Most of the English caricaturists are much too complimentary to the
German Emperor. They draw his moustaches, but not his face. Now his
moustaches are exactly what he, or the whole Prussian school he
represents, particularly wishes us to look at. They give him the fierce
air of a fighting cock; and however little we may like fierceness,
there will always be a certain residual respect for fighting, even in
a cock. Now the Junker moustache is a fake; almost as much so as if it
were stuck on with gum. It is, as Mr. Belloc has remarked, curled in a
machine all night lest it should hang down. Raemaekers, in the sketch
which shows the Kaiser as waiting for Nurse Cavell’s death to say, “Now
you can bring me the American protest,” has gone behind the moustache
to the face, and behind the face to the type and the spirit. The
Emperor is not commanding in a lordly voice from a throne, but with a
leer and behind a curtain. In the few lines of the lean unnatural face
is written the real history of the Hohenzollerns, the kind of history
not often touched on in our comfortable English humour, but common
to the realism of Continental art: the madness of Frederick William,
the perversion of Frederick the Great, the hint, mingled with subtler
talents, of the mere idiocy that seems to have flowered again in the
last heir of that inhuman house. The Hohenzollerns have varied from
generation to generation in many things and like many families; some
of them have been tyrants, some of them geniuses, some of them merely
boobies; but they have shared in something more than that hereditary
policy which has been the poison in Christendom for two hundred years.
There is a ghost who inhabits these perishing tenements, and in such a
picture as this of Raemaekers’ men can see it looking out of the eyes.
And it is neither the spirit of a tyrant nor of a booby; but the spirit
of a sly invalid.