George Moore's The Untilled Field

Dreams are a link to the subconscious mind, and George Moore dared to imagine what his characters would find in their flights of fancy. In The Untilled Field, (almost entitled, The Passing of the Gael) the desires of the characters are revealed though their dreams, thus displaying the unified need to create a new Ireland for a kind of nourishment of the soul. Moore displays through visions, dreams address the needs of reality, and ideas that speak with a life of their own, that Ireland is invented through the willfulness of the people.

There are three significant times when dreams are more then flights of fantasy, in The Untilled Field. When a dream is referred to as a vision, it takes on an entirely new context which does not always imply simply religious ecstasy. The desire of the characters who experience visions in 'Some Parishioners,' 'The Clerk's Quest' and 'The Exile,' proves to be an overwhelming force that is so great it alters the surrounding environment with psychic force.

In 'Some Parishioners', the character of Biddy M'Hale tries to seek justification for her existence via donating a stained glass window to the church. Although a widow, she remains a successful businesswoman in comparison to the rest of the community through chicken rearing. However, she is a friendless, lonely creature, and must live her life vicariously through others as a gossip. Father John Stafford confirms, that she is one who "manufactures stories out of the slightest materials…but who sells excellent eggs" (34). Loneliness is the plague that attacks all of Moore's most endearing characters. There is a need for nourishment of the psyche that can only come from the nation's landscape enveloping the soul in a kind of maternal cloak. Younger male characters are generally driven to imagining America as this source of sustenance, when they are incapable of contracting a female relationship; such as is assumed of James Murdoch in 'A Letter to Rome' when he won't be able to afford his bride, "He'll be that lonesome, he'll be going to America,"(105), the refused James Phelan who "used to sit smoking [by] the fireplace, [his father] knew that James was thinking of America all the while" (79), and James Bryden's torn psychic landscape in 'Home Sickness.' Biddy, naturally, does not have the same potential as a young man to travel to America to fulfill her emotions. She has chickens, but possessing triumphant knowledge at a poultry lecture over the speaker can not be the means for a satisfying life. Therefore, she wraps herself (quite literally) in a cloak of religious piety that consumes her very existence.

Her dreams take on distinct forms, her reminiscing towards childhood, her imagery of the window, and her ecstatic religious visions. Each of them tries to fill the void in her life where fantasy and reality lie to far apart. The recollections of childhood are bittersweet, reminding the reader that this now hunchback woman who has caused trouble to other characters in previous sections of 'The Parishioners', has suffered illnesses and frolicked in fields in her past. Just like the Irish nation, having a past is important to establishing character-and Ireland has great character full of highs and lows. Her wistful reunion to childhood lends her the depth of character that she previously lacked. "She remembered suddenly that she used to wear a blue ribbon when she went blackberrying among the hills; she found it in an old box and tied it round her neck" (64). However, now that Biddy has the inclination that she is to complete something of religious significance in life (the window) even her childhood memories are ripped toward the fantastic. "The moment she put [the ribbon] on her memory was as if lighted up with the memories of the saints and the miracles they had performed, and she went to Father Maguire to tell him of the miracle, and she was encouraged to think some miraculous thing had happened when the priest asked her to tell him exactly what her window was like" (64). Indeed, Father Maguire needs Biddy firstly for her finances, and later for her as a novelty act-he is the closest thing Biddy is going to receive by way of personal attention. Her desire still lays in human contact.

After hearing and seeing her window come to life in a dreamlike state during mass, she determines it to be a vision. "As the days went by her life seemed to pass more and more out of the life of the ordinary day. She seemed to live, as it were, on the last verge of human life, the mortal and the immortal mingled…the memory of her vision was still intense in her, but she wished to renew it; and waited next Sunday breathless with anticipation" (67). As the masses continue so do the visions, and Father Maguire interprets the entire matter as an annoyance. Her story should be tragic; she is left as an effigy of martyrdom, a poor Irish cliché that is not respected by her fellow characters. Her chickens now gone, she too, is left fruitless and unproductive. Father Maguire explains to a visitor, "she lives now in an out-house. She lives on the bits of bread and the potatoes the neighbors give her. The things of the world are no longer realities to her. Her realities are what she sees and hears in that window" (70). She is allowed to remain in the Church because she is like a freak show attraction, which aids the Father Maguire as a means to his ends. To Moore, a vision for religion's sake only serves to make one ridiculous. However, Biddy's happiness negates her surroundings. When she is called by the priest, she rushes towards him, "as a dog comes to its master, joyful, and with brightening eyes" (70). An elderly woman has found her desire, which is virtually the same for all the characters in The Untilled Field, and that is nourishment. Her channel is simply beyond male comprehension. "The two men stood looking at her, trying vainly to imagine what her happiness might be" (71).

