seemingly without effort, and it is at its best under the highest pressure.  The Kaiser is not to be laughed at for wanting to know all there is to be known, but he may justly be criticized for failing to distinguish between the attempt and its failure....

“Is it all charlatanerie?  Is it all of a part with his speech in Russian to the regiment of which the Czar made him honorary colonel, a studied trumpery effort, designed for a momentary effect?  Is the Kaiser just glitter and tinsel, impulse and rhapsody, with nothing solid beneath?  Is it his supreme object to make an impression at any cost, to force, like another Nero, the popular applause by arts more becoming to a cabotin than a sovereign?  Vanity, restlessness, a consuming desire for the palm without the dust—­an intense and theatrical egotism—­are these the qualities that give the clue to his character and actions?

“I do not think so altogether.  The Kaiser has scattered too much.  In an age of specialists on many subjects he speaks like an amateur.  He is always the hero, and often the victim, of his own imagination; like a star actor, he cannot bear to be outshone; he is morbidly, almost pruriently, conscious of the effect he is producing.  And on all matters of intellect and taste his influence makes for blatant mediocrity.  But he is not meretricious; at bottom he is not by any means as superficial and insincere as he often seems.  He is one of those men in whom an instinct becomes an immutable truth, an idea a conviction, and a suspicion a certainty, by an almost instantaneous process; and, the process completed, action follows forthwith.  The Kaiser is always resolved to do the right thing; the right thing, by some quaint but invariable coincidence, is whatever he is resolved to do.”

These appreciations from afar may be as sound as they are brilliant, but they rather refer to the non-essential parts of the character of the Emperor in the first flush of imperial glory than to the essential character as it has developed with the years.

As a man—­he will be dealt with as monarch presently—­his essential character must be judged from his conduct, and conduct extending over a good many years.  One might say, conduct and reputation, but that reputation is so often the result of a confused mixture of superficial observation, gossip, tittle-tattle, envy, hatred and uncharitableness, and, in the case of an Emperor, of merely picturesque and effective writing.

There is another source which would materially help us in forming a judgment, but it is wholly wanting in the case of the Emperor.  No private correspondence of his is, as yet, available to the world.