is no field in which he so persistently or, be it said, so tactlessly seeks to force on his people what should remain his private views, so is there no subject upon which the Emperor has alienated sympathies as much as on this question of art. There is also the matter of his admiration for England and things English which one class of German can never forgive; but that is a chapter to itself.

The deep religious sense which underlies all artistic natures, and which is so marked a trait in the Emperor's character, makes his principles of art appear in his eyes a kind of religious belief in which, as a good ruler, he holds it to be the interest of his people to share.

With his domineering character and indomitable will thus coming into conflict with a people whose views on art are as independent and obtrusive as the German's, the result is bound to be a collision, and it is a commonplace that differences æsthetic are usually more violent than political disputes. A stern disciplinarian, almost a martinet, in everything, the Emperor has always been accustomed to form independent views; but in the case of art his early training in the parental house strengthened his adherence to the tenets of rigorous orthodoxy. Brought up under the æsthetic influence of his refined English mother, herself an amateur artist of no small talent, the Emperor early developed an inborn taste for the fine arts, a love of beauty of line and form, and an appreciation of the masterpieces of the world. The Empress Frederick he himself has described as "a woman whose every thought was art, and in whom all destined for the uses of life was redolent of beauty." William II. has declared that as "heir and executor of his parents' art testament, he will hold his hand over the German people, and the growing generation, cherish in it the beautiful, and bring

out the art within it." It is in trying to live up to this self-imposed task that the Emperor has come into conflict with those of his subjects who claim absolute freedom of æsthetic thought on the ground that art, to flourish and thus fulfil its mission, must be free.

The tastes of the Emperor and Empress Frederick rose above the narrowminded Philistinism of the Prussian kings, who saw in the painter and sculptor but instruments for the decoration of their palaces and the glorification of their names. The Imperial couple had ideals of a loftier art, a "Volkskunst," to have its being in the public thoroughfares, to be free of access, to delight the eye and fertilize the imagination of the people. Their creed would know nothing of an art that languished behind a barrier of sentries and lackeys in Royal palaces and private collections.

The exposition of the didactic art theory by monarchs, however, always tends to narrow their field of vision, a result which in things æsthetic defeats its own ends. The reason for this lies in the very essence of monarchy. Be his education, his surroundings, what they may, a monarch's range of vision must, by the mere fact of his exalted position, be limited, and certainly, as far as art is concerned. the measure of his autocratic power stands in inverse ratio to the breadth of his mental field. The worship of tradition, the cult of ancestry, with which rulers are surrounded from the cradle to the grave, make the exposition of this theory of didactic art a dangerous, even a pernicious, influence on the national artistic development. For art, as expounded on these lines by the ruler, assumes patriotism and loyalty to be the highest virtues, and accordingly depends for its effect as much on the educatory appeal made by the subject represented as on the æsthetic influence of color and form. Be

fore this pompous protegée of kings, the art of every-day life, the art that outlines the beautiful in the things around us, must hide her head in oblivion. This is well brought out by the writer of a review appearing in the Cologne Gazette of a work published last year on the Emperor's relation to art. The reviewer says: "As the history of most art-protecting princes shows, and as, indeed, by virtue of a ruler's special position, is also quite natural, he (the Emperor), like his parents, primarily thinks of great monumental art, or as he puts it himself, of an ideal mission of art whereupon historical art automatically places itself to the fore, while only a diminished interest remains for bourgeois art or art on a small scale. The latter is not credited with the educational influence aimed at. From such views results, as a matter of course, insistence on the concrete."

The Emperor was ever a man to plough a straight furrow, and in this question of art, once having set his hand to the plough, he has never looked back. With heart and soul he has flung himself into the task of executing the will of his parents. His natural inclinations lean towards the plastic in art. He once remarked to a sculp tor whose studio he was visiting, "If I were not the Emperor, I should like to have been a sculptor." And in sculpture he sees the readiest instrument for accomplishing the artistic ed. ucation of his people. With this end in view he has set up throughout the length and breadth of his beautiful capital statues and monuments in shining white marble, dull gleaming bronze, or massive granite. There is the SiegesAllee in the Tiergarten, an avenue containing statues of the forefathers of the holders of the Prussian throne. It

"Der Kaiser und die Kunst." By Professor Paul Seidel. Director of the Hohenzollern Museum and the Art Collections of the Royal Castles. (A. Schall, Berlin.)

