Chapter I: Introduction

In the publication of the two plays in this volume are involved many things: “Le Théâtre Libre,” its echo in England, “The Independent Theatre,” Ibsen, Mr George Alexander, Mr William Archer, “The New Century Theatre,” the “Irish Literary Theatre,” and the normal intelligence of theatrical audiences in France and England. It would be impossible--I mean that it would be impossible for me--to speak of the plays before speaking of these contiguous matters. Therefore with your permission....

* * * * *

It was for the purpose of acting the psychological drama, which seems to interest no part of the public except actors and men of letters, that the “Théâtre Libre” was founded. It had become known that many distinguished authors, without thought of supplying a popular demand, had written psychological plays. These remained in their desks unacted until the “Théâtre Libre” asked permission to act them. M. Antoine, its director, was anxious to put the taste of the public to the test, to find out whether the public was as opposed to the literary drama as managers seemed to think. The “Théâtre Libre” was imitated in England under the name of the “Independent Theatre,” with this difference, that I did not hope to discover any psychological drama in England. English prose is mercenary, English dramatic prose is the most mercenary of all. I did not expect to recover literary drama from the desks of our dramatists, I knew that none was there. Before a nation can produce art it must see art, and my hope rested on the supposition that the wealthy would subscribe sufficient money to pay for a monthly performance of a work of art. That this work of art should be of British origin did not seem to me to be of immediate importance; and the money required was so little, £2000 a year or even less, £1500, would have been ample funds for the “Independent Theatre.” I gave up all my time and energy to the production of the first plays produced by the “Independent Theatre.” They created some passing literary interest, but little by little the truth was borne in upon me that there were not 1500 people in London who cared sufficiently for dramatic art to pay one guinea a year to save dramatic writing from the grave into which it was slipping. Having made sure of this fact I cut the “Independent Theatre” adrift. It has long ceased to exist, and the “Théâtre Libre” in France has ceased to exist too, and for the same reason.

Our dislike to good painting nearly equals our dislike to a good play, but good painting is dependent on the good taste of a very few. The pre-Raphaelite movement was kept alive by half-a-dozen men of taste; but the art of the dramatist demands a more numerous patronage, and even the little patronage necessary for the existence of an independent Theatre was not forthcoming. The public in both countries, in France and England, for some obscure reason, which it would be vain to attempt to elucidate, regards any dramatic movement outside of the ordinary scheme of the ordinary commercial theatre, not merely with the indifference which might be expected, but with a fierce hostility which is incomprehensible. To many this will seem an exaggeration, but many will remember the sullen opposition to the first performance of “The Doll’s House.” It is not too much to say that to like Ibsen’s plays in the eighties was equivalent to liking Wagner’s music. Both were regarded with oblique looks, and few were quite sure that the new music and the new drama were not an immorality, which it was perhaps the duty of the state to stamp out. Not infrequently this view found expression in the writings of men who, on all other points, were as sane and as mediocre as their fellows. It was not until the other day that the critic ceased to confuse the poet philosopher with a social reformer, interested in the liberation of women from their husbands, and in the struggle between capital and labour. It has only just come to be suspected that perhaps Ibsen did not write his plays to prove the necessity for reformation in these directions.

Wagner has had his revenge; but Ibsen, though he has ceased to be execrated, has remained unpopular; perhaps he has even lost adherents, for, in replying to some admirers, he admitted that poetry interested him more than social reformations.