In 'The Clerk's Quest', another form of vision takes place as a means to fulfill the desire of spiritual nourishment. Edward Dempsey, a man who wanted nothing more then to strive for mediocrity, entered his own dream world do to the stimulus of pseudo-nature. A check passed though his office scented with a woman's perfume, which he associated to a flower. "He had hardly seen a flower for thirty years" (151), therefore, it triggered the latent wanting in his brain for the outside world of nature and romance. At "night, just as he was falling asleep, a remembrance of the insinuating perfume returned to him" (151). Dempsey floats through dream sequences and swooning in the entire tale, where phantoms roamed with the model of Henrietta Brown, a women he knew only by her scented checks that passed though his office once a month. To him, "the name and handwriting were pregnant with occult significances in Dempsey's disturbed mind" (151). He becomes so enamored with his ideas, (despite the reality that Henrietta does not want to meet Dempsey, and certainly not return his affections) he, like Biddy, neglects his physical body and believes that he is seeing visions. Henrietta becomes less of a person and more like a nymph or ghost. He is "content to walk about the streets in a happy mood, waiting for glimpses of some evanescent phantom at the wood's glistening shoulder and feet flying towards the reeds" (153). His vision still pulls him forward after he has been robbed of his wealth. "The face of Henrietta Brown obliterated all remembrance of thieves and diamonds, and he wandered for a few days, sustained by his dream and the crusts that his appearance drew from the pitiful. At last he neglected to ask for a crust, and foodless, followed the beckoning vision, from sunrise to sundown" (153). He is dies along the roadside alone. Moore uses poetic imagery to describe the scene, making it appear that there is the possibility of a spiritual transcendence, he metaphor is obvious that Dempsey will not need the physical 'bread of life' to survive, but has found fulfillment in a spiritual engulfment by the universe. The idea of woman in the Celtic Revival is both nation and mother, and there should be need for nothing more. However, Dempsey's ecstasy does not leave for a satisfying ending. The image of the star as a feminine rebirth seems out of reach for this clerk, no matter how devoted he is to the cause. Once again, a vision seems to have made a fool out of another soul.

In 'The Exile,' the visions explored prove to be more ambiguous as to the satisfaction of a desire towards nourishment. The tale involves a father, Pat Phelan, and the love triangle between his two sons, James and Peter over a young woman, Catherine Ford. All of the characters are seeking spiritual nourishment and a deep fear of loneliness. Pat dreads the thought of losing his livelihood and family with the onset of age, being that James yearns for America after his repeated marriage rejections by Catherine. James' reaction of wanting to leave Ireland for the States is typical of his malady, 'heart-sickness.' Peter, who has no aptitude for farming, although he does poses Catherine's heart, seeks asylum in the priesthood, hoping to live a comfortable, intellectual existence, reach self-actualization, and thus transcend the need for actual tangible nourishment. Although this is one of the few decisions Peter is able to make for himself, the ideals of priesthood never come to fruition. Catherine, who only wants to be with Peter, proves to be the catalyst for the motion in the story, as well as the recipient of the visions after she leaves for the nunnery knowing Peter left for the priesthood.

