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 it into the best of pasture land. That reclamation and transformation has become a passion with him, and soon we feel that it is the symbol of that quality in him that is untamed, incurably "ideal." To free that field of rocks and to drain its bogs he has mortgaged his estate, and, in the play, before the success or failure of his undertaking is proved, he mortgages almost all that remains to him to improve the land below, which the draining of the heather field has turned into a swamp. His wife, to prevent this last folly, strives to have control of his property taken away from him, but his friend, Barry Ussher, believing that restraint would make Tyrrell mad indeed, so intimidates a hesitating physician that Mrs. Tyrrell fails in her most natural plan to save herself and her child from ruin by having her husband declared incompetent, and, if necessary, restrained. With his friend's assistance Tyrrell has won his fight against his wife. Obstinacy in the treatment of some tenants that his debts have driven him to evict rouses such hatred against Tyrrell, until then a loved landlord, that the police hold it necessary to follow him with an escort that he may not be shot by his people. To avoid being so followed, Tyrrell keeps within doors and so intensifies his malady. The catastrophe comes when, on his boy's first spring search for wild flowers, the child brings him a handful of heather buds from the heather field. Their message is that the mountain will revert to waste again. Even in his "ideal domain" reality has asserted itself. His ideal world crumbles for the instant, and his reason with it, and forever. But after a moment's agony ideality triumphantly reasserts itself, and in mad ecstasy Tyrrell, his years fallen from him, passes from sight crying out at the beauty of a world that is to him now forever a world of mornings in which, as he says, "the rain across a saffron sun trembles like gold harpstrings through the purple Irish spring.... The voices--I hear them now triumphant in a silver glory of song!" Such is the play, "aching and lofty in its loveliness."