried unsuccessfully to assassinate his land agent, and from the Kildare Street Club, which tried, also without success, to expel him.

Spurred by contempt for the society he found both in England and Ireland, Martyn turned his attention from that world to the aloof self-sufficiency of his own mind. There, unencumbered by the limitations of an imperfect humanity, he could construct models of a timeless, utopian civilization and the visionary geniuses who inhabited it, all dedicated to the highest ideals of beauty and knowledge. The dramatic tension of his best plays arises from the diametrical opposition between these two worlds: the one, ordinary, finite, flawed, superficial, physical, and mundane; the other, exotic, infinite, ideal, visionary, and spiritual. His literary characters, imprisoned in an all too oppressive and common existence, long for an ideal they only rarely and dimly perceive. In their efforts to unite the two worlds, they inevitably fall back between two irreconcilable opposites, left with little but ecstatic, visionary madness or death as the only possible resolution.

In his two major plays, The Heather Field and Maeve, both written in the 1890s, Martyn defines an ideal of heroism that demands complete sacrifice to its principles. Aloof from and superior to the world around them, his heroes commit themselves totally to their private visions. For these, in the language of the plays, are “real.” The world of the senses, that perceived by ordinary human faculties, is the “dream,” the veil that separates man from and conceals his higher reality. In the visionary realm, ideal beauty transcends all being and experience, unites it within one perfect whole. The hero, marked by his superior vision and genius, can recognize this higher reality; ordinary humans are left with the vague terms of the preceding sentences, terms which Martyn's plays clarify only dimly.

The indefinite ideas of the plays take on more concrete detail and context from Martyn's biography. His mother, the daughter of a wealthy peasant, married into one of the best county families in 1857, the Martyns of Tulira. When John Martyn died only three years later, he left his young widow with two sons. Devoting herself entirely to her children with a rigid, cold discipline, Edward's mother inadvertently helped foster his horror of women and the unlikelihood that the family line would survive him. Aside from his brother John, he saw almost no other children until his mother moved the family to Dublin to begin the boys' education. Edward attended a Jesuit preparatory school, Belvedere College, where he was nearly expelled for rebellious behavior. His mother, determined to create as many social opportunities as possible for her children, soon afterward hustled them off to better schools in London. Edward entered another Jesuit school in 1870, Beaumont College, but in 1876 his relentless mother managed to procure him a place at Oxford and a chance at even better social credentials, except that Edward failed to coöperate. Lonely, awkward, and miserable, one of Oxford's few Catholic undergraduates, he showed no promise as a scholar, and in 1879, with no degree of any kind and with a bitter resentment of British education, he returned to his family home in Tulira and took up his position as landlord.³ George Moore briefly served as his tutor in 1880, and their careers remained closely intertwined for many years afterwards. Their tour of Greece and Bayreuth at this time indulged Martyn's early passion for art and music; it also offered him a welcome, albeit temporary, escape, not only from his repressive and ambitious mother, but from the dangers of the Land War as well.

He believed that common people would destroy what they did not understand, and that the upper classes therefore occupied a vital position in the defense of the old way of life. Along with the Catholic religious leaders, the aristocracy had a duty to safeguard the highest values of its society. But, at the height of the Land War in Ireland, the gentry needed some extra protection themselves. Martyn's unsympathetic treatment of his own tenants led to a predictable climax when they shot at his land agent near Tulira. One could think of many reasons during such times for taking in Bayreuth or remaining isolated within a medieval tower. The considerable personal risks he faced provided him a solid framework for the polarized forces in his later plays. There, the peasants would merge with weak and compromising landlords and parasitical Englishmen under the amorphous banner of materialism, which they then advanced against the solitary, idealistic hero. From the peasants' standpoint, of course, the rich landlords represented materialism at its most extreme. In Martyn's view, the peasants threatened what was rightfully his: his estate, his status as an Irish aristocrat, his freedom to indulge his tastes in art, literature, philosophy, music. He found it a simple and convenient matter to characterize these possessions, in his plays, as inherently ideal, appreciated only by a few men of vision and genius, not to mention wealth and position.