In Ibsen are combined poet, philosopher and dramatist in almost the same proportions as in Shakespeare, more than in Racine, Goethe or Hugo. He is deficient only in the romantic spectacle which Shakespeare provides in abundance. Shakespeare alone amid dramatists was able to remain a poet for his pleasure while conceding booths and roundabouts to his audience for theirs. But the psychological drama does not admit of spectacle; that is why it fails on the stage. The explanation is a sad one, for if it be true we shall never possess a popular literary drama again. The psychological drama is the only possible literary drama in the nineteenth century. The romantic incidents which abound in Shakespeare were part and parcel of Elizabethan life; there was more room in the world then; at every few miles the realities of life faded to a romantic background. In the seventeenth century, duels, conspiracies, serenades and poisoned goblets were common circumstances, and could be freely used by the dramatists; they are still the stock-in-trade of the drama of the nineteenth century; they still hold the interest of sophisticated audiences anxious to be amused, but the skill of no one will ever endow them with life again.... Perhaps without laying ourselves open to the suspicion of believing that a theatrical audience will ever be found less unintelligent than the audiences which collect nightly in our theatres, we may wonder if this present theatrical convention will not wear itself out as the convention of Italian opera has worn out. The theatrical folk of fifty years hence, possessed by a foolish notion of progress, may decide that they do not care for scenery, dresses and romantic adventure, and welcome as a change the psychological drama which to-day is deemed pernicious and intolerable, even when written by the second greatest dramatic genius this world has seen.

In this long interval the drama will exist as a pretext for actors and actresses to dress themselves in fine clothes and to posture for the mild distraction of a public that has eaten itself into a stupor. But should a revolution in taste come to pass, will it endure? The public is the original jungle, and the garden that has been won from the jungle very soon returns to the jungle. A better chance is that some man may awake to the idea that there are others to endow hospitals and that it is his mission to endow a theatre. Until then those who write plays from impulse, because they have something to say, must publish their plays in book form. Appeal may be made to the vanity of the actor-manager and his wife; the vanity of the actor and actress is a gleam of hope in a dark outlook, a fugitive gleam.

* * * * *

“I have brought to you a play, Alexander, in which there is a real live man, one just born into literary life--he has never been seen on the stage--no, he is not out of a novel. But,” I added, seeing his face brighten too rapidly, “there is not a penny of money in the play. It is merely a good part.”

“Is it then so well written that----”

“The fault lies deeper than the writing. The public will tolerate good writing, but what it will not tolerate is, that a play should be built on a solid base of human idea and emotion, etc.... If the play be frivolous in its conception, the public will tolerate artifices of language.”

* * * * *

Mr Alexander read the play and promised to produce it at a morning performance, and that he did not fulfil his promise is no part of my present grievance. A broken promise were a pitiful thing to lament. It would be no wiser to reproach Mr Alexander for having produced plays out of whose inanities he has made a fortune. He did well to produce these plays, for nine-tenths of an actor’s life must be given up to rubbish; rubbish is the fare of the multitude, and it is the multitude that enables the actor to keep the roof over his head; but he should reserve a tenth part of his life for himself--for his art. All actors try to do this, for actors love their art; they talk about it incessantly and never about their salaries; in this respect their attitude towards their art compares very favourably with that of authors towards theirs. (When I say authors, I of course mean the members of the Society of Authors.) No one recognises the human emotions and no one welcomes them in a play more than actors, and if it were their taste that obtained, Ibsen would be the most popular dramatist. The taste of actors in plays is identical with that of the “Independent Theatre,” but it is the taste of the public that obtains, and so Sardou and Cyrano de Bergerac, which is merely rhymed Sardou, are hoisted above Ibsen. The vanity of the actor impels him toward art; for six months, for ten months of the year he is forced to inhale and exhale nonsense, on the eleventh he longs to rush out of the confined and vitiated atmosphere of the theatre into the open air of art; his tired lungs pant for a breath of human emotion; and this is the moment when the dramatic author should get him to sign an agreement to produce his play. It was in such a revulsion of feeling that Mr Alexander was caught, and if he broke his promise after having made it to me, it was the fault of the dramatic critics. I will name the principal delinquent, Mr Archer, and explain.

True it is that he and I are moved by the same desire to see literature on the stage; he has given up his life, I gave up some months, perhaps a year of my life, to attain this object. I retired from the struggle, he has persisted. Our taste in dramatic literature often coincided; our admiration of Ibsen is the same, but though our eyes were set on the same goal, the ways by which we hoped to reach that goal were different ways. My belief was that the most likely way of arriving at the goal was by an uncompromising sincerity, by taking no heed of vain appearance, by going to the root of things and denouncing all pseudo-literature in the rudest possible terms. For plays like the “Circus Girl” and “Charlie’s Aunt” much toleration should be shown, but the pseudo-literature play should be held up to contempt. Mr Archer’s belief was that the goal could be reached by encouraging, with insincere praise, all work that seemed new, every play that seemed better than the last play; his attitude towards dramatic writing has therefore been one of benevolent insincerity. He has pursued this policy for twenty years, and he has only to hear the plays now running at the London theatres to be convinced that he has not “educated” the public taste.

