ers that they have realized as
fine art. It is more than likely, for instance, that Mr. Yeats had in
his mind some memory of Peg Inerny when he created Cathleen ni Houlihan.
There is, too, about the best plays of Mr. Martyn, a quality of a
certain kind. They have the distinctness of objects seen under the
bright hard light of late winter, when the sun grows strong, but when
the winds are still keen from the northwest and there are no leaves as
yet on the trees.

There are many characterizations of Mr. Martyn in his kinsman's "Ave."
He is now "a fellow ... with an original streak of genius in him, and
very little literary tact"; but he is more generally characterized in
some such fashion as this, which Mr. Moore makes a deliverance of his
own: "A good fellow--an excellent one, and a man who would have written
well if his mother hadn't put it into his head that he had a soul. The
soul is a veritable pitfall." However that may be, it was the discovery,
or at least suppositious discovery, that he had a soul, a soul in
harmony with the melancholy soul of Ireland, that drove Mr. Moore back
to Dublin, and, for moments, even farther west to the home country of
his family about Lough Gara in Mayo. This discovery was foreshadowed in
"Evelyn Innes" (1898), in which Mr. Moore grows curious about the belief
in ancestral memory and other esoteric beliefs of Mr. Yeats; it is
latent in the introductions to "The Heather Field" and "The Bending of
the Bough"; and it is made manifest in the parts of the latter play that
are Mr. Moore's. Who most helped him to the discovery it is not easy to
say, but an interest in his country entered into and possessed him as
Kirwan's ideas entered into and possessed Dean. No doubt Mr. Yeats
helped him to find his soul, and Mr. Russell, but it must be it was Mr.
Martyn through whose agency the first glimmerings of such a recognition
began to break upon his mind. Is it only dramatically that Mr. Moore
wrote when he put upon Kirwan's lips in 1900 the words, "Life is the
enemy--we should fly from life"? But whether this is only a dramatic
repetition of what he might have heard any time from "A.E." had he
chosen to listen, there is no doubt that Mr. Moore did discover a new
quality in himself in the late nineties after he became intimately
associated with the new Irish movement. There is a wistfulness of
feeling and a beauty of thought in his writing, from "Evelyn Innes" on,
that there was not in it before "E