Chapter 17
The Emperor's other speeches referring to the Boxer movement at this period have been adversely commented on as showing him in the light of a cruel and blood-thirsty seeker after revenge. This is an unjust, at least a hard, judgment. A passage in his address at Bremerhaven to the expeditionary force when setting out for China is the main proof of the charge--in which, after referring to the murder of von Ketteler, he said:
"You know well you will have to fight with a cunning, brave, well-armed, cruel foe. When you come to close quarters with him remember--quarter ('Pardon' is the German word the Emperor used) must not be given: prisoners must not be taken: manage your weapons so that for a thousand years to come no Chinaman will dare to look sideways at a German. Act like men."
It is difficult, of course, to reconcile such an address with Christian humanity practised, so far as humanity can be practised, in modern war, but it should be remembered that the Emperor was speaking in a state of great excitement, and that, according to Chancellor Prince Bülow's statement in the Reichstag subsequently, confirmation of the news of the murder of his Minister to China had only reached the Emperor ten minutes before he delivered the speech.
There is one incident, however, though not a very important one, in connexion with the troubles, which may fairly be made a matter of reproach to the Emperor--the seizure, on his order, of the ancient astronomical instruments at Pekin and their transference to Sans Souci, in Potsdam, where they are to be seen to the present day. The troops of all nations, it is known, looted freely at Pekin; but the Emperor might have spared China and his own fair fame the indignity of such public vandalism.
While writing of China it may not be superfluous to add that the Emperor's foreign policy in the Orient cannot be expected to present exactly the same features, or proceed quite along the same lines, as his foreign policy in Europe. By far the greater part of Europe is now as completely parcelled out and as permanently settled as though it were a huge, well-managed estate. The capacities of its high roads, its railways, its great rivers, with their commercial and strategic values and relations are perfectly ascertained; and the knowledge, it is not too much to say, is the common property of all important Governments. It is not so, or not nearly to the same extent, in the Orient. In Europe there is little or no difficulty in distinguishing between enterprises that are political and those that are commercial, or in recognizing where they are both; and if a difficulty should arise it can be arranged by diplomatic conversations, by a conference of the Powers interested, or in the last resort--short of war--by arbitration. This is not so simple a matter in the Orient, where conditions are at once old and new, where interests of possibly great magnitude are as yet undetermined or unappropriated, where possibly great mineral sources are undeveloped and the capacities of new markets unascertained; where, in short, the decisive factors of the problem are undiscovered, it may be unsuspected.
In such cases there is often no certain and readily recognizable line of demarcation between the two kinds of enterprise; and an undertaking that may present all the appearance of being a purely commercial scheme, and be solemnly asseverated to be such by the Power or Powers promoting it, may turn out on closer examination to be one of great political significance and incalculable political consequence. Of such enterprises two immediately spring to mind, the Cape to Cairo railway and the Baghdad railway, not to mention a score of problematic undertakings in other parts of Africa or Asia. It will be useful to keep this general consideration in view when forming an opinion regarding the Emperor's Oriental policy. That policy is, so far, almost entirely commercial. Long ago wars used to be made for the sake of religion, then for the sake of territory. Now they are made for the sake of new markets.
Yet the Far East is changing with the change in conditions everywhere in modern times, and it is evident that the premises for any conclusion as to German foreign policy there may, at any given moment, be subject to modification. Partly owing to the growth of Germany's European influence, and to the increase in her navy which has helped her to it, she is to be found of recent years playing a role in the Far East which would have been unintelligible to the German of the last generation. There are many Germans to-day, as in Bismarck's time, who ridicule the notion that the possibilities of trade in Oriental countries justify the national risk now run for it and the national expenditure now made upon it; but it is sometimes forgotten that, apart from the chance of obtaining concessions for the building of railways, for the establishment of banks, for the leasing of mines and working of cotton plantations, there is a large German export of beads, cloth, and, in short, of hundreds of articles which appeal to barbarian or only semi-civilized tastes.
Germany, too, looks hopefully forward to a future in which she will be supplied with the raw material of her manufactures by her colonies, or failing that by her subjects trading abroad in the colonies of other nations. This is one of the main objects of her Weltpolitik. As Prince von Bülow said: "The time has passed when the German left the earth to one neighbour and the sea to another, while he reserved heaven, where pure doctrines are enthroned, to himself;" and again: "We don't seek to put anybody in the shade, but we demand our place in the sun;" and the idea finds technical expression in the phrase on which Germany lays so much stress, the "maintenance of the open door." Her policy in the Far East, as in Europe, is thus on the whole a commercial one; she seeks there as elsewhere new markets, not new territory. Accordingly she supports the principle of the _status quo_ in China, and therefore raised no objection to the Anglo-Japanese Agreement of 1902 which, among other objects, secured it.