Like another he probably once believed that he had not lived in vain. The night of the production of “The Second Mrs Tanqueray” his hopes stood higher than they ever did before or since. Some years have passed, the circumstances which engendered the play are scattered, we can see it in its relation to literature and measure it by its humanities. It must be now plain to every one that it was no more than a dramatic version of the current gossip of the street. Folk were then talking of women with pasts: were asking what a man should do if he married a woman who told him that she had had a lover before she was married, and then what a man should do if he found out that his wife had had a lover before her marriage, and so on. The most astonishingly ill-devised tales were concocted by our dramatists on these themes. Mr Alexander, who likes betting on the taste of the public, produced one with success; and in the same spirit he bet on the taste of the public with a very horrible play called “The Conquerors”--and lost. But Mr Archer mistook “The Second Mrs Tanqueray” for a work of art, he declared it to be a play of the deepest social and literary significance, and the beginning of a dramatic renaissance. The actor-manager’s conscience or his vanity was appeased; he was convinced against his better judgment that he had ceased to talk nonsense on the stage; he believed that he was engaged in earnest work, etc.; why, therefore, should he produce “The Heather Field”? I had admitted that I did not think it would draw money, he was agreed with me on that point; as for art, why speak of it? Had he not fulfilled his artistic destiny by producing “The Second Mrs Tanqueray”?

Actors are better judges of literature than is generally supposed, their love of the humanities from which they are for ever debarred leads them aright, but bewildered by the press, Mr Alexander for a moment seems to have thought that perhaps, after all, there was a little money in literature, and hearing that Mr Henry James had written some plays he applied for one. I would not be discourteous to Mr Henry James; perhaps the worst discourtesy would be to refrain from saying exactly what I think of his play. Speak of it I must--the explanation on which I am engaged obliges me to speak of it; and what it is needful that I should say about “Guy Domville” he knows already. He knows that it was not vulgar, like “The Second Mrs Tanqueray,” but a mere hapless effort to speak in a language which he had not yet moulded to his lips. The knowledge that what he wrote was going to be spoken and not read seemed to have paralyzed his thoughts, until in the third act he could not express himself at all. In the first act some design was recognisable, but in the second and third acts everything that makes life, instinct, desire and reason, was swallowed up in flat fog. The incomparable Tourgueneff underwent the same kind of aberration when he wrote his five-act comedy, and his failure was in the same direction as Mr James’s. But instead of such simple truth every kind, almost every kind, of insincerity filled the newspapers. About the construction of the story some doubt was expressed, but the writing of it could not be sufficiently praised. Did the critics look into their hearts to discover what they really thought of the writing of the play or did they say it was well written because Mr James wrote it? They were impressed by the sentences, which were elaborately composed and wore a thoughtful air. Alas, current criticism cannot understand that to think well is to write well, that an idea which has been conceived in hesitation and fear must of necessity be badly written. If the critics had looked into their hearts, if they had striven to discover their real thoughts from floating masses of preconceived opinion, they must have learnt that the play for different reasons, but for equally valid reasons, was no nearer to literature than any drama by Mr George R. Sims. Few read dramatic criticism, and it is forgotten as soon as the page on which it appears is passed. Dramatic criticism is as ephemeral as a fashion article; successful plays are but fashions; but even about fashions the critic is behoven to write truthfully. We may not answer, ‘what matter whether women wear one kind of sleeve or another?’ Every lie matters, and the attitude of benevolent insincerity which the critics assumed towards Mr James’s play produced its little effect in the subconscious mind of Mr Alexander and in the general mind, which is always subconscious. The critical articles which condoned instead of condemning induced a feeling of resentment against literature, a feeling that may be interpreted in the following words: “So that is literature! you all say it is, ... well, literature does not do on the stage.”

