h the deeds of men, as his
friendship for Count Phili Eulenburg and the malodorous "Camarilla" go
to show, and his choice of Imperial Chancellors, his grand viziers,
has not in every instance been happy. He has less tact than character,
as he showed once in Vienna, where he greatly pained the Foreign
Minister, Count Goluchowski, one day at a club by calling to him,
"Golu, Golu, come and sit beside your Kaiser." He has the German
masculine enjoyment in a kind of humour which would have delighted Fox
and the three-bottle men, but would sadly shock the susceptibilities
of an Oxford aesthete. He has a share of personal vanity, but it
springs from the desire to look the Emperor he is, not because he
supposes for a moment that he is an Adonis. He is theatrical in
exactly the same spirit--the desire imperially to impress his folk in
the sense of the German word _imponieren_, a word that needs no
translation. If he has lost much of Dr. Liman's "romantik," he still
retains the "scatteredness" of Mr. Sidney Brooks, though the Emperor
would rather hear it called "many-sidedness." _En resume_ he has the
defects of his qualities, but to no man or woman's unmerited loss or
injury, and if we weigh the good qualities with the bad, we find a
fine balance remaining to his credit as a man.

The fierce light which beats upon a throne, if it is apt to dazzle the
bystander, helps those at a distance, especially in these days of the
still fiercer light of modern publicity, to judge fairly the throne's
occupant. The character of the Emperor as monarch ought, therefore, as
far as is possible in the absence of archives marked "secret and
confidential" and yet lying in the ministries of all countries, to
disclose itself nowadays with reasonable clearness. Yet, even still,
different and conflicting opinions regarding it are to be gathered in
Germany and out of it.

Indeed, his own people are among the severest critics. One of them,
Professor Quidde, early in the reign, made an extraordinarily
ingenious, but quite unjustifiable, comparison of him to Caligula,
which, though only consisting of classical quotations and making no
mention of the Emperor, was seen by everybody to refer to him and has
caused discussion ever since. While many foreign critics have done the
Emperor justice, others in turn have made him out to be arrogant,
snobbish, bombastic, superficial, incompetent, and insincere. To
writers of this class he is always the German War Lord