In January, 1901, the Emperor was called to England by the sudden, and, as it was to prove, fatal illness of his grandmother, Queen Victoria. His journey to Osborne, where he arrived just in time to be recognized by the dying Queen, and his abandonment of the idea, impressive and almost sacred to a Prussian King and the Prussian people, of being present on his birthday, January 27th, at the bicentenary celebration of the foundation of the Prussian Kingdom, made a deep and sympathetic impression on the people of England. Usually on State occasions the Emperor does not display a countenance of good humour, or indeed of any sentiment save perhaps that of a sense of dignity; but on the occasion in question, as he rode in the uniform of a British Field-Marshal beside Edward VII, his looks were those of genuine sorrow. Public sympathy was not lessened when it became known that he had mentioned the pride he felt in being privileged to wear the uniform of two such soldiers of renown as the Duke of Wellington and Lord Roberts; and added that the privilege would be highly estimated by the whole German army. It was a chivalrous remark, the offspring of a chivalrous disposition.
The Emperor had hardly returned to Germany when, on February 6th, the only attack ever made on his person occurred in Bremen. He had been at a banquet in the town hall, and was being driven through the illuminated streets to the railway station to return to Berlin, when a half-witted locksmith's apprentice of nineteen, Dietrich Weiland by name, flung a piece of railway iron at him with such good aim that it struck him on the face immediately under the right eye, inflicting a deep and nasty, but not dangerous wound. The Emperor proceeded with his journey, the doctors attending to his injury in the train, and in a few weeks he was well again. Weiland was sent to a criminal lunatic asylum. The attempt had, apparently, nothing to do with Anarchism or Nihilism or the Social Democracy. When the Emperor alluded to it afterwards in his speech to the Diet, he referred it to a general diminution of respect for authority.
"Respect for authority," he said to the Diet,
"is wanting. In this regard all classes of the population are to blame. Particular interests are looked to, not the general well-being of the folk. Criticism of the measures of the Government and Throne takes the coarsest and most injurious forms--and hence the errors and demoralization of our youth. Parliament must help here, and a change must be made, beginning with the schools."
It was natural enough that a few days after, addressing the Alexander Regiment of Guards, who were taking up quarters in a new barracks near the palace in Berlin, he should tell them the barracks were like a citadel to the palace, and that, as a sort of imperial bodyguard, the regiment "must be ready, day and night as once before"--he was referring to the "March Days"--"to meet any attack by the citizens on the Emperor."
At Bonn in April the Emperor attended the matriculation (immatriculation, the Germans call it) of his eldest son, the Crown Prince, at the university. He was in civil dress, one of the rare public occasions during the reign when he has not been in uniform, but this did not prevent him delivering a martial address to the Borussians. "I hope and expect from the younger generation," he said to the students,
"that they will put me in a position to maintain our German Fatherland in its close and strong boundaries and in the congeries of German races--doing to no one favour and to no one harm. If, however, anyone should touch us too nearly, then I will call upon you and I expect you won't leave your Emperor sitting."
A great shout of "Bravo!" went up when the Emperor ceased, and the students doubtless all thought what a fine thing it would be if he would only lead them straightway against those cheeky Englanders.
At the end of June, on board the Hamburg-American pleasure-steamer _Princess Victoria Luise_, the Emperor pronounced the famous sentence--"Our future lies on the water." The year before he had said something like it, and it is worth quoting as the Emperor's first explicit allusion to Weltpolitik. "Strongly," he exclaimed,
"dashes the beat of ocean at the doors of our people and compels it to preservation of its place in the world, in a word, to Weltpolitik. The ocean is indispensable for Germany's greatness. The ocean testifies that on it and far beyond it no important decision will be taken without Germany and the German Emperor."
His words on the present occasion were:
"My entire task for the future will be to see that the undertakings of which the foundations have been laid may develop quietly and surely. We have, though as yet without the fleet as it should be, achieved our place in the sun. It will now be my task to hold this place unquestioned, so that its rays may act favourably on trade and industry and agriculture at home inside, and on our sail-sports on the coast--for our future lies on the water. The more Germans go on the sea--whether travelling or in the service of the State--the better. When the German has once learned to look abroad and afar he will lose that 'hang' towards the petty, the trivial, which now so often seizes him in daily life."