The next attempt to foster the literary play was made by a new Society constituted probably after the fashion of the “Independent Theatre” Society. It was called the “New Century Theatre,” and the first play that the new dramatic society produced was Ibsen’s “John Gabriel Borkman.”

To produce Ibsen was so obviously the right thing to do that the wisdom of the management does not transpire in the choice any more than the wisdom of the captain of a man-of-war transpires when he fires a salute to the Queen. To judge the wisdom of the new management we must look to its second rather than to its first production, and the second play that the New Century Theatre produced was a sort of sea captain’s yarn of robbery and murder, written in a language compiled very carefully from the Bible and Scotch idiom. That Mr Archer, the admirer of “The Second Mrs Tanqueray” and “Guy Domville” should mistake this piece of ingenious tinkering for a work of original genius seems natural enough if we consider how his taste oscillates between love of an exhibition of some social problem on one side and literary writing on the other. The difficulty is not to understand why he should like the three above mentioned plays, but why he should also like the “Master Builder.” For Catholicity in art consists in admiring such different things as the sculpture of the Parthenon and that of Chartres Cathedral; but if a third admiration--let us say a picture by Sir Edward Burne Jones--be introduced, we are forced to conclude that the critic has not understood either the first or the second.

The management of the New Century Theatre was in the hands of Mr Archer, Mr Massingham, and Miss Robins; and not only did they choose a sea-captain’s yarn for their second production, but they still further exposed the feebleness of their taste by selecting a one-act play to precede it, whose feebleness ranged beyond those wide bounds marked out for feebleness to range in by unpretentious suburban managements.

Mr Archer and Mr Massingham are critics of the drama. They advocate Wagner theatres and subsidised theatres, so I will say to them that it would be well to have a subsidised theatre if we had a man with a sufficiently definite taste to conduct it; a man who could admire the Parthenon and Chartres Cathedral, but who did not dally with Mr Leader or his Associate Jones. Antoine was such a man, and Mr Archer did seem once like the man who could successfully direct a literary theatre. But he likes so many things; his taste is so varied that he may be said to have no taste. He admires another Jones and praises “Michael and his Lost Angel.” “The Second Mrs Tanqueray” induced him to believe that we were on the eve of a dramatic renaissance. The variations in Mr Archer’s tastes are so unexpected that he has become for me what the game of “Patience” is for others. In lonely evenings it is always a distraction to try to penetrate to the secret of his nature, to discover why he likes “Hedder Gabler” and “The Benefit of the Doubt.” We all play the game of “Patience” in some form or other, and the reconcilement of an admiration for “The Benefit of the Doubt” with any considerable intelligence is the problem I often set myself. And sometimes I think that it may be explained by the antagonism of the Puritan Mr Archer to the playgoer Mr Archer; the Puritan demanded atonement from the playgoer, and the atonement that the Scotch ancestor demanded was the sacrifice of all personal vanity; so Mr Archer became a dramatic critic. But the original ancestor demanded further sacrifice; and Mr Archer renounced original work and accepted the hard fare of translation. But outraged Nature has reasserted herself in Mr Archer’s sub-conscious mind. He says, ‘I lay no egg but I think I might hatch one.’ Of all objects in Nature none is perhaps more pathetic than a clucking hen, and when the last chicken was hatched out I consented to go and see it. “He really has begun to think,” said the anxious parent. “But,” I said, “the thinking chicken does not begin to think, he begins by thinking.”

The play was the unfortunate “Benefit of the Doubt,” and the divorce court has always been accepted by Mr Archer as the symbol of thoughtfulness.... There is no reason why the hapless tale should be unfolded here; it matters little whether the wife confessed or the husband found her out; suffice it to say that Mr Pinero, who is about as subjective as a clown, soon began to wander round the dramatic ring hoop in hand. All the usual hoops were jumped in the second act, overheard conversations and the rest; but not one of his characters could he get through the psychological hoop; round and round they went, missing it time out of mind. The poor jester stood in the middle of the third act, a psychological and a theological hoop in either hand, tired out, the horses at walking pace, the ladies swinging limp on their wide saddles. It was eleven o’clock! There was nothing for it but to call a bishop down from the gallery to pull the performance through somehow. There were a bishop in the play and a young man called Claude, and these were the folk who did not satisfy Mr Archer. The bishop after all did bring the play to a conclusion, and Claude seemed to me one of the most amusing creations of the greatest creator of comic characters since Dickens.

