Chapter 18

"As ruler of the country I often find it extremely bitter that art, through its masters, does not with sufficient energy oppose such tendencies. I do not for a moment fail to perceive that many an aspiring character is to be found among the partisans of these tendencies, who are perhaps filled with the best intentions but who are on the wrong path. The true artist needs no advertisement, no press, no patronage. I do not believe that your great protagonists in the domain of science, either in ancient Greece or in Italy or in the Renaissance period ever had recourse to a _réclame_ such as nowadays is often made in the press in order to bring their ideas into prominence, but worked as God inspired them and let others do the talking.

"And so must an honest, proper artist act. The art which descends to _réclame_ is no art be it lauded a hundred or a thousand-fold. A feeling for what is beautiful or ugly has every one, be he ever so simple, and to educate this feeling in the people I require all of you. That in the Siegesallée you have done a piece of such work, I have specially to thank you.

"This I can even now tell you--the impression which the Siegesallée has made on the foreigner is quite an overpowering one; everywhere respect for German sculpture is making itself perceivable. May you always remain on these heights, may such masters stand by my sons and sons' sons, should they ever come into existence! Then, I am convinced, will our people be in a position to love the beautiful and honour lofty ideals."

At the Berlin Art Museum next year, after praising the devotion of his parents to art, and especially of his mother, "a nature," he said, "about which poesy breathed," he continued:--

"The son of both stands before you as their heir and executor: and so I regard it as my task, according to the intention of my parents, to hold my hand over my German people and its growing generation, to foster the love of beauty in them, and to develop art in them; but only along the lines and within the bounds drawn strictly by the feelings in mankind for beauty and harmony."

The Emperor's speech to the sculptors, if it contains some questionable statements, is a thoughtful address by one who is himself an artist, though not perhaps an artist of a high class. His artistic endowments, transmitted from his parents, have been already indicated. In reference to them he said to the official conducting him over the Marienburg in later years, when the official expressed surprise at the Emperor's art-knowledge:--

"There is nothing wonderful in it. I was brought up in an artistic atmosphere. My mother was an artist, and from my earliest youth I have been surrounded by beautiful things. Art is my friend and my recreation."

The highest praise of a work of art is to say of it that it pleased, or would have pleased; his mother. Of her he said, "Every thought she had was art, and to her everything, however simple, which was meant for the use of life, was penetrated with beauty." When giving his sanction to a plan, a park, a statue or a building he always thinks--"Would it have pleased my parents--what would they have said about it?" The Kaiser Friedrich Museum and the Kaiser Friedrich Memorial Church, both in Berlin, testify to the Emperor's gratitude to his parents for their artistic legacy.

He went, as we have seen, through the ordinary art drudgery of the school, recognizing, no doubt, with Michael Angelo, with all good artists, that correct drawing is the foundation of every art into which drawing enters and applying himself industriously to it. As a young soldier at Potsdam he spent a good deal of his time, during the three years from 1880 to 1883, practising oil-painting under the guidance of Herr Karl Salzmann, a distinguished Berlin painter. Among the results of this instruction was a picture which the princely artist called "The Corvette--Prince Adalbert in the Bay of Samitsu," now hanging in the residence of his brother, Prince Henry, at Kiel; and two years later, as his interest in the navy grew, a "Fight between an Armoured Ship and a Torpedo-boat." Innumerable aquarelles and sketches, chiefly of marine subjects, were also the fruit of this period.

The Emperor has constantly cultivated free and friendly intercourse with the best artists of his own and other nations, and been continually engaged devoting time and money to the art education of his people. The admirable art exhibitions in Berlin of the best examples of painting by English, French, and American artists, which he personally promoted and was greatly interested in, may be recalled as instances. If his efforts in encouraging art among his people have not been so successful as his imperial activities in other directions, the reason is not any fault on his part, but simply that art refuses to be, in Shakespeare's phrase, "tongue-tied by authority."

This was shown by the chorus of unfavourable criticism which the speech to the sculptors drew forth. No one questioned the sincerity of the Emperor or the magnanimity of his aims, nor was the criticism wholly caused by the suspicion that it savoured of the "personal regiment" under which the people were growing impatient; but many thought he was pushing the dynastic principle too far and unduly interfering with liberty of thought and judgment, and that there was something Oriental as well as selfish in occupying with a gallery of his ancestors, the majority of whom were, after all, very ordinary people, one of the fairest spots in the capital. Perhaps, however, what was most objected to was his trying to drive the art of the nation into a groove, the direction given by himself: in trying to inspire it with a particular spirit and that an ancient not a modern spirit, when he ought to let the spirit come of its own accord out of the mind of the people--the mind of many millions, not the mind of one man, however high his rank. Politics and government might be things in which he had a right to an authoritative voice, but art, like religion, the people considered to be a matter for individual taste and judgment.