And he closed: "We must now go out in search of new spots where we can drive in nails on which to hang our armour."
Early in August the Emperor was called to the death-bed of his mother, the Empress Frederick, at her castle in Cronberg. She died on the afternoon of her son's arrival, on August 5th. The Emperor ordered mourning throughout the Empire for six weeks, and forbade all "public music, entertainments, theatrical or otherwise" until after the funeral. The Empress was buried in the mausoleum attached to the Friedenskirche in Potsdam on the 13th of the month.
The delivery of a famous speech on art by the Emperor in December brings the chronicle of 1901 to a close, but perhaps it will not displease the reader if a new chapter is opened for the purpose of quoting it and of considering the Emperor in what is a traditional Hohenzollern relationship.
X.
THE EMPEROR AND THE ARTS
Art is a favourite subject of conversation on the Continent, where it is more popularly discussed than in England and where authorities of all kinds are more alive to its educative capabilities. It is eminently "safe" ground, does not savour of gossip, and no one need leave the field of discussion with the feeling that he has been driven from it. Hence it is the salvation of diplomatists who are apprehensive of committing their Governments or themselves when mixing in general society, and it doubtless does good service for the Emperor also upon occasion. Indeed it is a topic on which he speaks willingly and well.
Unfortunately for precision of thought and speech, though useful for the man in the street, the word "art" has been pressed into the service of metaphor more than almost any other word in language. We are told in turn that everything is an art--hair-dressing, salad-dressing (a different kind), lying, flying, dying. The Germans are trying to make an art of life. Whistler wrote about the "Gentle Art of Making Enemies." One hears of "artful hussies" and "artful dodgers." People are described as "artful" in the small diplomacies of intercourse. Jugglers, acrobats, sword-swallowers, "supers" at the theatre, the men who play the elephant in the pantomime would all be mortified if they were not addressed as "artists," In short, everything may be called an art.
But what, truly, is art? The question is as hard to answer satisfactorily as the questions what is truth or what is beauty? The notion "art" usually occurs to the mind as contrasted with the notion "nature"; the word is derived from the Sanskrit root _ar_, to plough, to make, to do; and accordingly art may be taken to be something made by man, as contrasted with something made, or grown, or given by God. How art came into existence it is of course impossible to do more than conjecture. The necessities of primitive man may have stimulated his inventive powers into originating and developing the useful arts for his physical comfort and convenience; and his desire for recreation after labour, or the mere ennui of idleness, may have urged the same powers into originating and developing the fine and plastic arts for the entertainment of his mind. Or, lastly, if no better reason can be found, and though Sir Joshua Reynolds laid it down that all models of perfection in art must be sought for on the earth, it may be that seeing and feeling instinctively the glory and beauty of the Creation, mankind began gradually, as its intelligence improved, to burn with a longing to imitate, reproduce, and represent them.
However art arose, it seems true to say, as a German writer has well said, that when a work of art, whether a poem or a picture or a statue, causes in us the thought that so, and in no other way, would we ourselves have expressed the idea, had we the talent, then we may conclude that true art is speaking to us, whatever the idea to be expressed may be. Everything demands thought, but our thoughts are an unruly folk, which never keep long on the same straight road, and love to wander off to left and right, here finding something new and there throwing away something old. The artist, when he conceives a plan, has to fight with the host of his thoughts and find a way through them. They often threaten to divert him from it, but on the other hand they often lead him to his goal by novel paths along which he finds much that is new and valuable.
This is a doctrine that, sensible though it is, would hardly be subscribed to by the Emperor, to whom no new movement in art strongly appeals, and who thinks that such movements, unless founded on the old classical school, the Greek and Roman school of beauty, ought, in the public interest, to be discouraged. However, let him speak for himself. He set forth his art creed in a speech which he delivered on December 18, 1901, to the sculptors who had executed the Hohenzollern statues in the famous Siegesallée at Berlin, and which ran substantially as follows:--
"I gladly seize the occasion, first of all, to express my congratulations and then my thanks for the manner in which you have assisted me to carry out my original plan. The preparation of the plan for the Siegesallée has occupied many years, and the learned historiographer of my House, Professor Dr. Poser, is the man who put me in a position to set the artists clear and intelligible tasks. Once the historic basis was found the work could be proceeded with, and when the personalities of the princes were established it was possible to ascertain those who had been their most important helpers. In this manner the groups originated and, to a certain extent, conditioned by their history, the forms of them came into existence.