From still another quarter, his mother continued to pose her own threats. Especially after the death of her second son at the age of 23, she repeatedly invited eligible young women to Tulira. She replaced the old family house, itself a beautiful structure, with a massive stone mansion in 1882. The original Norman tower of the estate, a separate building from about the 12th century, stayed put, and the adjoining structures vividly demonstrate the clash between Edward's desires and those of his mother. He not only refused to provide the opulent new mansion with a bride, he scorned to live in it at all, keeping as his bedroom a bare, ascetic cell over the stables. He felt just as alienated from all his mother's schemes to work him into the social activities expected of a wealthy landlord, and chose instead to invite many famous British and Irish artists and intellectuals to his estate during the 1880s. In this select company at Tulira, at his London and Dublin clubs, or alone in his tower study, he could imagine some of the happiness that Agathopolis seemed to promise.

Martyn's depiction of heroic failure in the world of action, and his own isolation from the socially conventional activities of the landed gentry, must be set against his energetic involvement in liturgical music, politics, and the Literary Revival. Morgante the Lesser received extensive reviews in 1890 and gave him enough self-confidence to enter local government as a county magistrate. The death of his mother in 1898 removed even more of the private obstacles. Yet, this emergence from his cloistered existence of the 1880s into the public life of the 1890s maintained the character of a lonely religious crusade. Martyn entertained few illusions about the practical success of his ideals, as if their failure in the public arenas would demonstrate their spiritual worth and thus serve to inspire a select few who might then keep these values alive. Without such inspiration, these ideals, like the Martyn family line, might well end with Edward himself.

Martyn's interest in politics began during the Land War. By the time of the Boer War he had become radically anti-British, a position that increased in vehemence throughout his life. With Yeats and Maud Gonne, he took part in the nationalist demonstrations in 1898 and, in protest against England, resigned his county magistrate's post. This brought several requests that he enter national politics, but Martyn instead settled on an active executive position in the Gaelic League. Here in the language movement, he felt, lay the foundations for the widespread de-Anglicization of Ireland. In an attempt to bring more nationalism into the movement, he contributed a steady flow of propaganda to the newspapers and to the official Gaelic League publication. Then, in 1904, he accepted the presidency of the ultranationalist organization Sinn Féin and finally provoked the Kildare Street Club into trying to expel him. Predictably, Martyn refused to leave. The resulting lawsuit sapped much of his energy from 1906 to 1908. Even though he eventually won, his retreat back into a less strenuous way of life led him in 1908 to resign from Sinn Féin.

Inspired by his trip to Greece in the early 1880s, and in the hope of achieving literary fame, he labored over a long poem in a classical style that he repeatedly polished and revised. In 1885, stricken with religious qualms about such work, he burned the manuscript. A year later his work on Morgante the Lesser began to turn some of the early bitterness back on the world. He published the novel under a pseudonym “Sirius.” For his next and greatest work he had nothing more to conceal. Dedicated to Yeats, Moore, and Arthur Symons, The Heather Field was performed in Dublin on May 9, 1899. With Yeats's The Countess Cathleen, it signalled the beginning of a spectacular period in Irish drama.

Along with Yeats and Moore, Martyn became cofounder of the Irish Literary Theatre in 1899, a step he called “the most significant action” of his life.⁴ For the first time he could put all of his talents to use on a public project, one commensurate with his private ideals. He imagined the theatre, just as in Agathopolis, as a cultural center that could possibly begin the long process of restoring the glory of the Celtic past. If a “native genius” could be reawakened in Ireland through such means as a national theatre and literature, then the Irish people would share their appreciation of beauty and knowledge at the spiritual level of Martyn's utopian civilization. Furthermore, those men of vision and genius who had initiated their nation into its true heritage would receive their just recognition as cultural leaders.

Even during the triumphant celebration after the Literary Theatre's opening performance, Martyn could not have expected either his own reputation or the Irish society to reach such airy heights. The obstacles within Ireland had become too many and powerful: the influence of the industrialized and cosmopolitan British society, the egalitarianism of public education; the determination of the lower and middle classes to improve materially their living conditions; and the inevitable decay of the traditional guardians of Irish culture, the aristocracy and the landed gentry. The intended social function of Martyn's plays, rather, lay in his attempts to keep alive the ideals he associated with Ireland, the values Maeve represents as “the fairy lamp of Celtic Beauty.”⁵ Maeve herself may die, yet the enactment of her death on stage could turn her personal defeat at the hands of the world into the triumph of a spirit ultimately stronger than the world. As pure spirit, Martyn's ideals could, he felt, remain indifferent to and uncorrupted by any historically limited social conditions. The person of vision had only to inspire further guardians of the lamp, who would of necessity always remain a select few. The broad mass of society, although welcome to support artistic ventures like a national theatre, could best serve by keeping a respectful distance.

