Moore, George: A communication to my friends ([London]: Nonesuch Pr., 1933)

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that Father Tom Finlay had read the play and decided
that there was no heresy in it, therefore we were under
no obligation to obey the Cardinal’s interdiction. “He
has not read the play,” many voices cried, “he has not
read the play.”
After a year and a half’s residence in Ireland I began
to see Ireland as a portrait, and the form in which to
choose to draw her portrait was the scene of a dozen short
stories, each equally good, excluding all that was not
first rate in story-telling, and I argued with myself that
if I succeeded in doing this, I would supply the Irish
writers not yet in being with models on which they
might make their stories more authentic than mine. The
title of the book should have been A Portrait of Ireland.
but that seemed too flagrant, and I chose another title
The Untilled Field, which seemed to me sufficiently sug-
gestive of the intention of the book, but I found no story*
teller in Ireland who wished to take light from another;
they all deemed that they possessed the light, and that
when Ireland obtained her freedom she would rise higher
than she had ever risen before; that the new Ireland
would rival the Greece of Pericles.