The visions Catherine receive bring her back to the men in her past. She informs the Reverend Mother,
My thoughts were taken away and I remembered those at home. I remembered Mr. Phelan, and James, who wanted to marry me, but whom I would not marry; and it seemed to me that I saw him leaving his father-it seemed to me that I saw him going away to America. I don't know how it was-you will not believe me, dear mother-but I saw the ship lying in the harbour, that is to take him away. And then I thought of the old man sitting at home with no one to look after him, and it was not a seeming, but a certainty, mother. It came over me suddenly that my duty was not here, but there. Of course you can't agree with me, but I cannot resist it, it was a call
(89-90)

The Reverend Mother is slightly more concerned with losing Catherine as an adept farmer then for the deficit of a potential nun. However, the experience was enough to release her back into her homeland. "Her vision in the garden consoled her, for she could no longer doubt that she was doing right ingoing to Peter, that her destiny was with him" (92). With Catherine back in the fold, the farm will survive, and Pat will not lose his livelihood. Being that Peter doesn't make his own decisions, he is irrelevant at this stage. Peter, however, leaves on a train that that is "followed by wailing relatives" (93) take him away from everything. Indeed, the most emotionally moving segments of the narrative involved Pat's journey through the countryside that was weeping with the loss of its young men to America. Therefore, while everything is left in place, there is a tremendous sense of loss at James' escape out of Ireland. This time the vision makes no one look like a fool, as Biddy or Dempsey did-however, the food is on the table, ready to nourish all who need, but no one is eating.

There are dreams that appear in The Untilled Field that seem less leading then the visions, for they blend with the landscape to form a coherent yet definite desire. The wish fulfillment begins in the mind, but when attempted to become tangible, the ideas melt away like a sandcastle with each wave or reality. All that is left for mortal beings to do is learn from the thoughts that pass by with quiet acceptance. Prime examples of this are 'Home Sickness', 'So On He Fares', and 'The Wedding-Gown".

In 'Home Sickness,' James Bryden is torn between which landscape, Ireland or America, is more appealing to his emotional needs. His desires tear his mind from one shore to another, his wants never fitting his geography-and Moore manages to create one of his more compelling narratives from a fairly simple plot. James' initial landing in Ireland (for the purpose of recovering his health) seems promising, and boarders on the surreal. He dreams of seeing Mike Scully again, who was, "one of the heroes of his childhood, and his youth floated before him, and he caught glimpses of himself, something that was more then a phantom and less than a reality" (95). His meeting up with the Scully's seems to have the remedy for his emotional lack of nourishment. Mrs. Scully suggests, "Now won't you be taking a sup of milk? You'll be wanting a drink after traveling" said Mrs. Scully (96). Noted soon after, "he had come back in search of health; and he felt better already; the milk had done him good" (97). Milk is always a classic image of maternal nourishment, and one would suspect that feminizing of the Irish landscape would ensue. However, James becomes tired and disgusted by the people who are in his native land. His is reflected in his dream imagery.

Never had he been so unhappy, and the sound of Mike breathing by his wife's side in the kitchen added to his nervous terror. Then he dozed a little; and lying on his back he dreamed he was awake, and the men he had seen sitting round the fireside that evening seemed to him like specters come out of some unknown region of morass and reedy tarn. He stretched out his hands for clothes, determined to fly from this house, but remembering the lonely road that led back to the station he fell back on his pillow
(98)

It is clear at this stage that the dream images that James is trying to bring into reality will not reach fruition. Mike and his wife have become less then heroes, and even when he dreams of leaving, the reality of the lack of propinquity between him and the train station disturbs his very fantasy. Ironically, the realities of the situation, such as the common peasants who visited James, have become more fictionalized in his dreams, but in a manner that makes them less appealing. When in America he wanted to get back to these people-his desires will always be where they can not be a reality, which is the hitch of this character, and human nature. Our dreams tell us what we want and can not have.

Still in Ireland and with everything he could want, a beautiful new fiancé, Margaret Dirken, and the prospect of making money and living well in his native soil, he naturally dreams and desires America,
The smell of the Bowery slum had come across the Atlantic, and had found him out in this western headland; and one night he awoke from a dream in which he was hurling some drunken customer through the open doors into the darkness. He had seen his friend in his white duck jacket throwing drink from glass into glass amid the din of voices and strange accents; he had heard the clang of money as it was swept into the till, and his sense sickened for the bar room
(102)

