was an original possession of none of the dramatists of the Celtic Renaissance, and Mr. Martyn might have been content to be a fellow learner, along with the rest of them, from one another, and from all the great dramatists of the world. It may be that Mr. Martyn never would have attained style, but he could, I think, have learned to make his characters express themselves in a way nearer to true dramatic speech than the lifeless dialogue of his that only just manages to give you their thought, with none of their mood of the moment or of their personality.
In every one of Mr. Martyn's plays the plot is interesting, save in "The Place Hunters"; in every other play it is significant; and in all it is come largely of his individual experience of life. Back of all the plays but these two political satires there is brooding that is deep if not passionate. In all the characters are natural, though some of them are unusual in the way of the unusual characters of Ibsen. And all the plays are marred, "The Heather Field" less than any other, by the fumbling touch of the amateur. Ironically, Mr. Martyn is strong where most Irishmen are weak—in his plot construction: even Mr. Yeats, who never praises with his tongue in his cheek, owning to "the triumphant construction of the 'The Heather Field'"; and weak, where most Irishmen are strong, in the dialogue. It would not have aided Mr. Martyn, for the kind of play he prefers, to have listened to the speech of the peasant as Lady Gregory has listened to it, but he might have learned, with such compeers, how to select and to condense from actual upper-class speech a speech that would represent the thoughts and emotions
