Page:Irish plays and playwrights (IA irishplaysplaywr00weygrich).pdf/116

 94 and personalities of his characters. It is far more difficult, of course, to write dialogue for upper-class people, save humorous dialogue, since, as many from Wordsworth's day on have pointed out, upper-class people do not express their thoughts and emotions as frankly as do the folk. As Mr. Yeats puts it, they look into the fire instead.

Amateur as he is, however, Mr. Martyn has one play to his credit that he who has read will remember, "The Heather Field." It is often thus with the amateur. We need go no further than Mr. Martyn's countryman who gave us "The Burial of Sir John Moore" for witness. Mr. Martyn has, too, like other amateurs, given suggestions to others 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