In The Heather Field, completed sometime before 1894 and first published and performed in 1899, Martyn develops a pattern of the composite personality to define his heroes. Two characters, one a realist and the other an idealist, would, if merged, yield a personality having the ability both to recognize the ideal in vision and to tolerate the mundane in everyday routine. Barry Ussher, the realist, possesses an intellectual understanding of beauty and genius as absolute qualities. Through his scholarship and love of art he can learn about and believe in a higher reality without ever having any direct experience of it. The idealistic Carden Tyrrell, on the other hand, the central figure of the play, brings to this distanced recognition the immediate vision that inspires and transforms knowledge, charges it with a transcendent energy. He acts as a kind of prophet who can initiate the realist into the possibility of vision. Ussher, through his learning, can explain and clarify the meaning of that ecstatic experience, not only for Tyrrell, but for the audience of the play as well.

Ussher closely resembles Martyn himself, the wealthy, aristocratic sage sequestered among his books, ideas, and works of art. Yet Ussher scorns all his accomplishments as too tenuous and mutable, prey to reversal in the next round of luck. In Tyrrell's ability spiritually to transcend the limits of the senses, Ussher finds his link to the ideal and a release from the frustrating restrictions, materialism, and banality of the common world. Yet even he must recognize that Tyrell's most recent and ambitious endeavor, the reclamation of the heather field, is doomed to failure. On the side of a mountain that constantly dominates the background scenery of the play, the field is the first step in Tyrrell's massive plan eventually to reclaim all the waste land in Ireland. Forced into the farming enterprise, he feels himself “bound to find the extreme of its idealisation” (48). He consequently turns the humdrum, routine methods of farming into a scientific exercise, one that allows him to ignore the landlord's usual day-to-day problems of managing an estate, and that will, he hopes, transform ineffable vision into concrete reality.

The symbolic parallel between Tyrrell and the heather field leaves him no escape. If he succeeds in eradicating the natural growth of wild heather, and converting the field into manageable farmland, he will signal the victory of the external forces he has always resisted, and the degeneration of spirit to the level of ordinary matter. Tyrrell's fatal mistake, as Ussher can see, grows out of his attempt to unite real and ideal, and his subsequent inability to distinguish one from the other. Ussher knows his society too well to hope for such unity, knows that Tyrrell's visions and idealistic principles maintain their fragile existence only so long as they are protected from the outside world. When Tyrrell seeks to transfer them outward into the realm of material action and practical endeavor, when he tries to realize the ideal in the real, he can end up with nothing but failure.

Driven insane by reports that the wild heather has again broken out on the mountain, Tyrrell slips permanently into untroubled happiness and a release from a world that leaves no place for him. Just as he cannot destroy the natural heather, society cannot civilize and contain his nature. Tyrrell thus fails only by the mundane standards of a society that refuses to tolerate such genius. Measured by his own more superior and inviolate values, his spirit has risen into triumph. The main concrete achievement of the play is not the financial survival of his estate at the end, which concerns the realist Ussher, but which Martyn could have parcelled out as ruthlessly as he decreed the division of his own land in his family will; it is rather the survival of the heather field.

In Maeve, published in 1899 and performed a year later, Martyn greatly diminishes the character of the realist and accentuates that of the idealist. Once given his actual audience in the national theatre and a forum where his ideas could have had political results, Martyn instead made his position even less accessible by seeking the extreme of its expression and by resorting to vague and oversimplified rhetoric. The few men of vision could still find inspiration in Maeve; the broad mass could make do with the play's slogans.

In her devotion to a philosophy of mystical and intellectual idealism and in her visionary imagination, Maeve closely resembles Carden Tyrrell. But Martyn is more concerned here with the abstract glorification of his heroine than with a concrete delineation of personality, and so he dispenses with the interpretation and psychological realism that make The Heather Field by far the better play. He further isolates Maeve within the recurring image of ice. Wanting to suggest her exalted purity, he instead surrounds her with connotations of death. She wanders through the ruins of an abbey on a freezing night exclaiming, “How beautiful to be like the ice!” (111) and feeling nothing but the lure of the moonlight.

