Amateur as he is, however, Mr. Martyn has one play to his credit that he who has read will remember, "The Heather Field." It is often thus with the amateur. We need go no further than Mr. Martyn's countryman who gave us "The Burial of Sir John Moore" for witness. Mr. Martyn has, too, like other amateurs, given suggestions to others that they have realized as fine art. It is more than likely, for instance, that Mr. Yeats had in his mind some memory of Peg Inerny when he created Cathleen ni Houlihan. There is, too, about the best plays of Mr. Martyn, a quality of a certain kind. They have the distinctness of objects seen under the bright hard light of late winter, when the sun grows strong, but when the winds are still keen from the northwest and there are no leaves as yet on the trees.
There are many characterizations of Mr. Martyn in his kinsman's "Ave." He is now "a fellow ... with an original streak of genius in him, and very little literary tact"; but he is more generally characterized in some such fashion as this, which Mr. Moore makes a deliverance of his own: "A good fellow--an excellent one, and a man who would have written well if his mother hadn't put it into his head that he had a soul. The soul is a veritable pitfall." However that may be, it was the discovery, or at least suppositious discovery, that he had a soul, a soul in harmony with the melancholy soul of Ireland, that drove Mr. Moore back to Dublin, and, for moments, even farther west to the home country of his family about Lough Gara in Mayo. This discovery was foreshadowed in "Evelyn Innes" (1898), in which Mr. Moore grows curious about the belief in ancestral memory and other esoteric beliefs of Mr. Yeats; it is latent in the introductions to "The Heather Field" and "The Bending of the Bough"; and it is made manifest in the parts of the latter play that are Mr. Moore's. Who most helped him to the discovery it is not easy to say, but an interest in his country entered into and possessed him as Kirwan's ideas entered into and possessed Dean. No doubt Mr. Yeats helped him to find his soul, and Mr. Russell, but it must be it was Mr. Martyn through whose agency the first glimmerings of such a recognition began to break upon his mind. Is it only dramatically that Mr. Moore wrote when he put upon Kirwan's lips in 1900 the words, "Life is the enemy--we should fly from life"? But whether this is only a dramatic repetition of what he might have heard any time from "A.E." had he chosen to listen, there is no doubt that Mr. Moore did discover a new quality in himself in the late nineties after he became intimately associated with the new Irish movement. There is a wistfulness of feeling and a beauty of thought in his writing, from "Evelyn Innes" on, that there was not in it before "Evelyn Innes."