is a cold, lifeless place, this Sieges-Allee, recalling, with its sixteen white figures a side, one of the interminable avenues in Père la Chaise. Each robber duke or puling princeling of those bygone days is backed by a marble bench surmounted by busts of prominent men of the time. The figures themselves are stiff and staring, like so many Prussian guardsmen on parade. The laying out of the avenue involved the sacrifice of many beautiful old trees. Their destruction gave the Berliner an opportunity of displaying his talents for caustic criticism, which the vernacular succinctly sums up in the epithet schnodrig. The unhappy Sieges-Allee is still a fertile theme for the German humorist, and at the time of its construction was the butt of every caricaturist and CoupletSänger in Germany. On the terrace of the Berlin Schloss the Kaiser erected more statues of his ancestors, this time the rulers of the House of Orange, one of which statues, that of William III., was presented in replica to King Edward, and now stands in front of Kensington Palace. A charmingly situated clearing in the heart of the Tiergarten, known as the Grosser Stern, was disfigured by a series of utterly expressionless hunting groups in au impossible yellow bronze, the presentation of which, by the Berlin Tramway Company, was maliciously interpreted as a wisely calculated libation to the gods who preside over concessions in the Prussian capital.

The Kaiser is accustomed to indicate to the sculptor the nature of the statue he proposes to erect, and frequently makes radical alterations in the model according to his own artistic ideas. The King of Prussia has the right of putting his royal embargo on any monument to be erected in a public place in Berlin, and the present wearer of the crown does not hesitate to exercise his prerogative if he sees fit. It is.

therefore, obvious that the muse of the sculptors employed by the Emperor must obey the dictates of the Imperial blue pencil, a condition which seems entirely incompatible with theories of the divine inspiration of the artist. That this censorship has a stultifying effect is not surprising. It almost invariably strangles that divine afflatus which alone can breathe life into the cold stone. Public criticism of some of the works executed in fulfilment of the Imperial commands is so severe as to give the impression (which undoubtedly prevails in some art circles in Germany) that the acceptance of a commission from the Kaiser is a confession of mediocrity.

But if in plastic art criticism of the Emperor's tenets is general, in painting the antitheses are more pronounced and more acute. It is worth while to examine the standponts of both camps. The Kaiser's position is clear, for he has taken frequent occasion to make public confession of his doctrines. His views are summed up in his own saying: "I recognize no directions (Richtungen) in art: I recognize only art, noble art." He ruthlessly condemns what he regards as the self-advertising tendency of the modern school. The admitted aim of the Modernists to appeal to the spectator by the aid of impression, to reproduce the picture as it presents itself to the fine frenzy of the artist-the art pour l'art theory in short -is rejected by the Emperor as an evil growth of modern times, which it is his duty, as father of his people, to cut away at the roots. To him the rules of art are firmly established, and the art student must go to the Old Masters to catch the reflected light to show him the way to the steps of the throne, the protector of the artist. And that way is only reached over the beaten track of convention.

A classical instance of what the Emperor understands under his artistic

ideals was recently afforded by the Loan Collection of Old English Masters, a notable exhibition which was the clou of last year's winter season in Berlin. The distinguished and beautiful subjects of the Gainsboroughs. Romneys, and Reynolds, the perfection of pose, the beauty of coloring, the warmth of the flesh tones, instantly inflamed the Imperial imagination. These Old Masters went straight home to the Kaiser's English heart, embodying as they do all he considers most noble. most enlightening, in art. In the course of his numerous visits to the Academy of Arts, where the exhibition was housed, the Emperor never wearied of emphasizing the difference between these masters of their craft and the "Modernen." An intimate of his Majesty, one privileged to indulge in a little mild chaff on occasion, to whom the Kaiser appealed for corroboration of his glowing eulogy of Lawrence's "Miss Elizabeth Farren," said: "Well, sire, does it not seem to you that there is a touch of Modernism. . .” The Emperor did not let him finish. "Don't mention that word in my presence," was his immediate rejoinder.

In

Adolf von Menzel and Anton von Werner, both of them artists whose works are almost exclusively devoted to depicting the achievements of the House of Hohenzollern and of the Prussian Army, found in the Emperor an appreciative and generous Mæcenas. his many years of tireless toil von Menzel produced some masterpieces, but this cannot be said of von Werner. whose pictures never rose above what they were intended to be, stirring battle scenes, and nothing more. It is not hard to see in what way these painters' work, reviewing in the case of the former the glories of the Frederician era, and of the latter the bloody romance of the welding of the German Empire, appealed to the Kaiser. With von Werner the Betonung des Stoffli

chen, the reliance on such thrilling episodes as the storming of the Düppel entrenchments or the cavalry charge at Gravelotte results in satisfying the æsthetic demands of the people without calling into play or bringing out its artistic sense at all.

