Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from The Untilled Field, And, the Lake
IT must have been somewhere at the end of the nineties, not unlikely in ninety-nine, that dear Edward said to me in the Temple: I should like to write my plays in Irish. And it was not long afterwards, in the beginning of 1900, that Yeats persuaded him to come to Ireland to found a literary theatre. In search of a third person, they called on me in Victoria Street, and it is related in Ave how we packed our bags and went away to do something. We all did something, but none did what he set out to do. Yeats founded a realistic theatre, Edward emptied two churches - he and Palestrina between them - and I wrote The Untilled Field, a book written in the beginning out of no desire of self-expression, but in the hope of furnish ing the young Irish of the future with models. Yeats said that I had learned the art of presentation in Paris, and in 1900 we believed that the Irish language could be revived You see, it is necessary, I observed to Ed ward, that Ireland's future writers Should have models, and the stories will be published in a Jesuit magazine. If the Jesuits assume all responsibility, he muttered, and fell to pondering over his pipe, but he raised no fur ther objection and invested with full authority I wrote The Wedding Gown, alms-giving, The Clerk's Quest, and So On He F ares, in English rather than in anglo-irish, for of what help would that pretty idiom, in which we catch the last accents of the original language, he to Tiagh Donoghue, my translator? As soon as his transla tions were finished, my manuscripts were to be burnt; but these first stories begot a desire to paint the portrait of my country, and this could only be done in a Catholic 11: atmosphere, and as I had just come out of Evelyn Innes and Sister Teresa, The Exile rose up in my mind quickly, and before putting the finishing hand to it I began Home Sickness. The village of Duncannon in the story set me thinking of the villages round Dublin, and I wrote Some Parishioners, Patchwork, The Wedding Feast, and The Window. The somewhat harsh rule of Father Maguire set me thinking of a gentler type of priest, and the pa thetic figure of Father macturnan tempted me. I wrote A Letter to Rome and A play-house in the Waste; and as fast as these stories were written they were translated into Irish and published in a very pretty book of which nobody took any notice, and that the Gaelic League could not be persuaded to put in its window; and one evening a disheartened man was driven to the bitter extremity of collecting his manuscripts for a London publisher. The cheque they brought back on account of royalties did not soothe me; in 1903 England was hateful on account of the Boer War, and the sale of one hundred copies of the book that I could not read would have pleased me more than ten thousand of the book that I could. In a word, I was hipped with my book, and willingly forgot it in the excitement of The Lake, a thing an author Should never do, for to forget a book or to Speak contemptuously of it brings bad luck. And so Synge was raised up against me in Ireland, and for the last ten years we have been thinking and talking of him as the one man who saw Irish life truly and wrote it candidly.
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