William of Germany

by Stanley Shaw

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.