t into the best of pasture land. That reclamation and
transformation has become a passion with him, and soon we feel that it
is the symbol of that quality in him that is untamed, incurably "ideal."
To free that field of rocks and to drain its bogs he has mortgaged his
estate, and, in the play, before the success or failure of his
undertaking is proved, he mortgages almost all that remains to him to
improve the land below, which the draining of the heather field has
turned into a swamp. His wife, to prevent this last folly, strives to
have control of his property taken away from him, but his friend, Barry
Ussher, believing that restraint would make Tyrrell mad indeed, so
intimidates a hesitating physician that Mrs. Tyrrell fails in her most
natural plan to save herself and her child from ruin by having her
husband declared incompetent, and, if necessary, restrained. With his
friend's assistance Tyrrell has won his fight against his wife.
Obstinacy in the treatment of some tenants that his debts have driven
him to evict rouses such hatred against Tyrrell, until then a loved
landlord, that the police hold it necessary to follow him with an escort
that he may not be shot by his people. To avoid being so followed,
Tyrrell keeps within doors and so intensifies his malady. The
catastrophe comes when, on his boy's first spring search for wild
flowers, the child brings him a handful of heather buds from the heather
field. Their message is that the mountain will revert to waste again.
Even in his "ideal domain" reality has asserted itself. His ideal world
crumbles for the instant, and his reason with it, and forever. But after
a moment's agony ideality triumphantly reasserts itself, and in mad
ecstasy Tyrrell, his years fallen from him, passes from sight crying out
at the beauty of a world that is to him now forever a world of mornings
in which, as he says, "the rain across a saffron sun trembles like gold
harpstrings through the purple Irish spring.... The voices--I hear them
now triumphant in a silver glory of song!" Such is the play, "aching and
lofty in its loveliness."

Is this ending, or is it not, sadder than the catastrophe of "Ghosts"?
Certainly to "Ghosts" it owes something, and to "The Wild Duck" more
than something. A quality as of Ibsen pervades the play, and it has,
too, back of it a background of nature and of thought that is beautiful
in the way the background of nature and of thought is beautiful and
compensating