It is asking for trouble to expect a permanent dwelling-place at the top of the ladder, and to pin one's happiness to such an uncertain tenure. Life is a great comedian, and plays merciless practical jokes with its most august victims. It thrust the young Corsican up to a height of power unparalleled in the history of the world and then left him to eat his heart out on a bit of rock in a remote ocean, growing prematurely old and fat and diseased. But Napoleon's penalty was light compared with that of the Kaiser, who must surely hold the record for all time as the sport of the gods. Napoleon at least knew what a fickle thing success was. Starting with nothing, he had won the world, and to his cynical and realpolitik mind there was nothing surprising in his loss of what he had won.
But the Kaiser had never had the salutary teaching of experience. He was born at the top of the ladder, and could conceive of no existence away from that dizzy eminence; he really believed that he belonged to a semi-divine order, and if we had had the misfortune to be born in his circumstances most of us would have had the same illusion. Now, after such splendour of power as Louis XIV. himself never enjoyed, he is cast aside like an old shoe, disowned by his people, repudiated by his relatives, his empire shrunk to the dimensions of a Dutch garden, and he himself become, to all appearances, of no more significance than if he were an Italian organ-grinder or blew the trombone in a German band. He must surely have had a larger measure than any man in history of what Chaucer calls the heaviest of all afflictions:
For of fortune's sharp adversitee,
The worst kind of infortune is this,
A man to have ben in prosperitee
And it remembren when it passèd is.
"And it remembren when it passèd is." It was that bitterness which Caruso feared even when he was at the top of the ladder. It is that bitterness which is about all that life has left to the negligible exile in Holland.
ON FACES—PAST AND PRESENT
In a matter of taste we cannot expect a decisive verdict, and it is probable therefore that the discussion which is proceeding in the Press as to whether we are more handsome than our forefathers will leave this interesting problem unsettled. "Of course men are growing more handsome," says Sir William Orpen, the painter. "Of course men are not growing more handsome," says Professor Geddes, the sociologist. Between the two views comes that of Professor Keith, the anthropologist, who says simply that faces are changing, whether for better or worse he does not venture an opinion.
I have no doubt that Professor Geddes has got his eye on the Greeks. He usually has. And if we bring the ancient Greeks into the competition I do not see how the verdict can go against him. The memorials they have left of the human face and form are still the accepted standard of beauty. The highest praise that the idolaters of that young Apollo, Carpentier, can give him is that he is like a Greek god. And the Romans were handsome fellows, too. Judging from the most famous and most authentic bust of Cæsar, that great man had a face of extraordinary intellectual beauty. If you were to put, let us say, a bust of Mr. Winston Churchill beside that of Cæsar, you would not be disposed to say that we had achieved much in the way of growing handsome in the course of two thousand years. There were ugly fellows then, of course, as there are ugly fellows now. Sulla, with his blotched and satyr face, was as unpleasant in appearance as he was in character, and the great Socrates was no thing of beauty. But in comparing ourselves with the past we must compare best with best.
And if we leave the ancient world and come down to a time of which we have authentic records in portraiture, the evidence is still with Geddes. You would have to stand a long time in the Strand before you saw coming along its populous pavements a face of such sublimity as that of Dante, and I fancy that if Beatrice appeared in a ball-room in Belgravia she would not lack suitors for a dance. Take the men that Dürer and Holbein painted four hundred years ago. It will be hard to match the exquisite sensitiveness and enlightenment that live in the face of Erasmus, or the dignity and noble austerity of Bellini's portrait of the great Doge Loredano, which you may see in the National Gallery. Is there a face comparable with it in the House of Commons to-day? And what of that wonderful face of the Bishop in the Ansidei Madonna of Raphael which you may also see in the National Gallery?
And coming down a century or so later, and to another land, have we much ground for thinking we of to-day are more handsome than Velasquez' Spaniards? Put Sir William Orpen's portraits of the modern English into competition with Velasquez' portraits of the Spaniards of three hundred years ago, and you will feel you have passed to a lower plane of beauty. You may say that it is unfair to compare a supreme artist with a merely clever technician; but the material they have worked on is the faces they have seen about them, and the faces of Velasquez live in the memory like a sonnet of Keats and the faces of Orpen leave no impression behind. Where will the much-praised "Chef" be beside the solemn beauty of Velasquez' "Menippus" three hundred years hence? Where will it be even beside the "Tailor" of Moroni, to which it offers so common-place a challenge?