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