"A Tale of a Town" is so crude, so naked, so obvious, so uninspired, one wonders why it can be taken seriously at all. But the reason is not far to seek. The play is true, in the main, to the life it depicts, and there is vehement feeling back of its satire; and truth and intensity of feeling cannot be denied effect on the stage any more than on the rostrum. Where it falls short of reality is in the dialogue of the aldermen. No politicians, even when egged by their envious womankind, would ever give themselves away as do these of "A Tale of a Town." They are as frankly self-revelatory as if they were characters in a morality play.
It would, perhaps, be inexact to call Mr. Martyn a misogynist, but he has that attitude toward women of some priests his countrymen, as of many priests of all creeds, that there is something belittling if not degrading in absorbing association with women. His feeling is not at all the commoner feeling of men that leads them all to cry, "The woman tempted me." Women tempt Mr. Martyn no more than they did Ruskin, but he seems to feel that the majority of them are nuisances if not baggages. So strong is this feeling in "A Tale of a Town" that it leads him to make Millicent behave in a way no Jasper Dean in real life would ever stand, for Jasper Dean is not a man pronouncedly uxorious until his abject surrender at the end of Act IV.
There are almost as many indictments of women as there are of England in the plays of Mr. Martyn: Mrs. Tyrrell in "The Heather Field" and Mrs. Font in "The Enchanted Sea," as well as all of the women in "A Tale
