people who speak it, and in the latter part of the play labored and stodgy. "Grangecolman" is a picture of life as we all know it, and there is in it a fidelity of purpose that gives it a kind of effectiveness. There is not in it, however, any keenness of vision, any deep reading of life, any great underlying emotion, to relieve its abject sordidness. There is no gusto, no beauty, no intensity of bitterness even, to make its sordidness interesting in any other than a pathological way.
As one reads "Hail and Farewell," one might readily come to believe that Mr. Martyn is only an eccentric character, "gotten up" by Mr. Moore for a novel. Mr. Martyn is, in reality, a very vital force working for the nationalization of Irish art, if not an artist himself. The pity is that he is not wholly an artist, for he might have been. He knows and is interested in classes of Irish society that the dramatists of the Abbey Theatre have not tried to depict, and had he realized twelve years ago what a chance was his to learn the art of the stage, with the help and collaboration of Mr. Moore, Mr. Yeats, and Lady Gregory, he might now be what he seemed to be after the triumphant production of "The Heather Field," the Irish playwright who had adapted the modes of Ibsen to the presentation of the life of Irish landlords and bourgeois politicians.
But Mr. Martyn would not realize that ideas—and he is rich in ideas—constitute the larger part of originality; he thought technique in drama must come from the man himself, too. Such technique, of course, comes most often from the study of other drama. Certainly it