No one discovered the moral of this play; perhaps it had none, but the moral of the articles that were written about it was clear enough. Again the press endeavoured to deceive the public. Mr Pinero had been put forward as a thinker; the play was rigmarole, but to admit that it was rigmarole would be to compromise for ever the literary drama. So Mr Archer thought; whereas it is by supporting such plays that the press compromises the chances of the literary drama. “Again,” the public said, in its dim sub-conscious way, “if that is literature I do not like literature.” And since the failure of that most dismal play indifference has settled over things theatrical: farce and melodrama and musical comedy are everywhere.

* * * * *

I have to reproach Mr Archer with sins of omission as well as with sins of commission. For while he was defending the indefensible and exhausting the patience of the public with a tale of the sea, there was published unbeknown to him in London a play, beautiful as anything in Maeterlinck, a play possessing all the beauties of the Princess Maleine, and the beauty of verses equal to the verses of Homer. The name of this play is the “Countess Cathleen,” and the name of its author is W. B. Yeats. If I had mentioned the name of a certain popular writer of military jargon our silly literary press would bubble with enjoyment, but the genius of W. B. Yeats, being a survival of that of the prophet and the seer of old time, escapes the appreciation of the newspapers.

That those who find the natural outlet of their lives in Newmarket and the Riviera should not have read the “Countess Cathleen” is comprehensible enough; but that those whose life’s business would seem to be to understand art, should read the “Countess Cathleen” and prefer “Admiral Guinea” and “The Benefit of the Doubt,” is surely a sign of the degrading influence of newspaper criticism upon those who write it. Or shall we hazard a conjecture? Shall we say that Mr Archer has not spoken or written about this play because the English reviews are only open to chatter about the doings of little Belgians and Frenchmen? The bi-monthly article about a French poet is one of the literary conventions of our day. But even if we accept this convention as a sufficient explanation for Mr Archer’s silence regarding the “Countess Cathleen,” the choice of the New Century Theatre for its second production still remains unexplained. The beauty of the verses and the perfection of the construction of this play will be admitted by Mr Archer; it will be on the character drawing that he will sharpen his pen.... But do we not hear too much of the differentiation of one man from another? Is not character drawing a mere rind of life in which the English novel is still seeking an existence? And without being thought to say that it were well to ignore social differences, may it not be suggested that they are worthy of no more than a passing notice? Temperamental differences are more important, but even they are but the threshold of the deep regions of humanity--those states of eternal consciousness which are souls in a far deeper sense than we are souls. When the critic has said, as he says too frequently, “I do not see your hero, I do not see your heroine,” he has not said everything; he has not uttered, as he thinks he has, the final reproof. What we see most clearly is not always most real, another and a more abiding reality exists in our immortal instincts. The Countess Cathleen being a creature of myth, and stripped of all circumstantial habit, is visible only to the eyes of the soul, and represents only that which is most human and eternal in man.... She would barter her soul to gain the salvation of those who are selling their souls for food in famine time. But this compact is an impossible compact; we barter our souls only for selfish gratification; and it was the genius of the primitive poem to imagine such paradoxical sacrifice, in order to represent the blindness of human pity. A fixed idea like the Countess Cathleen looks neither to the right nor left; she walks straight for the chasm, but instead of falling she ascends an angel to heaven, her intention being pure.