Not the most appealing depiction of the States-but James' soul cries out for that which he can not bring into reality at the moment. While he is surrounded by Celticism at the present, he imagines the alternative landscape. The 'strange accents' and 'clang of money' have replaced the tribal chanting and beating of drums. In America, or any urban setting versus a rural one, a man would find himself surrounded by strangers, with perhaps only a few close friends in sight, as James envisions here. There is a certain bizarre intimacy in this. In a country setting where one has spent an entire life, and has a family history behind him, there may be a feeling of suffocation. Even though there are personal connections in both settings, the feeling of loneliness and need for escape can not be denied in either. Therefore, after his return to America, after a lifetime with a new wife and grown children, all now gone, "lonesomeness began to creep about him; in the evening, when he looked into the fire-light, a vague, tender reverie floated up, and Margaret's soft eyes and name vivified the dusk" (104). This is not surprising looking at James' sensitive track record thus far. However, Moore then embarks on one of his more poignant concluding paragraphs,

There is an unchanging, silent life within every man that none knows but himself, and his unchanging, silent life was his memory of Margaret Dirken. The barroom was forgotten and all that concerned it, and the things he saw most clearly were the green hillside, and the bog lake and the rushes about it, and the greater lake in the distance, and behind it the blue lines of wandering hills
(104)

Once again, the dream is deceiving, just as James' face was to Margaret's heart. The fantasy and the reality will always remain apart. Interestingly enough, the first sentence of the paragraph "signals an authorial voice reciting what is to be understood as a timeless parable. It brings in the figure of the narrator as storytelling author, and the visual impression of landscape is overtly acknowledged as part of that storyteller's tale: its position is made clear" (Grubgeld, 220). The sense of landscape and place are just as much a part of James' psychological terrain, wrought with desire, but there is still an unsettling acceptance of everything.

On a similar note to 'Home Sickness,' in 'So On He Fares,' a young man tries to be master of his own desires only to find that when going against fate he finds emotional despair. As a lad of ten, Ulick Burke dreamed of voyaging on a ship away from his mother, much in a manner as which his father supposedly left for the wars for adventure. Saddened at knowing this should not be, "dreams are a makeshift life. He was very unhappy, and though he knew it was wrong he could not help laying plans for escape" (160). His sadness spurred from his parents, his mother being unkind, and his father's absence. Both can easily be construed as a kind of discontent in the landscape of Ireland, the feminine mystique refusing to open her arms, and the masculine pride wounded by war and neglect. He is a "psychological orphan, torn between two mothers" (Welch, 115). However, unlike James, torn between two places, Ulick makes a decision to leave, and found what he was looking for. He received an adopted mother who cared for him in a way that his own mother did not. When the surrogate died, "He led a wild rough life, and this flight from home was remembered like a tale heard in infancy, until one day, as he was steering his ship up the Shannon, a desire to see what they were doing at home came over him" (165). Ulick will find that his mother has another child of the same name and that his father is still supposedly at war. The reality is now stranger then a dream and he has no place in this dreamed family, this second chance in which the first was conveniently forgotten on both his and his mother's parts. Both, for tampering with reality will go unnourished without the other. The concluding lines, "The evening sky opened calm and benedictive, and the green country flowed on, the boat passed by ruins, castles, and churches, and every day was alike until they reached Shannon" (169), seem to indicate a leaving blessing over the entire narrative. The movement which appeared to be circular, (that is the emotional feelings started and ended sourly with mother and child), in fact is not. The landscape in The Untilled Field continues to develop almost into a personality of its own as the stories transpire. Here, it is as if Ulick is moving through time, and it doesn't matter what the powers that would be were, the ruins, the castles, the churches, all are archaic now and they will all seem just as unjust. In Shannon, Ulick is master of his own destiny, and events, we readers presume, will change-hopefully to match his desires.

Dream sequences float through The Untilled Field as a way of indicating desires of the characters that are not in sync with reality, but the inability to assimilate them must be accepted with certain learning. The reader soon finds sympathy for 'Granny' Margaret Kirwin. Like Biddy in 'Some Parishioners,' she is wasting away from too much dreaming. Her emphasis on her wedding-gown made her forget the reality that "the rain was coming in through the thatch, there was hardly a dry place in the cabin, and she had nothing to eat but a few scraps that the neighbors gave her" (142). However, here there is even more empathy for the character, for while Biddy was a pious Catholic, Margaret is a mysterious woman who came from wealth and tragically fell on hard times. Also, she will come to be associated more so with pagan Revivalist ideology, for Margaret deals with the dreams of the subconscious, not the commanding visions that Biddy conjures.

