‘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 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 furnishing 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 Edward, “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 further objection and invested with full authority I wrote “The Wedding Gown”, “Almsgiving”, “The Clerk’s Quest”, and “So On He Goes”, in English rather than in Anglo-Irish, for what help would that pretty idiom, in which we catch the last accents of the original language, be to Taigh Donoghue, my translator? As soon as his translations 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 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 pathetic figure of Father MacTurnan tempted me. I wrote “A Letter to Rome” and “A Playhouse 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.’

It was just as if on purpose to make an omadaun of me that Yeats brought him over from Paris in the year 1903, though he had no English on him at the time, only the like that’s heard in the National Schools, and if you don’t believe me, will you be throwing your eye over the things he wrote in them days for the weekly papers, and faith you’ll see the editors were right to fire them out. Wasn’t he dreaming, too, he could be writing like a French fellow of the name of Loti, that knew the trick with a couple of twists of the pen of turning every country in the wide world into a sweet-shop? But ’tis little of the taste of sugar-candy he got into his articles, and his book about the Aran Islands has more of the tang of old leather, like as if he’d be chewing the big brogues he did be always wearing on his feet. And, morebetoken, his language in the same book is as bald as the coat of a mangy dog, and traipsed along over a page of print like the clatter of a horse that hone in the legs. it’s many a heart scald this same must have given to my bold Yeats, for it’s the grand Judge entirely he is of the shape end the colour and the sound of words. So one day he up and said to Synge: “Give up your schoolmaster words that have no guts left in them, and leave off thinking of Loti and his barley-sugar, and go down into the County Wicklow and listen to what the people do be saying to ’other when they’re at their ease without any notion of an ear cocked to carry of what they say. I hear tell that they speak a language that isn’t worn out yet, and that has some of the youth of the world in it. I ‘d like to write in it myself, but I’d be afeared of muddying the clear English well that I’m used to dabbling in. Besides, if you pick it up anyway decent you might yet prove to the world that it wasn’t a mare’s nest I found when I discovered you,” he said. And if Synge didn’t pack up his few duds and tramp off that very minute, and if he hadn’t the luck of the old boy himself in finding a lodging in a house in the hills of Wicklow that was like as if it was made on purpose for him - a room over the kitchen with an old broken boarded floor to it, the way he could see and hear all that was going on below, and nobody a penny the wiser but himself. Lying flat on his belly with an ear or an eve to the slits, he took in all that was said and done, and put it down in a bookeen with the stump of a pencil and made a play out of it. [Moore’s italics.]

There is the pretty idiom of the Irish peasants as they chatter it along the roads, about their firesides, in the marketplaces, reported truthfully without exaggeration or refinements. But Synge put polish upon it and enlivened it with bright colours, and drew out of it the poetry of the country with which it is saturated as with dew. We listened delighted to The Shadow of the Glen, admitting to ourselves as we sat in our seats and to our friends as we left the hall that we preferred the cooing of Synge’s dialogue to grey thoughts. We told him so in the street, and he went away to the Aran Islands for the summer-time, hoping to return in the autumn with another play, written in the same idiom, of course but enriched by direct translation from the Irish. Why good English can be discovered by translating word for word from the Irish is one of the many great mysteries that beset our lives; but it is so. And when the news was passed round that Synge had brought back a play from Aran, we assembled in the Molesworth Hall, and it seemed to us that he had raised a tombstone over the intellectual drama. Dear Edward was the only dissident; he averred, and stood stiffly to it, that he hated peasant language. Yeats cried: “Sophocles!”, and then revising his judgment, said: “No, Eschylus.” John Eglinton, AE, and myself looked upon these two plays as two remarkable exercises in language. We were interested; we approved the plays, and on tiptoe Dublin waited for Synge’s new play, which came two years after, The Well of the Saints, another remarkable exercise in language hardly more; for the play is but an adaptation of Clemenceau’s Voile du Bonheur, with an Irish couple substituted for the Chinese couple and country idiom for Clemenceau’s Parisian speech. But Synge’s indebtedness did not trouble us; why should it? we asked. Is not a plagiarist one who spoils the original text, and an original writer one who improves upon his predecessor? And satisfied with this definition, we waited, and whenever a circle of men and women drew round a fire, the subject of the Playboy was discussed. Yeats had communicated it so that we might be prepared to accept a parricide as a hero, and a Mayo village as nothing loth to do the same. At first sight the subject seemed wildly improbable, having no roots in human nature, but it was defended on the ground that brigands have always been popular heroes. And when the play was produced, our little group discovered extenuating circumstances for Christy Mahon. Into an extremely ingenious paradoxical story, Synge had brought real men and women, and amazed we asked each other how it was that Synge, who had never before shown any sense of form, should suddenly become possessed of an exquisite construction. We fell to wondering how the miracle had come about, and we continued wondering, and myself was still head-scratching in Vale, asking how Synge had sprung at once out of pure boardschool English into a beautiful style, finding it in an idiom that had hitherto been used only as a means of comic relief. Tricks of speech a parrot can learn, but it is impossible to learn through a crack how character acts and reacts upon character. Never before did anyone hear that the intelligence may be lifted through eavesdropping on to a higher plane. Yeats told us that Synge read only Racine and Clement Marot; but we turned up our noses at these herrings, and the history of The Playboy was wrapped in unsearchable mystery until I began to read The Untilled Field for this new edition, and found myself thinking that if perchance any of my writings should survive me for a few years, as likely as not it would be these stories, And as this little vanity dispersed, I became more and more interested, for it seemed to me that I had come upon the source of Synge’s inspiration. The Untilled Field was a landmark in Anglo-Irish literature, a new departure, and Synge could not have passed it by without looking into it. It was not Racine nor Clement Marot. I would not, however. seem invidious to Synge’s fame; my hope is not to pluck a leaf from the wreath that Yeats has placed upon his brow. I would merely explain his talent, and if that be impossible, I would explain how he came by it; to do this with becoming modesty is surely commendable. And if my critics think that I am exaggerating the importance of The Untilled Field in Synge’s literary life, they will have to seek for another explanation, and for all I know they may prefer to fall back on Yeats’s terrible great conjurations in the Nassau Hotel: Yeats standing over an entranced Synge, his pearl pale, or is it his ivory hand sweeping the strings of a harp of applewood, rousing a masterpiece out of the abyss.’ (The Untilled Field, 1903 Edn.; Preface, pp.ix-xiii; END.