It was open to Mr Archer, Miss Robins and Mr Massingham to have produced this divine play; or if they had wanted a prose play they might have produced “The Heather Field,” which will now be performed by the Irish Literary Theatre on alternate nights with Mr Yeats’ play.... I sent “The Heather Field” to Mr Archer, but he did not see as much as Mr Alexander saw in it, nor did discussion help him to understand that it was the first play written in English inspired by the examples of Ibsen. He seemed still involved in the traditional comprehension of Ibsen which discerns a social reformer in the greatest dramatic poet and thinker since Shakespeare, or maybe it was the man who paints from life, straight away, without troubling himself about symbolism, that Mr Archer saw in Ibsen at that time. He said, speaking of “The Heather Field” and “The Benefit of the Doubt,” that it was open to me to prefer a piece of rude original sculpture to a piece of academic work. It is not required that I should raise the question whether academic work expresses qualities of balance, design, sequence. However this may be, it is certain that these qualities are as conspicuously present in “The Heather Field” as they are conspicuously absent from “The Benefit of the Doubt.” A play that possesses qualities of balance, design, sequence is a work of art and will hold its own in any company; and although “The Heather Field” will seem small by the side of “The Wild Duck,” it will hold its own by the side of “The Wild Duck,” or “Macbeth,” or “Hamlet,” just as a housewife by Peter de Hoogh will hold its own by the side of the “Marriage Feast” by Veronese, or the “Entombment of Christ” by Titian, or the “Last Judgment” by Michael Angelo. The little story entitled “Ships that Pass in the Night” is not lofty in conception nor very profound, but it is wistful and true, and it therefore holds its own by the side of “Don Quixote,” “On the Eve,” and “l’Education Sentimentale.” A picture or poem that does not hold its own by the side of the greatest works is not worthy of consideration, is not art. Art is full of differences of style which seem to amount to contradictions, but art is always the same, and the true critic is he who is not deceived by the superficial appearance. But the mission of the journalist is to record appearances.... I think that in these last lines I have made something clear that was not clear before, and it is not impossible that many will understand now why “The Second Mrs Tanqueray” stands beyond the pale, not being of the right flesh and blood, while “The Heather Field” stands well within the pale. I apologise for the words “well within,” they are unnecessary; there is no border-land: picture, poem, statue, novel, sonata, should enter instantly by right of birth or be thrust outside like hirelings.

M. Jules Lemaître has published several volumes of criticism, and so far as I remember without failing to distinguish between the sheep and the goats. But Mr Archer is never sure which is which, and his sins of commission are only to be paralleled by his sins of omission. He failed to perceive that the hero of “The Heather Field,” Carden Tyrrell, is the first appearance of humanity in the English prose drama of to-day--of the eternal instinctive humanities and not the ephemeral differences which divide the grocer from the baronet. It were surely impossible to point to a scene in the English prose drama of the present century so essentially human as the scene in which Carden Tyrrell speaks to his brother Miles of the days when they sailed their skiff to Lorlei, and Carden, who is the elder brother, tells Miles, who was then a boy, the legends of the Rhine. This scene is certainly a beautiful and pathetic expression of that passionate wistfulness which rises up in the heart and brain when we look back on the days of our early youth, those days fresh and fugitive as the days of early spring, when the buds are breaking into tiny leaf and the daffodils star the grass. In a moment we are in the midst of the emotion which Mr Martyn has expressed in this scene, an emotion known to all over thirty, to the hind as well as the king. Expression of it has hitherto been sought by bringing together an elderly spinster and an elderly bachelor who did not marry, and who fear that it is now too late, the assumption being that if they had married they would have been happy. But Mr Martyn probes deeper than the ephemeral griefs which circumstances create, and in the scene between Carden Tyrrell and Miles Tyrrell 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. This scene occurs again at the close of the third act; in a modified form, it brings the play to its conclusion. Carden Tyrrell is a man whose dreams are in conflict with reality. He 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. Mortgage after mortgage is placed upon the property, and the future of his wife and child is compromised. The play resolves itself into a duel between husband and wife, and one of its merits is that although all right and good sense are on the wife’s side, the sympathy is always with Carden. We forget the ruin he is bringing on his family, and we love him for his dreams, for his dreams are the eternal aspiration of man for the ideal. He hears voices, magical voices on the mountain side, and in his heart the sound of a silver harp string.

