“It is true,” said Mrs. Ascher.
That was precisely my difficulty. It was not true. I went back to my recollections of old Dan Gorman, a man as intensely interested in the struggle as ever any one was. I remembered his great pot belly, his flabby skin, his whisky-sodden face. I remembered his grasping meanness, his relentless hardness in dealing with those in his power. The most thoroughly materialised business man in Belfast has more spirituality about him than old Dan Gorman ever had. Nor did I believe that his son, Michael Gorman, would have accepted Mrs. Ascher’s account of his position. He would have winked, humourously appreciative of an excellent joke, if any one had told him that he was a crusader, out to wrest the sacred sepulchre of art from the keeping of the Saracens of Ulster.
I did not, of course, attempt to reason with Mrs. Ascher. There is nothing in the world more foolish than trying to reason with a woman who is possessed by a cause. No good ever comes of it. But Mrs. Ascher is quite clever enough to understand a man even if he does not speak. She felt that I should have been glad to argue with her if I had not been afraid. She entered on a long defence of her position.
She began with the Irish Players, and the moment she mentioned them I knew what she was going to say.
“The one instance,” she said, “the single example in the modern world of peasant art, from the soil, of the soil, redolent, fragrant of the simple life of men and women, in direct touch with the primal forces of nature itself. There is nothing else quite like those players and their plays. They are the self-revelation, of the peasant soul. From the whitewashed cabins of the country-side, from the streets of tiny, world-forgotten villages, from the islands where the great Atlantic thunders ceaselessly, these have come to call us back to the realities of life, to express again the external verities of art.”
That is all very well. I agreed with Mrs. Ascher thoroughly about the art of Synge’s plays, and Lady Gregory’s and Yeats’, and the art of the players. But it is merely silly to talk about the soil and whitewashed cottages, and self-revelation of peasant souls. Neither the dramatists nor the players are peasants or ever were. They are very clever, sometimes more than clever, members of the educated classes, who see the peasants from outside just as I see them, as Mrs. Ascher would see them if she ever got near enough to what she calls the soil to see a peasant at all.
When Mrs. Ascher had finished with the Irish Players she went on, still in a white heat of excitement, to the attempt to revive the Irish language.
“Where else,” she said, “will you find such devotion to a purely spiritual ideal? Here you have a people rising enthusiastically to fight for the preservation of the national language. And its language is the soul of a nation. These splendid efforts are made in defiance of materialism, without the remotest hope of gain, just to keep, to save from destruction, a possession felt instinctively to be the most precious thing of all, far above gold and rubies in price.”
“The only flaw in that theory,” I said, “is that the people who still have this most precious possession don’t want to keep it in the least. Nobody ever heard of the Irish-speaking peasants taking the smallest interest in their language. The whole revival business is the work of an English-speaking middle class, who never stop asking the Government to pay them for doing it.”
That was the second occasion on which I came near quarrelling with Mrs. Ascher. Yet I am not a man who quarrels easily. Like St. Paul’s friends at Corinth, I can suffer fools gladly. But Mrs. Ascher is not a fool. She is a clever woman with a twist in her mind. That is why I find myself saying nasty things to her now and then. I suppose it was Gorman who taught her to be an Irish patriot. If she had been content to follow him as an obedient disciple, I should have put up with all she said politely. But, once started by Gorman, she thought out Ireland for herself and arrived at this amazing theory of hers, her artistic children of light in death grips with mercantile and manufacturing materialists. No wonder she irritated me.