ty of intention, though Mr. Moore's greater power over
words gives his plays a dignity as art that the plays of Mr. Martyn do
not attain.

Alone of the quartette that founded "The Irish Literary Theatre," Mr.
Martyn is possessed of none of the instincts of the publicist. Lady
Gregory has edited articles about ideals in Ireland at home, and on the
lecture platform she has stoutly fought the battles of "The Playboy of
the Western World" in America; Mr. Yeats has ever delighted in writing
letters to the newspapers and he has preached the evangel of the
Renaissance from Edinburgh to San Francisco; and Mr. George Moore is a
controversialist pamphleteer even before he is a novelist. In the few
articles about the movement that Mr. Martyn has written, brief articles
all of them, there is, however, clear indication of the spirit in which
he wrote his plays, if comparatively little discussion of his art. In
the second number of "Beltaine" (February, 1900), in an article entitled
"A Comparison between Irish and English Theatrical Audiences," Mr.
Martyn declares that he sees in Ireland, instead of the "vast
cosmopolitanism and vulgarity" of England, "an idealism founded upon the
ancient genius of the land." It is wholly in accord with the spirit of
this declaration that Mr. Martyn has written his more important plays,
all of them, in fact, but the satires on weaklings and officials he
calls "A Tale of a Town" (1902) and "The Place Hunters" (1905). He
writes little of the peasants, being less interested in them than are
Mr. Yeats and Lady Gregory, and therefore less acquainted with them. If
one may judge from his writings the intimates of Mr. Martyn have been
among his own landlord class, the priests, and the politicians. It is
the landlords and middle-class people that occupy the foreground of his
plays, Peg Inerny in "Maeve" (1899) being the only important character a
peasant, unless Mrs. Font in "The Enchanted Sea" (1902) can be called a
member of a class that she was born to, but from which her marriage
removed her.

This question of the class the plays should present was one of those
that led to the withdrawal of Mr. Martyn from the dramatic movement. A
more definite cause, perhaps, was the unanimous determination of Lady
Gregory, Mr. Yeats, and Mr. Moore that his "A Tale of a Town" could not
be presented by "The Irish Literary Theatre" as he wrote it if the
standards of that theatre were to be preserved. Its author's magnanim