Page:Irish plays and playwrights (IA irishplaysplaywr00weygrich).pdf/101

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