Page:Irish plays and playwrights (IA irishplaysplaywr00weygrich).pdf/104

 82 not only because I have not seen the play on the stage but because, on reading it, its effect is one that puts my judgment at sea. Years ago as I read it it gripped me hard, but when I read it now and think it over now, I am at a loss to see why, done as it is done, I should have been so moved by it. Now I am moved greatly by but two situations. Both of these are in the last act. One of them is Tyrrell's revulsion against the bad news that his brother Miles brings from Dublin of the mortgagee's refusal to extend. His wife tells their friends that she is ruined, that "pretty nearly all" their property is mortgaged, but Tyrrell cries out, "All, do you say? No—not all. This vulture cannot touch the heather field! My hope,—it is my only hope, and it will save me in the end. Ha, ha! These wise ones! They did not think the barren mountain of those days worth naming in their deed. But now that mountain is a great green field worth more than all they can seize, (with a strange intensity) and it is mine—all mine!"

The other situation that moves me greatly is that at the very close of the play, that from which I quoted a while back, in which Tyrrell's madness becomes evident in his belief that he is a youth again, with all the world before him to do with as he will.

The characters in "The Heather Field" are less rigid than those in the later plays, but even in this play you feel about them, as you feel so often about the characters of Hawthorne, that they are characters chosen to interpret an idea rather than children of the imagination or portraits done from observation of life.