ned, that "pretty
nearly all" their property is mortgaged, but Tyrrell cries out, "All, do
you say? No--not all. This vulture cannot touch the heather field! My
hope,--it is my only hope, and it will save me in the end. Ha, ha! These
wise ones! They did not think the barren mountain of those days worth
naming in their deed. But now that mountain is a great green field worth
more than all they can seize, (_with a strange intensity_) and it is
mine--all mine!"

The other situation that moves me greatly is that at the very close of
the play, that from which I quoted a while back, in which Tyrrell's
madness becomes evident in his belief that he is a youth again, with all
the world before him to do with as he will.

The characters in "The Heather Field" are less rigid than those in the
later plays, but even in this play you feel about them, as you feel so
often about the characters of Hawthorne, that they are characters chosen
to interpret an idea rather than children of the imagination or
portraits done from observation of life.

As one recalls the motive and situations and background and symbolism
of "The Heather Field," not having read the play for some time, it seems
far finer than when one returns to it. Fine, too, it must seem to any
one reading a scenario of it and not offended, as one reading it
constantly is by the inability of its dialogue to represent more of the
person speaking than his point of view. The dialogue of Mr. Martyn is
almost never true dramatic speech, and not only not true dramatic
speech, but despite the very clear differentiation of the characters,
with little of their personality or temperament in it.

"Maeve" has always seemed to me a lesser play than "The Heather Field,"
and it now leaves me even colder than of old. Nor, though I can see how
fine in conception was the character of Mrs. Font in "The Enchanted
Sea," does that one character seem to me, now, to redeem the undeveloped
possibilities of the situations of the play, the incomplete characters
of Guy and Mask and the failure of the dialogue assigned to the
characters to approach true dramatic speech. "Maeve" is the better play
of the two. With all its shortcomings it has about it an unearthliness
of atmosphere, a quiet coldness of beauty that has come of the thought
Mr. Martyn had, as he wrote it, of the moonlight on the Burren Hills in
his home country. In this one respect Mr. Martyn has done what he would,
for he holds that "the gre