Page:Irish plays and playwrights (IA irishplaysplaywr00weygrich).pdf/97

This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
EDWARD MARTYN AND GEORGE MOORE
75

cles about ideals in Ireland at home, and on the lecture platform she has stoutly fought the battles of "The Playboy of the Western World" in America; Mr. Yeats has ever delighted in writing letters to the newspapers and he has preached the evangel of the Renaissance from Edinburgh to San Francisco; and Mr. George Moore is a controversialist pamphleteer even before he is a novelist. In the few articles about the movement that Mr. Martyn has written, brief articles all of them, there is, however, clear indication of the spirit in which he wrote his plays, if comparatively little discussion of his art. In the second number of "Beltaine" (February, 1900), in an article entitled "A Comparison between Irish and English Theatrical Audiences," Mr. Martyn declares that he sees in Ireland, instead of the "vast cosmopolitanism and vulgarity" of England, "an idealism founded upon the ancient genius of the land." It is wholly in accord with the spirit of this declaration that Mr. Martyn has written his more important plays, all of them, in fact, but the satires on weaklings and officials he calls "A Tale of a Town" (1902) and "The Place Hunters" (1905). He writes little of the peasants, being less interested in them than are Mr. Yeats and Lady Gregory, and therefore less acquainted with them. If one may judge from his writings the intimates of Mr. Martyn have been among his own landlord class, the priests, and the politicians. It is the landlords and middle-class people that occupy the foreground of his plays, Peg Inerny in "Maeve" (1899) being the only important character a peasant, unless Mrs. Font in "The Enchanted Sea" (1902) can be called a member of a class