Yet something may be advanced in favour of the Emperor. His recommendation, for in fact it was and could be only that, was quite in keeping with the traditions of his office and the people's own view of royal government. The speech, as was admitted, was suggested by no mere dilettante's vanity, but, as is evident from his words at the Art Museum, by the conviction that just as it is the imperial duty to provide an efficient army and navy, so it is the imperial duty to use every personal and private, as well as every public and official, effort to provide the people with an art as efficient, as honest, and as clean; and it was inevitable that the art the Emperor recommended was that which he believed, and still believes, to be in conformity with the ideals, as he interprets them, or would have them to be, of the Germanic race.

The speech itself is interesting as showing the Emperor's attitude towards art and artists and his personal conception of art and its nature. His attitude is evidently that of the art-loving prince of whom he speaks in the address, a royal Maecenas or di Medici, who gathers artists round him; but he means to use them, not so much perhaps for art's sake, as for the instruction and elevation of his folk. A very laudable aim; only, as it happens, the folk in this matter desire themselves to decide what is improving and elevating for them and what is not. They are not willing to leave the exclusive choice to the Emperor.

The Emperor, again, would give the artist the freedom to put into his work "that from himself which any artist must, if he is to give the work the stamp of his own individuality." This attitude, too, is admirable, but on the other hand lies the danger, such is poor human nature, that the individuality will be that which the Emperor wishes it to be, not the artist's independent individuality To the foreign eye all the Hohenzollern statues in the Siegesallee, with the exception possibly of two or three, seem to have much the same individuality, though that again may be due to the nature of the subject and the foreigner's inherent and ineradicable predispositions.

Thirdly, art, the Emperor says, can only be educative when it elevates instead of descending into the gutter. Hogarth descended into the gutter. Gustav Doré depicts the horrors of hell. Yet both Hogarth and Doré were great artists, and educative too. The Emperor was here thinking of the Berlin Secession, a school just then starting, eccentric indeed and far from "classical," but which nevertheless has since produced several fine artists. The Emperor, it would appear, thinks that the antique classical school is the true and only good school for the artist. Very likely most artists will agree with him-- at least as a foundation; but the belief, it also appears, is not considered in Germany, or outside of it, to justify the Emperor, as Emperor, in discouraging all other schools and particularly the efforts of modern artists in their non-classical imaginings.

The Emperor says art "takes its models, supplies itself from the great sources of Mother Nature." With all courtesy to the Emperor one may suggest that art, and sane art, takes its models not only from Mother Nature, but also from an almost as prolific a maternal source, namely imagination; and that imagination is limited by no eternal laws we know of, or can even suspect. Accordingly it is useless to check, or try to check, the imagination by telling it to work in a certain direction--so long, naturally, as the imagination is not obviously indecent or insane.

Again, the Emperor says that in classical art there reigns an eternal law, the "law of beauty and harmony, of the aesthetic" which is expressed in a "thoroughly complete form" by the ancients. It is admittedly a delightful and admirable form, but is it thoroughly complete? Is it the last and only form; and may not the very same law be found by experiment to be at work in future art that cannot be called classical, as it was found to be at work in the various noble schools since classical times? One must agree with the Emperor that the Greeks and Romans illustrated the "law of beauty and harmony, of the esthetic, in a wonderful manner." But it was wonderfully done for their age and intellect. They did not exhaust the beautiful and harmonious: far from it.

Neither the world nor mankind has been standing still ever since; certainly the mind of man has not, even though his senses have undergone no elemental change. Paganism was succeeded by Christianity, and with Christianity came a new art canon, new forms of beauty and harmony--the Early Italian. The age of reason followed, bringing with it the Baroque and Rococo canons: and as time went on, and the world's mind kept working, came other canons still. The most recent canon appears to be that of naturalism (the Emperor's "gutter ") with which artists are now experimentalizing. None of the canons, be it noticed, destroyed the canon that preceded, because beauty and harmony are indestructible and imperishable. "A thing of beauty is a joy for ever."