'The Wedding-Gown' appears to be a Revivalist twist on the Cinderella fairy tale. Moore deals more with templates then with the tinkering with the didactic sentiment of the story, however. Margaret, although usually completely senile, discovered that her grand-niece, Molly, was unable to go to a dance because she did not have proper cloths. Like a fairy godmother, she lends her wedding-gown-which no one was usually allowed to go near-for the event, thus shocking everyone. Margaret seemed quite pleased with herself, and "she sat looking into the fire, seeming to see the girl dancing quite clearly. She seemed to contented that they left her, and for an hour she sat dreaming, seeing Molly young and beautifully dressed in the wedding-gown of more then sixty years ago" (147). She continues to dream, "Dream after dream went by" (147) and she believes it is her wedding day again. Either that, or the woman has already entered the afterlife and this is a joyous reunion for the dead. In a dreamlike state she gets into an imaginary gown, "she held the dream-gown in her hands and she sat with it in the moonlight, thinking how fair he would find her in it" (147). These are the desires of the woman, her dreams speaking for what she was unable to say for all of her later years. However, dreams can not reach reality as a vision would to make one ridiculous, so Margaret's time is up in this world. Molly senses that something is wrong at the dance, and rather then having to get home by the stroke of twelve, she must race Death personified back to the homestead. Her Achilles heal was a fear of death, and often her kindness was actually a misunderstanding of this weakness. "Moore captures the first breathless haste of Molly's race through the dark to her home and then the studied calm that comes over her when the she faces her great-aunt's body, and recognizes there not only the physical resemblance with herself but the fact that they share a common morality" (Welch, 61). Molly thinks, 'I shall be like that some day if I live long enough" (149). Therefore, Molly has come to not fear death, and to see herself as one with her roots. She retains the dress and the memory of her great-aunt, and thus her Celtic heritage. Nourishment has at last been accomplished with cyclical simplicity.

The final manner in which desire manifests itself in the minds of the characters is when an idea actually becomes personified and speaks as if independent of human thought. Just as the landscape developed into a personality, which was actually a reflection of mental landscapes that were forming one cohesive idea of Ireland, Ideas become developed. Beginning with the three stories that concern artists, in The Untilled Field, those being, 'In the Clay', 'The Way Back', and 'The Wilde Goose', the characters themselves become benign of any independent motion and are mere mouthpieces for theory. The second manner in which ideas may be personified, however, is when they actually may breathe life unto themselves and speak. This is displayed in 'A Letter to Rome' and "'Alms-Giving.'"

The first edition of The Untilled Field begins and concludes with the stories, 'In the Clay', and 'The Way Back'. Including 'The Wild Goose', "all concern painters and writers who embrace and reject Ireland…all have visions that set them apart from and in conflict with their social environments" (Grubgeld, 216). They also spend most of their time as mouthpieces for the never ending battle of art versus religion. Rodney drabbles on, "beauty is a reality, morality is a myth, and Ireland has always struck me as a place for which God had intended to do something, but He changed his mind and that change of mind happened about a thousand years ago" (237). In general, these stories are the least favorites of the critics, one stating that the opening dialogue from 'In the Clay' "Alice Barton, newly graduated from the convent of St. Leonard's, could not have written more amateurish speech into her graduation play" (Dunleavy, 120).

Picking up on the theme of tapping into Rodney's latent potential via wish fulfillment, the artist spies what he believes will be the perfect model for his Virgin in a teenage girl. His desire for her is more then sexual, "the desire of her as a model had overborn every other desire" (13); she is the idea of art and beauty. "There was a strange idle rhythm in her walk…he stood watching her, [and] divined long tapering legs and a sinuous back. He did not know what her face was like" (7). Lucy is identified by Rodney by way of her walk (this is how he later recognizes her in a tea-room) and as a collection of body parts. The addition of her face into the sculpture of the Madonna is an afterthought spurred by Harding. 'The Way Back' at the conclusion of The Untilled Field will find Harding's character later develops into a sympathetic voice for the Celtic Revival-tired of all the luster of Paris and Rome. "The decline of art was coincident with the Union of the Irish Church with Rome, and it was impossible to deny that Irish Catholics wrote very little" (Freeman, 154). Moore is seizing this opportunity to use his characters breathe life into his opinions. At the end of 'In the Clay' Rodney is saddened that he is not going to see Lucy again. However, he muses to himself that "there are other girls just as good in Paris and in Rome" (14). This contradicts what has been narrated previously, "he had never had such a model before, not in France or in Italy, and he done the best piece of work he had ever done in his life" (8). There seems to be something in Ireland that Rodney does not want to admit. However, Harding will do it for him, and Moore, in a subsequent story.