The Heather Field is the symbol of his incurable nature; whatever its circumstances it will seek its destiny out and find it; and with the flowering of the Heather Field Carden passes quietly over the border-land. The years, with all their hideous realities fall behind him, wife, domestic misfortunes and middle age, all that has been done becomes undone; his wife becomes Miss Desmond; his little son Kit becomes his brother Miles; Carden is young again and he babbles of the rainbow, of the Rhine, the gold of the Rhine and its legends; he attains his lost youth, the soft scent and colour of the spring mornings, the green leaf and the meadow starred with daffodils. “It is always morning now for me,” he exclaims. The others watch him baffled and unhappy, they are still involved in the cruel coil of reality which he has shaken off, and he leads the child to see the rainbow, “that mystic highway of man’s speechless longings.”

Carden Tyrrell will appear to the superficial reader merely as a man who lives in a state of chronic misunderstanding with his wife, and squanders his fortune in experiments for the reclamation of waste land; and in Maeve the superficial reader will perceive a young lady who finds herself unable to marry the man she has promised to marry, and who is rescued from her dilemma by Queen Maeve who rises from the great cairn, and accompanied by her harpers and warriors, carries the young girl away to Tir-nan-ogue. But the discerning reader will at once understand that notwithstanding much apparent dissimilarity of subject the two plays are but different expressions of the same thought, and the power to re-tell the same story in a different form he will recognise as the sign of the true artist. The idea of both plays is 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 harp 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. Maeve is a character evolved out of a place; she is made out of the light of the keen bright Irish spring and the loneliness of the Clare mountains that surround her home, of the round tower, the masterwork of Goban, on which she gazes with intense eyes; of the legends of the ancient Irish gods, of the beauty of the Irish romanesque ornament, those exquisite traceries which are a reflection of the Byzantine, but more refined. Maeve is the spirit and sense of an ill-fated race, and she portrays its destiny and bears the still unextinguished light of its heroic period. Maeve is all ecstasy, tremulous white ecstasy, cold as ice and glittering like ice in the moonlight. She looks beyond the world for her love; she is haunted by the herolepsy of the plume and the spear of the warrior, and sees her lover the chiefest among the chieftains of Queen Maeve. Maeve’s love is a cerebral erithism which shrinks from all contact or even thought of the contact of flesh. But this severance of her temperament from the strange fruition of all our holy and most tender aspirations does not alienate our sympathy from her. Although shorn of all common humanity, our sympathy is with her as it is with Carden Tyrrell, and we cry, “Believe in your warrior of long ago, and let go by you the young Englishman who seeks to rob you of your dream;” and to triumph thus over common instincts and infect the reader with sympathies and longing which lie beyond the world is surely to succeed where hitherto no modern English dramatist has even dreamed that drama was to be found.

* * * * *

These plays are perfectly constructed; they could be acted as they are written, without curtailment; they were composed with strict regard for the stage, though perhaps not with a view to representation on the stage. Mr Martyn was not innocent enough to think that plays in which human emotion is the whole of the play, would be tolerated in a theatre of the present day. He wrote them with strict regard for the stage, because it is impossible to write good plays without the actors and the actresses who will never interpret them, always before your eyes. It is as impossible to compose literary plays that do not act as it is to compose sonnets in fifteen lines; but by some strange irony it has come to pass that the plays which lend themselves to interpretation are the plays which are neglected on the stage and cherished in the study.

GEORGE MOORE.

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THE HEATHER FIELD

A PLAY IN THREE ACTS

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DRAMATIS PERSONÆ

BARRY USSHER, _a landowner, student, philosopher, &c._

LORD SHRULE, _a neighbouring landowner_.

LADY SHRULE (LILIAN), _his wife_.

CARDEN TYRRELL.

MRS GRACE TYRRELL (_born_ DESMOND), _his wife_.

KIT, _their son, nine years old_.

MILES TYRRELL, _scholar of Trinity College, Dublin, and brother
of Carden_.

DOCTOR DOWLING, }
} _physicians_.
DOCTOR ROCHE, }

_The action takes place about the year 1890 in CARDEN TYRRELL’S house
on the West coast of Ireland._

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