No one has greater respect and admiration for Ascher than I have. I respect his ability. I admire his cool detachment of mind and his unfailing feeling for justice. I recognise in him a magnanimity, a certain knightliness which is very rare. But it is vain to pretend that I can ever regard Ascher as an intimate friend. I am never quite comfortable in his company. He lacks something, something essential. He lacks a sense of humour.
No one in England—no one I suppose in Europe—wanted to make jokes during that critical week which followed my interview with Ascher. The most abandoned buffoon shrank from jesting when every morning brought a fresh declaration of war by one great power on another. But even under such circumstances the sense of the ridiculous survives—a thing to be carefully concealed—in those who are fortunate enough to possess it. Ascher has no sense of the ridiculous. He sees men and women clad in long, stately robes moving through life with grave dignity like Arab chiefs or caliphs of Bagdad. He sees their actions conditioned and to some extent controlled by the influences of majestic inhuman powers, the genii of eastern tales, huge, cloud-girt spirits of oppressive solemnity. In reality most people wear motley all day long and the fairy powers are leprechauns, tricksy, irresponsible sprites, willing enough to make merry with those who can laugh with them; but players of all Puck’s tricks on “wisest aunts telling saddest tales.”
I sometimes think that it is Ascher’s chivalry, his fine knightliness, which has killed his sense of humour. I cannot suppose that Sir Galahad found any delight in the quips of fools. His owl-like eyes, large with the wonder of Holy Grails, looked stupidly on faces wrinkled with merriment. King Arthur could never have talked as he did to Guinevere—Tennyson is my authority for the things he said—if he had not had in him the soul of an earnest member of a league for the sympathetic study of social problems. Ascher is as chivalrous as any member of King Arthur’s fellowship, and humour, if he ever had the sense of it, is dead in him. But perhaps he was born without it and is by nature hopelessly serious because he is a German. For the Germans never seem to be able to appreciate the fact that the grandiose is invariably comic, and that nothing in the world is more difficult than to stand toes to the line of the high heroic without stepping across it into the region of the ridiculous. I think of Wagner’s “Parsifal,” of Nietzsche’s “Zara-thrusta,” of the Kaiser Wilhelm’s amazing “Weltauf-fassung,” and it seems to me that such things could not be in any nation where one single man knew how to laugh.
If Ascher had in him the faintest glimmering of a sense of humour he would never have appealed to me, choosing the silent and ghostly middle of the night for the performance, to decide his point of honour for him. What am I that he should imagine me capable of settling high questions of that kind? An expatriated Irishman, a dispossessed landlord, a man without one high ambition, a mere mocker of enthusiasm of every kind. No one, unless he were absolutely blind to the ridiculous, would have consulted me on such a subject as the honour of a gentleman.
Yet, in her total lack of humour, Mrs. Ascher is as bad as her husband is. If such a thing were possible I should say that she is worse. There is, at all events, less excuse for her. She is not knightly, not very knightly, though she did champion the cause of poor, oppressed Ireland. She is an American, not a German, and the Americans pay high honour to their humourists. Perhaps she has lived too long with Ascher. Perhaps she has devoted herself too much to art and her steady contemplation of the sublime has killed her sense of the ridiculous. At all events it is dead. She has no humour now.
It is almost impossible to imagine that any woman would have been capable of calling in Gorman and me as advisers and helpers at a critical moment of her life. Yet that is what Mrs. Ascher did.
We obeyed the summons of course, both of us.
Gorman got there first. I found him seated opposite Mrs. Ascher in the large drawing-room of the house in Hampstead. Mrs. Ascher is lacking in humour, but she has a fine sense of dramatic propriety. Great decisions can only be come to fittingly, mighty spiritual tragedies can only be satisfactorily enacted, in spacious rooms. And there must be emptiness. Knicknacks and pretty ornaments kill high emotion. The chamber of a dainty woman, the room which delicate feminity has made its own, will suit a light flirtation, the love-making of a summer afternoon, but deep passion is out of place in it.
I walked cautiously across a wide space of slippery floor in order to shake hands with Mrs. Ascher. I saw that Gorman was sitting in a huge straight-backed chair with heavily carved elbow rests. It was the sort of chair which would have suited a bishop—in the chancel of his cathedral, not in his private room—and a major excommunication might very suitably have been delivered from it.
“I am in great trouble,” said Mrs. Ascher, “and I have asked you two to come to me because you are my friends. I was right to call you, was I not?”