All visions and poems of justice have been full of the refrain of
_deposuit potentes de sede_; but the bracing reality of such a
revolution is lost by certain effects of antiquity, by the mists which
make the past somewhat monochrome, and by the exalted equality of death.
To say that Belisarius became a beggar means little to us when it seems
only the difference between a rich and a tattered toga. We do not
picture Belisarius in a patched pair of trousers: but then we have no
reason to be angry with Belisarius. But whenever real tyranny and honest
wrath are reborn among men, there will always be an instant necessity to
represent the great reversal in the graphic colours of contemporary
fact. Raemaekers' cartoon, representing the tyrants of Europe reduced to
that very hopeless modern beggary to which they have driven many
thousands of very much better men, is perhaps of all his pictures the
most grim, or what would be called vindictive. I think that such revenge
is in truth merely realization. The victims of the war have to sit on
such real benches in such real rags. And being one of the fiercest, it
is also one of the most delicate of the Dutch artist's studies. Nothing
could be truer than the insolent and swollen decay of the Jew Ferdinant;
or the more effeminate collapse of the Kaiser, the very spike on whose
helmet droops with sentiment.