A faculty that in the Emperor has developed with the years is that of applying a sense of humour, not originally small, to the events of everyday life. He is always ready to joke with his soldiers and sailors, with artists, professors, ministers—in short, with men of every class and occupation. Several stories in illustration of his humour are current, but a homely example or two may here suffice. He is sitting in semi-darkness in the parquet at the Royal Opera House. "Le Prophète" is in rehearsal, and it is the last act, in which there is a powder cask, ready to blow everything to atoms, standing outside the cathedral. Fraulein Frieda Hempel, as the heroine, appears with a lighted torch and is about to take her seat on the cask. Suddenly the imperial voice is heard from the semi-gloom: "Fraulein Hempel, it is evident you haven't had a military training or you wouldn't take a light so near a barrel of gunpowder." And the prima donna has to take her place on the other side of the stage. Or he is presenting Professor Siegfried Ochs, the famous manager of the Philharmonic Concerts, with the Order of the Red Eagle, third class, and with a friendly smile gracefully excuses himself for conferring an "Order of the third class on a musician of the first class," by pleading official rule. A third popular anecdote tells of a lady seated beside him at the dinner-table. Salad is being offered to her, but she thinks she is bound to give all her attention to the Emperor and takes no notice of it. Thereupon the Emperor: "Gnadige Frau, an Emperor can wait, but the salad cannot." Possibly the Emperor had in mind Louis XIII, who complained that he never ate a plate of warm soup in his life, it had to pass through so many hands to reach him.
The German takes his theatre as he takes life, seriously. To cough during a performance attracts embarrassing attention, a sneeze almost amounts to misdemeanour. To the German the theatre is a part of the machinery of culture, and accordingly he is not so easily bored as the Anglo-Saxon playgoer, who demands that drama shall contain that great essential of all good drama, action. To the Anglo-Saxon, the more plentiful and rapid the action is, the better. The German, differing from most Anglo-Saxons, likes historical scenes, great processions, costume festivals, the representation of mediæval events in which his monarchs and generals played conspicuous parts. The Emperor has the same disposition and taste.
Yet both national taste and disposition, like other of the nation's characteristics, are slowly altering with the growth of the modern spirit, and Germans now begin to require something of a more modern kind, a more social order, something that comes home more to their business and bosoms. Greater variety in subject is asked for, more laughter and tears, more representations of scenes and life dealing with everyday doings and the fate of the people as distinguished from the doings and fate of their rulers and the upper classes. The Emperor has not followed his people in the new direction. He regards the stage as a vehicle of patriotism, an instrument of education, a guider of artistic taste, an inculcator of old-time morality. Its aim, he appears to think, is not to help to produce, primarily, the good man and good citizen, but the good man and good monarchist, and—perhaps—not so much primarily the good monarchist as the liege subject of the Hohenzollern dynasty. Having secured this, he looks for the elevation of the public taste along his own lines. He assumes that the public taste can be elevated from without, from above, when it can only be elevated proportionately with its progress in general education and its purification from within. Consequently he is for the "classical," as in the other arts. But apart from its aims and uses, the theatre has always appealed to him. His fondness for it is a Hohenzollern characteristic, which has shown itself, with more or less emphasis, in monarch after monarch of the line. Nor is it surprising that monarchs should take pleasure in the stage, since the theatre is one of the places which brings them and their subjects together in the enjoyment of common emotions, and shows them, if only at second hand, the domestic lives of millions, from personal acquaintance with which their royal birth and surroundings exclude them.
The Emperor treats all artists, male and female, in the same friendly and unaffected manner. There is never the least soupçon of condescension in the one case or flirtation in the other, but in both a lively and often unexpectedly well-informed interest in the play or other artistic performance of the occasion, and in the actors' or actresses' personal records. The nationality of the artist has apparently nothing to do with this interest. The Emperor invites French, Italian, English, American or Scandinavian artists to the royal box after a performance as often as he invites the artists of his own country, and, once launched on a conversation, nothing gives him more pleasure than to expound his views on music, painting, or the drama, as the case may be. "Tempo—rhythm—colour," he has been heard to insist on to a conductor whom in the heat of his conviction he had gradually edged into a corner and before whom he stood with gesticulating arms—"All the rest is Schwindel." At an entertainment given by Ambassador Jules Cambon at the French Embassy after the Morocco difficulty had been finally adjusted, he became so interested while talking to a group of French actors that high dignatories of the Empire, including Princes, the Imperial Chancellor and Ministers, standing in another part of the salon, grew impatient and had to detach one of their number to call the Emperor's attention to their presence. Since then, it is whispered, it has become the special function of an adjutant, when the occasion demands it, diplomatically and gently to withdraw the imperial causeur from too absorbing conversation.
Several anecdotes are current having reference to the Emperor as sportsman. One of them, for example, mentions a loving-cup of Frederick William III's time, kept at the hunting lodge of Letzlingen, which is filled with champagne and must be emptied at a draught by anyone visiting the lodge for the first time. This is great fun for the Emperor, who a year or two ago made a number of Berlin guests, including Chancellor von Bethmann-Hollweg, the Austrian Ambassador, Szoghenyi-Marich, the Secretary for the Navy, Admiral von Tirpitz, and the Crown Prince of Greece stand before him and drain the cup. As the story goes, "the attempts of the guests to drink out of the heavy cup, which is fixed into a set of antlers in such a way as to make it difficult to drink without spilling the wine, caused great amusement."
