leader Jasper Dean
gives up a leadership through which he could largely right his country's
wrongs. Not only does Mr. Moore make believable the action of the play,
but he puts words on it, which, if not true dramatic speech, reveal,
after the manner of the novelist, just what are the thought and emotion
of the characters, and the words are in themselves beautiful.

In "A Tale of a Town" the political situation from which evolves the
action of the play is the unification by Jasper Dean of the corporation
of a town, unnamed, on the west coast of Ireland, to prosecute a lawsuit
against an English town, Anglebury, which owes the Irish town a large
indemnity, promised the Irish town when it gave up a line of steamers in
the interest of the Anglebury line of steamers. After uniting all the
various elements save the place hunter Alderman Lawrence against
Anglebury, Dean gives up the leadership because his fiancee, whose uncle
is the mayor of the English town, turns against him because he is
opposed to the interests of her set. To hold her he betrays his town.

"A Tale of a Town" is so crude, so naked, so obvious, so uninspired,
one wonders why it can be taken seriously at all. But the reason is not
far to seek. The play is true, in the main, to the life it depicts, and
there is vehement feeling back of its satire; and truth and intensity of
feeling cannot be denied effect on the stage any more than on the
rostrum. Where it falls short of reality is in the dialogue of the
aldermen. No politicians, even when egged by their envious womankind,
would ever give themselves away as do these of "A Tale of a Town." They
are as frankly self-revelatory as if they were characters in a morality
play.

It would, perhaps, be inexact to call Mr. Martyn a misogynist, but he
has that attitude toward women of some priests his countrymen, as of
many priests of all creeds, that there is something belittling if not
degrading in absorbing association with women. His feeling is not at all
the commoner feeling of men that leads them all to cry, "The woman
tempted me." Women tempt Mr. Martyn no more than they did Ruskin, but he
seems to feel that the majority of them are nuisances if not baggages.
So strong is this feeling in "A Tale of a Town" that it leads him to
make Millicent behave in a way no Jasper Dean in real life would ever
stand, for Jasper Dean is not a man pronouncedly uxorious until his
abject surrender at the end of Act IV.

There are