SOURCE: "George Moore: The Untitled Field," in The Irish Short Story, edited by Patrick Rafroidi and Terence Brown, Humanities Press, Inc., 1979, pp. 113-25.

In the following essay, Cronin surveys the major themes of The Untilled Field.

The strange origins of George Moore's seminal collection of short stories, The Untilled Field, reflect the writer's idiosyncratic response to the Ireland of his time. They also throw a revealing light on the linguistic ferment of the age, a period during which many writers deliberately fed into their work the creative impulses of Ireland's two vigorous languages. All Moore's great contemporaries, from Yeats to Lady Gregory, from Douglas Hyde to J. M. Synge, were constantly involved with what Yeats himself had identified as the central preoccupation of the Anglo-Irish writer, the creation of an idiom. Lady Gregory's "Kiltartan" dialect, the vigorous speech of Synge's Playboy, the cogently dramatic idiom of Yeats's mature...