The principles of sport generally, it may be here interpolated, are not quite the same in Germany as in England, though no country has imitated England in regard to sport so closely and successfully as Germany. Up to a comparatively few years ago the Germans had neither inclination nor means for it, and though always enthusiastic hunters, hunting—not the English fox-hunting, but hunting the boar and the bear, the wolf and the deer—was almost the sole form of manly sport practised. Turnen, the most popular sort of German indoor gymnastics, only began in 1861, a couple of years after the birth of the Emperor. There are now nearly a dozen cricket clubs alone in Berlin, football clubs all over the Empire, tennis clubs in every town, rowing clubs at all the seaports and along the large rivers, nearly all following English rules and in numerous cases using English sporting terms. At the same time sport is not the religion it is in England—indeed, to keep up the metaphor, hardly a living creed.
The German attitude towards sport is not altogether the same as the English attitude. In England the object of the game is that the best man shall win, that he shall not be in any way unfairly or unequally handicapped vis-à-vis his opponent, and the honour, not the intrinsic value of the prize, is the main consideration. These principles are not yet fully understood or adopted in Germany, possibly owing to the early military training of the German youth making the carrying off the prize anyhow and by any means the main object. It is Realpolitik in sport, and a Realpolitik which is not wholly unknown in England; but while the spirit of Realpolitik is still perceivable in German sport, it is equally perceivable that the standard English way of viewing sporting competition is becoming more and more approached in Germany.
The Emperor is an enthusiastic patron of sport of all healthy outdoor kinds, not as sympathizing with the English youth's disposition to regard play as work and work as play, to give to his business any time he can spare from his sport, but because he estimates at its full value its place in the national health-budget. His personal likings are for bear-shooting, deer-stalking, and yachting, but he also wields the lawn-tennis racket and the rapier with fair skill. The names of several of his hunting lodges—-Rominten, Springe, Hubertusstock, and so on—are familiar to many people in all countries. Rominten preserve is in East Prussia, and embraces about four square miles, with little lakes and some rising ground. September is the Emperor's favourite month for visiting it. Here one year he shot a famous eight-and-twenty-ender antelope, which had come across from Russian territory. Before the present reign the deer, or pig, or other wild animal used to be beaten up to the royal sportsman of the day, but that practice has long ceased, and the Emperor has to tramp many a mile, and at times crawl on all fours for hundreds of yards, to get a shot.
We have seen that the Emperor's position as King and Emperor renders inevitable his adoption, either of natural bent, which is extremely probable, or from a policy in harmony with the wishes of his people, of a view of the monarch's office that to perhaps most Englishmen living under parliamentary rule must seem antiquated, not to say absurd. This attitude apart, the Emperor possesses, as it is hoped has been sufficiently shown, as modern and progressive a spirit as any of his contemporaries. His instant recognition of all useful modern appliances, particularly, of course, those of possible service in war, is a prominent feature of his mentality. He went, doubtless, too far in heralding Count Zeppelin, in 1909, as "the greatest man of the century," but the very words he chose to use marked his appreciation of the new aeronautical science Count Zeppelin was introducing. Similarly, the moment the automobile had entered on the stage of reliability it won a place in the imperial favour, and is now his most constant means of locomotion. He has never, it is true, emulated the enterprise of his son, the Crown Prince, whom Mr. Orville Wright had as a companion for a quarter of an hour in the air at Potsdam three years ago, but his interest in the aeroplane is none the less keen because he is too conscious of his responsibilities to subject his life to unnecessary risk.
Before closing our sketch of the Emperor as a man by quoting appreciations written by two contemporary writers, one German and the other English, it may be added that there is a statesman still—it is pleasant to think—alive who could, an he only would, draw the Emperor's character perfectly, both as man and monarch. Indeed, as has been seen, he has more than once sketched parts of it in Parliament, but only parts—the whole character of the Emperor, on all its sides and in all its ramifications, has yet to be revealed. Here need only be quoted what Chancellor Bülow—and also, by the way, Princess Bülow—publicly said about the Emperor as man. The Prince's most noteworthy statement was made in the Reichstag in 1903, when, in answer to Leader-of-the-Opposition Bebel, the Prince said, "One thing at least, the Emperor is no Philistine," and proceeded to explain, rather negatively and disappointingly, that the Emperor possesses what the Greeks call megalopsychia—a great soul. One knows but too well the English Philistine, that stolid, solid, self-sufficient bulwark of the British Constitution. The German Philistine is his twin brother, the narrow-minded, conservative burgher. Other epithets the Prince applied to the imperial character were "simple," "natural," "hearty," "magnanimous," "clear-headed," and "straightforward"; while Princess Bülow, during a conversation her husband was having with the French journalist, M. Jules Huret, in 1907, interjected the remark that he was "a person of good birth, fils de bonne maison, the descendant of distinguished ancestors, and a modern man of great intelligence."