"The next most difficult question was--Was it possible, as I hoped it was, to find in Berlin so many artists as would be able to work together harmoniously to realize the programme?
"As I came to consider the question, I had in view to show the world that the most favourable condition for the successful achievement of the work was not the appointment of an art commission and the establishment of prize competitions, but that in accord with ancient custom, as in the classical period, and later during the Middle Ages, was the case, it lay in the direct intercourse of the employer with the artists.
"I am therefore especially obliged to Professor Reinhold Begas for having assured me, when I applied to him, that there was absolutely no doubt there could be found in Berlin a sufficiency of artists to carry out the idea; and with his help, and in consequence of the acquaintances I have made by visiting exhibitions and studios in Berlin, I succeeded in getting together a staff, the majority of whom I see around me, with whom to approach the task.
"I think you will not refuse me the testimony that, in respect of the programme I drew up I have made the treatment of it as easy as possible, that while I ordered and defined the work I gave you an absolute freedom not only in the combination and composition, but precisely the freedom to put into it that from himself which every artist must if he is to give the work the stamp of his own individuality, since every work of art contains in itself something of the individual character of the artist. I believe that this experiment, if I may so call it, as made in the Siegesallée, has succeeded.
"... I have never interfered with details, but have contented myself with simply giving the direction, the impulse.
"But to-day the thought that Berlin stands there before the whole world with a guild of artists able to carry out so magnificent a project fills me with satisfaction and pride. It shows that the Berlin school of art stands on a height which could hardly have been more splendid in the time of the Renaissance.
"Here, too, one can draw a parallel between the great artistic achievements of the Middle Ages and the Italians--that, namely, the head of the State, an art-loving prince, who offered their tasks to the artists also found the master round whom a school of artists could gather.
"How is it, generally speaking, with art in the world? It takes its models, supplies itself from the great sources of Mother Nature, who, spite of her apparently unfettered, limitless freedom, still moves according to eternal laws which the Creator ordained for himself and which cannot be passed or violated without danger to the development of the world.
"Even so it is in art; and at the sight of the beautiful remains of old classical times comes again over one the feeling that here too reigns an eternal law that is always true to itself, the law of beauty and harmony, of the aesthetic. This law is given expression to by the ancients in so surprising and overpowering a fashion, in so thoroughly complete a form that we, with all our modern sensibilities and with all our power, are still proud, when we have done any specially fine piece of work, to hear that it is almost as good as it was made nineteen hundred years ago.
"But only almost! Under this impression I would earnestly ask you to lay it to heart that sculpture still remains untainted by so-called modern tendencies and currents--still stands high and chastely there! Keep her so, don't let yourselves be misled by human criticism or any wind of doctrine to abandon the principles on which she has been built up.
"An art which transgresses the laws and limits I have indicated is art no more. It is factory work, handicraft, and that is a thing art should never be. Under the often misused word 'freedom' and her flag one falls too readily into boundlessness, unrestraint, self-exaggeration. For whoever cuts loose from the law of beauty, and the feeling for the æsthetic and harmonious, which every human breast feels, whether he can express it or not, and in his thought makes his chief object some special direction, some specific solution of more technical tasks, that man denies art's first sources.
"Yet again. Art should help to exercise an educative influence on the people. She should offer the lower classes, after the hard work of the day, the possibility of refreshing themselves by regarding what is ideal. To us Germans great ideals have become permanent possessions, whereas to other peoples they have been more or less lost. Only the German people remain called to preserve these great ideas, to cultivate and continue them. And among these ideals is this, that we afford the possibility to the working classes to elevate themselves by beauty, and by beauty to enable them to abstract themselves and rise above the thoughts they otherwise would have.
"When Art, as now often occurs, does nothing more than represent misery as still more unlovely than it is already, by so doing she sins against the German people. The cultivation of the ideal is at the same time the greatest work of culture, and if we wish to be and remain an example in this to other nations the whole people must work together to that end; if Culture is to fulfil her task she must penetrate to the lowest classes of society. That she can only do when art comes into play, when she raises up, instead of descending into the gutter.