"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.
"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."