Ice represents to her a state of timeless, unchanging perfection and a union with her beloved ideal of beauty, personified as prince of “Tir-nan-ogue.” Although she longs for him as the hero who will “deliver me from bondage” (119), Maeve's lover never appears except as pure idea. She shrinks from any contact with him, believing that “the beauty of love would come to an end in the lover” (101), instead seeks an infinitely expanding love of the imagination and intellect, one frozen in a transcendent state outside the limits of time and space and consummation of desire. The play thus postulates an ideal and all-encompassing equation in which ice equals Maeve's feeling of love and her beloved—“My love is so divinely cold” (117)—equals beauty—“… a beauty which is transcendently cold” (123)—equals the spirit of ancient Greece—“The greatest beauty like the old Greek sculpture is always cold!” (119)—equals the spirit of ancient Ireland. Within the vague and shadowy depths of this formula, Martyn finds no obstructions to a further equation of the Irish spirit with Maeve herself.

The popular success of the play depended heavily on the nationalistic rhetoric of this final symbol and on the defiant rallying cry against a British usurper by Maeve's spiritual mentor, the mysterious and sinister beggar woman Peg Inerny: “You think I am only an old woman; but I tell you that Erin can never be subdued” (127). Peg, a spiritual relative of Yeats's Cathleen Ni Houlihan, carries on the Irish tradition of the Shan Van Vocht, the “poor old woman” who symbolizes Ireland. Enraptured by her vision of Peg's true kingdom and insensible to the cold around her, Maeve freezes to death. Her fate recalls Carden Tyrrell's. In death or in madness, they merge completely with the spiritual perfection they have longed for. Even more than Tyrrell's, Maeve's fate must be regarded as her triumph.

Although it controls much of the vagueness that spoils Maeve, the realism of The Heather Field also obscures the full extent of what Martyn rejects in these two plays. He ultimately reduces his ideal of heroism to a choice of death over life. In death, or in madness, the hero finds the essence of the immortal ecstasy and perfection he has longed for but has only fleetingly glimpsed. His ideals have failed within the external world of action and practical success, but they, and he, can better exist outside that world. Martyn's hero thus annihilates experience to retreat into vision; since experience feels so limited and oppressive and miserable, the end of experience seems to promise ultimate vision.

The failure of Martyn's work lies in his inability to return from such a vision back to the world of experience, but the failure has its personal dimension as well. Martyn felt himself in headlong flight from an Irish society he could not tolerate and which he saw as turning increasingly worse. His depiction of Ireland's heroic past becomes more idealized as his view of the commonplace future becomes more horrified. In his frozen isolation on the brink of the world, incapable of abandoning his sanctuary, he could claim for his personal dilemma only an ideal, visionary status that resisted contact with the society that had spawned it. His retreat points toward a paralyzed desire to stop those changes in his society. Only the select few could share in the dream. When it seemed he might gain a measure of political influence through his art, he made his position even more extreme and inaccessible.

Martyn's own terms left him at an impasse: only a pure ideal could transform the world, yet an ideal touched by the world could not remain pure. Maeve, consequently, faces even higher odds than Tyrrell, and her defeat demands even more sacrifice and perfection from those visionaries who would follow her inspiration and example. Her path leads away from experience; somehow, in ways Martyn never discovered, that path also needed to return to and redeem a changing society. For the Irish landlords in the 1890s, such a redemption had hopelessly vanished within the shuffle of new economic and political structures. Martyn may have had definite goals in mind to which the Irish society, he hoped, might one day aspire. But these more specific views became completely overwhelmed by his feelings that his society left him only defeat and despair. For in the conflict between ideal dream and degenerate circumstance, the ideal could survive only by retreating, by refusing finally to compromise its spiritual nature and preferring instead an icy, death-like perfection.

Notes

1. Morgante the Lesser (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1890), p. 291.

2. Denis Gwynn, Edward Martyn and the Irish Revival (London: Cape, 1930), p. 150. Gwynn cites an unnamed reviewer from the Irish Truth (n.d.).

3. Sister Marie-Thérèse Courtney, Edward Martyn and the Irish Theatre (New York: Vantage, 1956), pp. 16-18, offers this version of Martyn's years at Oxford. Gwynn, on the other hand, maintains that those years were relatively happy ones for Martyn. Given Martyn's affiliation with a distinctly minority religion, his unsuccessful attempt to earn a degree, and his later satiric blasts at Oxford and Cambridge in Morgante the Lesser, Courtney's view seems the more probable one. Besides Gwynn's and Courtney's biographical accounts of Martyn, see George Moore, Ave, Vol. I of Hail and Farewell (London: Heinemann, 1911), for the best-known, as well as the most fanciful and humorous, view of Martyn.

4. Courtney, p. 65, quotes from Martyn's Collected Papers, p. 164.

5. The Heather Field and Maeve (London: Duckworth, 1899), p. 114. All further references to these two plays are from this edition and are given parenthetically in the text.