But not only the mind of man kept changing: the world itself and its civilization--by war, by treaty, by science, by invention, by art itself--kept changing, and is changing now. Development, physical as well as social, has been constant, and the changes accompanying it have inspired, and are inspiring, artists with new ideas to which they are always trying to give expression. The subjects of art have enormously multiplied. Those introduced by sport of all kinds, by the development of the theatre, by the newly-found effects of light and colour, need only be mentioned as examples capable of suggesting beauties and harmonies unknown to and unsuspected by the ancients. Hence, in addition to the classical art of the day, there is room for the "new art," the secessionist, the futurist, the impressionist, even the cubist, or whatever the experimental movement may call itself. And any day any of these movements may lead to the establishment of a new and admirable school of genuine art as beautiful as the classical, if in a different manner. The world has no idea of the surprises in all directions yet in store for it.

The Emperor, too, is at one with all the world in assuming that art, to deserve the name, must possess the quality of beauty. He speaks of "beauty and harmony," but let it be taken that he understands beauty to include harmony. Now, as has been suggested, to answer the question, what is beauty, satisfactorily, is no easy matter. In immediate proximity to it lies the question, what is ugliness? It might be argued that nothing in nature is ugly, and that the word was introduced to express what is merely an inability on the part of mankind to perceive the beauty which constitutes nature; and it certainly is possible that, were man endowed with the mind of God, instead of with only some infinitesimal and mysterious emanation of it, he would find all things in creation, all art included, beautiful. The author of the Book of Genesis asserts that when God had finished making the world He looked upon His handiwork and saw that it was good. There is one advantage in adopting this view, and no small one, that a belief in its truth must impel us to look for beauty and goodness in all things, whether in art or nature--and even in the Secession. Perhaps, however, we shall not be far from the truth in saying, as regards art, that all things in creation are beautiful, that there are degrees in beauty of which ugliness is the lowest, and that the truly inspired artist can make all things, ugliness included, beautiful.

The Emperor thinks the appreciation of beauty is one of our innate ideas, like the ability to distinguish between right and wrong, which we call conscience. There is no agreement among thinkers on the point, and it may be that both beauty and conscience are relative, and simply the result of environment and education. Certainly there is no standard of beauty, and more certainly still, not of feminine beauty. The Mahommedan admires a woman who has the nose of the parrot, the teeth of the pomegranate seed, and the tread of the elephant.

But though there is no complete standard of beauty about which all people, at all times, in all countries, are agreed, there are two elements of beauty which may be said to have been standardized, at least for the civilized world, by the early Greeks and Romans. These elements are simplicity and harmony, simplicity being the forms of things most directly and pleasingly appealing to the eye and most easily reaching the common understanding, while harmony is the combination of parts most nearly identical with the lines, contours, and proportions of nature. These are two essentials of good sculpture, and the Emperor was talking to sculptors and perhaps thinking only of sculpture.

Yet simplicity and harmony alone do not constitute beauty, while on the other hand beauty may take very complicated forms. A third element one may suggest is essential, and its indescribable nature causes all the difficulty there is in defining beauty. This third element is--charm. A work of art, to be beautiful, must charm, and to different people different things are charming. Plato's theory is that the sense of beauty is a dim recollection of a standard we have seen in a heavenly pre-existence. Accepting it as as good an explanation of charm as we can get, we may conclude by defining beauty as, in its highest form, a combination of simplicity and harmony, resulting in charm.

The Emperor says: "To us Germans great ideals have become permanent possessions, whereas to other peoples they have been more or less lost." The remark is not one of those best calculated to promote friendly feelings on the part of other peoples towards Germany or its Emperor. It is like his declaration that Germans are the "salt of the earth," and of a piece with the aggressive attitude of intellectual superiority adopted by many Germans towards other nations--one reason, by the way, for German unpopularity in the world. But is it true? Germany has great ideals in permanent possession, but are they more or less lost to other peoples? It is at least doubtful. Great ideals are the permanent possession of every great people; it is these ideals that have made them great; and they are no less great if they differ according to the nature and conditions of each great people. One might go further, indeed, and say that great ideals are the common property and permanent possession of all great peoples. It is a hard saying that any one people has a monopoly of them. The contribution of every great nation to the common stock of great ideals is incalculable, and it would be interesting to investigate which nation is most successfully working out its great ideals in practice.

