live in drawing-rooms, but if you would uplift the
man of the roads you must write about the roads, or about the people of
romance, or about great historical people."

Neither "Maeve" nor "The Enchanted Sea" can be called a drawing-room
play, though both introduce us to "drawing-room people," but "The
Heather Field" (1899), Mr. Martyn's first play, and his greatest success
is a drawing-room play, as in a minor way are "A Tale of a Town" and
"The Place Hunters." These last two plays are failures; but they are not
failures, I think because they are drawing-room plays, but because Mr.
Martyn is less effective with a full stage than with two couples or so
and, principally, because he is less successful with social and
political questions than with those that concern the individual.

Whatever value one puts upon "The Heather Field" it cannot be denied
that it was a popular success and that it was praised by critics whose
judgment is discerning. It is perhaps because it is a variant of the old
theme of the war between man the idealist and woman the materialist that
it so appealed to young men, troubled themselves as to whether to follow
their star or to accept the chains that; wife and children impose. It
was enough for the audience that witnessed its first performances in the
Antient Concert Rooms, Dublin, May 9, 10, 13, 1899, that it showed a man
at war with the despotism of fact, as Ireland, preeminently the Celtic
Land, has so long been. It was not remarkably acted, by an
insufficiently rehearsed and not very understanding scratch company, and
yet it impressed its audiences more favorably than "The Countess
Cathleen" (1892), an unequivocally great poetic drama; and these
audiences were the most cultivated Dublin can boast.

"The Heather Field" is the story of the going-mad of Carden Tyrrell, a
landlord of the west of Ireland. From the first he is represented to us
as a man to whom as to so many of his countrymen dream is reality and
reality dream. His wife, to whom the realities are very instant, urges
him to do as others do, to entertain, to hunt, at least to do something
practical. For her he has abandoned the ideal world he had built up for
himself from his books and his dreams and is trying farming. Yet his
temperament is such that he must idealize even this. When the curtain
rises he is still busy with the project, long since undertaken, of
reclaiming a wind-swept heather field fronting the Atlantic and of
making i