'The Way Back,' is summed up nicely by Rodney. "Three Irishmen meet…one seeking a country with a future, one seeking a country with a past, and one thinking of going back to a country without past or future" (235). However, before all of this comes to fruition, Harding meets Lucy in London and takes her under his wing. His desire for her is unmistakable, yet he is still just a mouthpiece for his position. Therefore, his character remains as ineffectual as the other artists' stories. Harding sees Lucy as if "she's persuasive and insinuating as a perfume; and when I left the house, it was as if I had come out of a moonlight garden" (230). These lines are reminiscent of 'The Clerk's Quest', where Edward Dempsey, entered his own dream world where at "night, just as he was falling asleep, a remembrance of the insinuating perfume returned to him" (151). Between the dream sequences and swooning Dempsey becomes so enamored with his ideas he has a vision that eventually leads him to death. While Dempsey's departure did not leave the reader feeling particularly rewarded, Harding's parting words are extremely gratifying, however. He comments to Rodney, "You my dear friend, Rodney, you tempt me with Italy and conversations about interesting utterances about the Italian renaissance would not interest me half so much as what Paddy Durkin and Father Pat will say to me on the roadside" (238). The final idea that Moore is trying to relay is that of a new Celtic Revival, it is a pity that a mouthpiece so obvious had to do it for him.

In 'A Letter to Rome,' an idea is personified much as the landscape is in The Untilled Field so as the psychological desires of the characters can be sorted without disruption to the character's psyche. Father James MacTurnan mused over the state of Ireland one day, believing it to be falling into a Protestant majority. "The idea had fallen as it were out of the air, and now as he sat knitting by his own fireside it seemed to come out of the corners of the room" (107). The bright idea was that priest should be able to have children so as to increase the Catholic population. The Idea, however, does grow into an entity of itself, too dangerous for the priest to think of alone, so it must be personified, playing the devils advocate of itself, and be completely detached and subconscious at the same time. This is how desire may manifest other then in a vision or dream for Moore. The argument for the relinquishment of priestly celibacy continued, beginning with "his idea said" (107). It grew from speaking for itself, to the persuasive, "this idea talked to him" (108). Now firmly convinced, the letter Father James writes, "floated through his sleep" (108) in a dream, he has now welcomed it into his subconscious desires.

Father James is full of sexual desire, whether he will admit it or not. After the Idea had won the initial battle, Father James has moved into the dream world of desire. He immediately allowed himself to fantasize about a parishioner. "He looked round his parlour he asked himself if the day would come when he should see Norah Flynn sitting opposite to him in his armchair. And his face flushed deeper when he looked towards the bedroom door, and he fell on his knees and prayed that God's will might be made known to him" (111). Now the priest is tormented by ideas of impurities.

During the night he awoke many times, and the dream that had awakened him continued when he had left his bed, and he wandered round and round the room in the darkness, seeking a way. At last he reached the window and drew the curtain, and saw the dim dawn opening out over the bog….'Thank God, it was only a dream-only a dream
(111)

When confronted on the possibility that Father James might have thought this Idea so that he could satisfy his own needs, he vehemently denied the accusations. "No, your Grace, no. Celibacy has been no burden to me-far from it. Sometimes I feared that it was celibacy that attracted me to the priesthood. Celibacy was a gratification rather than a sacrifice" (115). This seems a bit doubtful. However, Father James is one of the most endearing and well developed characters in The Untilled Field due to the fact that the reader is allowed to examine him from different narrative perspectives. No matter what the angle though, the ultimate perspective is always the same, though he tries to be optimistic, he is a sad and lonely figure, needing nourishment, and just as all the rest of the characters do.