The truth is the German ideal of beauty in art is not, generally speaking, the same as that of the Anglo-Saxon or Latin foreigner. The art ideals of the Anglo-Saxon and Latin races in this respect are for the most part Greek, while those of the German race are for the most part Roman; and in each case the ideals are the outcome of the spirit which has had most influence on the mind and manners of the different races. The Greek philosophic and aesthetic spirit has chiefly influenced Anglo-Saxon and Latin art ideals: the Roman spirit, particularly the military spirit and the spirit of law, have chiefly influenced German ideals: and, as a result, arrived at through ages during which events of epoch-making importance caused many successive modifications, while the Anglo-Saxon and Latin races are most impressed by such qualities as lightness and delicacy of outline, round and softly-flowing curves and elegance of ornamentation, the German appears, to the Anglo-Saxon and Latin, to be more impressed by the elaborate, the gigantic, the Gothic, the grotesque, the hard, the made, the massive, and the square. In both styles are to be found "beauty and harmony, the aesthetic," to quote the Emperor, but they appeal differently to people of different national temperaments. To the Anglo-Saxon and Latin in general, therefore, German art, and particularly German sculpture and architecture, while impressive and admirable, lack for most foreigners the entirely indescribable quality we have called "charm."

The true artist, the Emperor says, needs no advertisement, no press, no patronage. The Emperor is right. The true artist, once he begins to produce first-rate work, will obtain instant recognition, and his work will begin to sell, not perhaps at prices the same kind of work may bring later, but at prices sufficient to support the artist and his family in reasonable comfort. If it does not, he is not producing good work and had better turn his attention to something else. As a matter of fact very few true artists do advertise, use the press, or seek patronage. The artist does not go to the press or the patron, for nowadays, the moment the artist does excellent work, the press and the patron go to him, and, when he is very exceptionally good, he is advertised and patronized until he is sick of both advertisement and patronage.

Naturally it is different in the case of the artist who is not excellently good, but the Emperor was not considering such. These artists too, however, insist on living and must find a market for their wares. It is an age of advertisement, the growth of new economic conditions, for advertisement creates as well as reveals new markets. Hence the vast host of mediocrities, not only in art but in almost every field of human activity, nowadays advertise and seek patronage because only in this way can they find purchasers and live. These artists, often men of talent, dislike having to advertise; they would rather work for art's sake, but having to do so need not hinder them from working for art's sake, since all that is meant by that much misused phrase is that while the artist is working he shall not think of the reward of his work, but simply and solely of how to do the best work he can.

Before leaving the Emperor's speech one is tempted to inquire what should be the attitude of a sovereign towards art and artists. For the Englishman the doctrine of Individualism--the thing he is so apt to make a fetish of--gives an answer, and, it may be, the right one. The Englishman will probably say that if in any one province of life more than in another freedom should be allowed to originality of conception regarding the form as well as the substance, the manner as well as the matter, it is in the province of art, always provided, of course, that the artist is sane and not guilty of indecency. The artist, like the poet, is born not made; you cannot make an artist, you can only make an artisan. The artist, who represents the Creator, the creative faculty, can influence man: man cannot, and should not try to, influence the artist, but can, and should only, offer him the materials for his art, smooth the way for his endeavour, encourage him in it by sympathetic yet candid criticism, and above all, when he can afford it, by buying the result of his endeavour when it is successful.

This should be the attitude of both monarch and Maecenas: it is an attitude of benevolent neutrality. "I know," such a Maecenas might say to the artist,

"that your artistic faculties move in an atmosphere above as well as on the earth, as I know that above the atmosphere of oxygen and hydrogen which envelops the earth there is an ethereal, a rarefied atmosphere, which stretches to worlds of which all we know is that they exist. If your spirit can soar above this earthly atmosphere, well and good. I, for one, shall do nothing to limit or hinder it: I shall only welcome and applaud and reward whatever effort you make to bring our inner being a step, long or short, nearer to the source of celestial light. Consequently, I offer you no instructions and put no fetters on your imagination."

It takes all sorts of art to make an artistic world, as it takes all sorts of people to make the human world: a world with only classic art in it would be as uninteresting and unthinkable as a world in which every one was of the same character, occupation, and dress.

But it is time to consider the Emperor a little more in detail in relation to his connexion with the arts. If he were not a first-rate monarch he would probably be a first-rate artist. He said once that if he were to be an artist, he would be a sculptor. But if he is not a professional artist he is a connoisseur, a dilettante in the right sense, a lover of the arts, an art-loving prince. The painter Salzmann tells us how he used to go to the Villa Liegnitz in Potsdam to give Prince William lessons, and how the Empress, then Princess William, used to sit with the pupil and his teacher, discussing technical and art questions. A result of the teaching, in addition to the pictures mentioned elsewhere, was an oil-painting, a sea-fight, which still hangs in the Ravene Gallery in Berlin.