The Modernists-and it must be remembered that the Secessionist form only a fragment of their number-are an aggrieved body. They claim for the young artist the right to free himself from the fetters of the past, so be it his talent impels him that way; the right to bring to canvas the expression of his artistic ideas unhampered by hide-bound tradition. They protest in the name of art against official ostracism of ideas that do not happen to harmonize with the Court view. They protest against the accusation of selfadvertisement, a generalization which might equally apply to any branch of the fine arts. But the "Modernen" are more aggrieved than angry. Their grievance is that the Emperor, in rigidly confining his mind within the narrow bounds of his art doctrines, has lost touch with the development of German art in all its manifold departments -painting, sculpture, architecture, and art industry. In the years of peace which have elapsed since William II. came to the throne the development of art has been as rapid as the progress of trade and industry. It is a matter of controversy whether this advance has been in the right direction, but by striking out for itself new roads it has shown the life that is within it, and has produced work that is worthy of a better fate than wholesale condemnation in one breath with the worst perpetrations of the Secession. When Kaiser Frederick died twenty years ago modern German art was yet in its cradle at Munich. Since then it has grown into a comely maid, who is enthroned at art centres throughout the empire, at Düsseldorf, Stuttgart, Karlsruhe,

and Dresden. It has brought out such talents as Böcklin, Lenbach, Klinger and Thoma. Who that has ever seen the painting can forget the magic charm of Böcklin's "Die Insel der Toten," the towering rock, the gloomy cypresses overhanging the silver pool, the secret silence which the painting breathes out? Is a school which can claim such a masterpiece as its own to languish beneath the ban of Imperial displeasure? That modern German art is in so thriving a condition is the best proof of its strength to weather the frowns from the throne. And that Böcklin's pictures and Lenbach's portraits-notably the latter's impressive portrait of Bismarck-are to be found in the home of every German of taste, in the same way that Gainsboroughs and Reynolds adorn the walls of so many English houses, is but another sign that in this question of art popular feeling runs strongly counter to the Emperor's attitude.

To be strictly fair, the line of development which modern art in Germany has taken is calculated to fill the man of taste with amazment, nay, even with horror. The Germans, as a people, were never noted for their refinement of taste, but the orgies of inartistic license revealed in the architecture. furniture designs, and sculpture of modern Germany are certainly an excuse for the Kaiser's intransigeance. No city bears the marks of the modern movement more clearly than Berlin. The wave of Græco-Roman "stuccoco" architecture, which, to judge by the relics seen to-day, must have made the London of the sixties so depressing a place to live in, did not sweep over Germany to nearly the same extent as it ravaged England. From the discreet and chaste late Renaissance style of Schinkel, who flourished in Berlin at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century, there was a gradual transition to the orna

mental, pseudo-old German house of the seventies. These houses are, in their turn, giving way rapidly to strange baroque creations which combine in their motley heterogeneousness a dozen styles, and might have been transported out of the pages of the Yellow Book. The new blocks of flats in the residential quarters of Berlin, with their turrets and gables, their painted walls and green copper roofs, give an idea en passant of the struggle which is now going on between the artistic and the bizarre in modern German art.

Intelligent Germans who deplore the sharp antithesis existing between the Kaiser and the majority of German artists admit that the license which is now running riot and playing havoc with German art must be checked, and they welcome the Emperor's efforts to enforce a healthy tone based on respect for convention. But they feel that, as in the Court scandals there was found no one in the Imperial entourage who had the courage to draw the Kaiser's attention to what all the world was saying about men in his immediate suite, so in this question of art there is nobody to keep the monarch au courant with the talent, the real talent, which the new movement is producing. An enthusiast for sculpture, what does the Emperor know of Rodin or Meunier? Little or nothing; for the two sculptors are modern, almost socialistic in their art, and there is no one in the Emperor's vicinity who would dare point out to this monarch, whose culture is so real and deep-rooted, the The Contemporary Review.

sublime force of "Le Penseur" or the mute eloquence of the series "Le Travail." Of Meunier he can know but little, or he would have visited the wonderful exhibition of his works which was held in Berlin a couple of years ago. But Rodin and Munier belong to the new school-basta cosi!

It is not as though art under official protection had thriven. There is as much, if not more, infinite rubbish exhibited at the annual summer Salon, held under entirely official auspices, as at the little collection on the Kurfürstendamm. The monuments and statues with which Berlin has of late years been so liberally endowed are, for the most part, stiff and ultra-conventional. It is not surprising, therefore, that there should be a feeling that the Kaiser's ideals of art, in themselves lofty, but unchastened by contradiction and stunted in their growth by deprivation of the light and air of free discussion, have been allowed to degenerate into a mere didactic instrument. The introduction of the personal régime in politics has been an accompanying phase of the political situation in Germany for so long that people have become almost reconciled to it, but the interference of the Crown in æsthetic matters grates on the nation's feelings the more for that the inclinations of the German are rather for art than polities. The controversy, although the first heat has slackened with the lapse of years, is still smouldering, and the historian will have to gauge its effects on the relations between Emperor and people in William II.'s illustrious reign. Eulenspiegel.