In "'Alms-Giving,'" the narrator interacts with a blind man. At one stage, erupts, "I asked myself angrily why he persisted in living. I asked myself why I helped him to live. It would be better that he should throw himself at once in the river. And this was reason talking to me, and it told me that the most charitable act I could do would be to help him over the parapet" (155). This is one side of the dueling desire. For there is emotion, for he is angry, but wants to distance himself from it. Rather then command himself with a vision, or incorporate a dream as wish fulfillment, the narrator is still developing alongside the story and landscape. The flip side of the emotion needs the same distancing. Later, he takes pity on the blind man, and claims, "I heard my heart speaking to me quite distinctly" (156). The heart naturally pleaded compassion. After listening to his heart and conversing with the blind man, the narrator reaches an epiphany. Similarly to the ending of 'Home Sickness', Moore indicates with the final paragraph a sense of authorship that demands a more moral reading, as well as marks the landscape as a crucial element to the narrative.

A soft wind was blowing, and an instinct as soft and as gentle filled my heart, and I went towards some trees. The new leaves were beginning in the branches; and sitting where sparrows were building their nests, I soon began to see further into life then I had seen before. "We're here," I said, "for the purpose of learning what life is, and the blind beggar had taught me a great deal, something that I could not have learnt out of a book, a deeper truth than any book contains." … And then I ceased to think, for thinking is a folly when a soft south wind is blowing, and an instinct as soft and gentle fills the heart
(158)

The landscape and emotion unified in the mind of the narrator and desire, even if completely unknown at this time, has been utterly fulfilled. "AE (George Russell) with his mystical perception of landscape, his keen sense of the atmosphere of place generated by its historical and religious past" (Cave, 167), certainly was an influence on Moore in sweeping passages such as these. This is nourishment at its best.

To conclude, Moore presents in The Untilled Field sketches of characters that desire emotional nourishment. Each individual has a different means to achieve his or her goal, whether it is through a commanding vision, or a subversive dream or a talking idea personified. There is the human element to be considered, that requires distancing from the needs and emotions-Moore understood this well. "The Mr. Moore in The Untilled Field begins to be a more likeable person than the novelist and critic we knew heretofore. He denotes as much of his intelligence as he can spare from the development of his art to a sympathetic study of Ireland and her problems" (Mitchell, 76). Eventually, everyone is walking down the same path, no matter what route they took. Whether the characters were successful or not in achieving their goals, Moore certainly was in his writings. Some people put up playhouses that will never be used, as in 'The Playhouse in the Waste.' However, this reader is convinced, just as the narrator was of the cardriver, that he "is the legitimate descendant of the ancient bards" (140).

Bibliography

Works Cited

Cave, Richard Allen. A Study of the Novels of George Moore. Guildford, London, and
Worcester: Colin Smythe, Ltd., Gerrards Cross Buckinghamshire, 1978.

Dunleavy, Janet Egleson. George Moore: The Artist's Vision, The Storyteller's Art.
Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1973.

Freeman, John. A Portrait of George Moore in a Study His Work. London: T. Werner
Laurie, Ltd., 1922.

Grubgeld, Elizabeth. George Moore and the Autogenous Self: The Autobiography and
Fiction. Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press, 1994.

Mitchell, Susan L. George Moore. Dublin & London: Maunsel & Co. Ltd., 1916.

Welch, Robert, ed. The Way Back: George Moore's Untilled Field & The Lake. Dublin:
Wolfhound Press, 1982.

Works Consulted

Frazier, Adrian. Moore's 'Hail' and Yeats's 'Farewell'. University of Saint Tomas:
New Hibernia Review 6.4 (2002) 108-119.

Gerber, Helmut E., ed. George Moore in Transition: Letters to T. Fisher Unwin and
Lena Milman, 1894-1910. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1968.

Gose, Elliot, B. Jr. The World of the Irish Wonder Tale: An Introduction to the Study of
Fairy Tales. Toronto, Buffalo and London: University of Toronto Press, 1985.

Taylor, Estella Ruth. The Modern Irish Writers: Cross Currents of Criticism. New
York: Greenwood Press, 1954.

Prose

Moore, George, The Untilled Field. McLean, Virginia: IndyPublish.com.