William of Germany Part 24
"I was standing within arm's length of him at Cuxhaven, where we were waiting the landing of Prince Henry, his brother, on his return from America. The _Deutschland_ had to be warped alongside the quay, and the Emperor, in the uniform of a Prussian general of infantry, meanwhile mixed with the suite and chatted, now to one, now to another, with his usual bonhomie. I was speaking to the American attache, Captain H----, when the Emperor came up, and naturally I stood a little to one side.
"The thing that most struck me was the Emperor's large grey eyes. As they looked sharply into those of Captain H---- or glanced in my direction, they seemed to show absolutely no feeling, no sentiment of any kind. Not that they gave the notion of hardness or falsity. They were simply like two grey mirrors on which outward things made no impression.
"Two other features did not strike me as anything out of the ordinary, but the whole face had an air of ability, cleverness, briskness, and health. The Emperor is about middle height, with the body very erect, the walk firm, and is very energetic in his gestures. I did not notice the shortness of the left arm, but that may have been because his left hand was leaning on his sword-hilt. Captain H---- told me he could not put on his overcoat without a.s.sistance, and that the hand is so weak he can do very little with it.
There was nothing of a Hohenzollern hanging under-lip."
The following judgment was formed a year or two ago by an American diplomatist: "I have often met him," the diplomatist said,
"and only speak of the impression he made on me. I would describe him as intelligent rather than intellectual. He appreciates men of learning and of philosophic mind, and while not learned and philosophic himself, enjoys seeing the learned and philosophic at work, and gladly recognizes their merit when their labours are thorough and well done. His mind is marvellously quick, but it does not dwell on anything for long at a time. It takes in everything presented to it in, so to speak, a hop, skip, and jump.
"In company he is never at rest, and surprises one by his lively play of features and the entirely natural and unaffected expression of his thoughts. He is sitting at a lecture, perhaps, when a notion occurs to him, and forthwith indicates it by a humorous grimace or wink to some one sitting far away from him. He is always saying unexpected things. On the whole, he is a right good fellow, and I can imagine that, though he can come down hard on one with a heavy hand and stern look, he does not do so by the instinct of a despot, but acting under a sense of duty."
Another diplomatist has remarked the Emperor's habit in conversation of tapping the person he is talking to on the shoulder and of scrutinizing him all over--"ears, nose, clothes, until it makes one feel quite uncomfortable."
The next sketch of him is as he may be seen any day during the yachting week in June at Kiel:--
"The Emperor is in the smoking-room of the Yacht Club, dressed in a blue lounge suit with a white peaked cap. He is sitting carelessly on the side of a table, dangling his legs and discussing with fellow-members and foreign yachtsmen the experience of the day, now speaking English, now French, now German. He seems quite in his element as sportsman, and puts every one at ease round him. His expression is animated and his voice hearty, if a little strident to foreign ears. His right hand and arm are in ceaseless movement, emphasizing and enforcing everything he says. He asks many questions and often invites opinion, and when it differs from his own, as sometimes happens, he takes it quite good-humouredly."
To-day the Emperor is outwardly much the same as he has just been described. He is perhaps slightly more inclined to stoutness. His features, though they speak of cleverness and manliness, are forgotten as one looks into the keen and quickly moving grey eyes with their peculiar dash of yellow. He is well set up, as is proper for a soldier ever actively engaged in military duties, and his stride continues firm and elastic. He is still constantly in the saddle. His hair, still abundant, is yet beginning to show the first touches of the coming frost of age, and the reddish brown moustache, once famous for its haughtily upturned ends, has taken, either naturally or by the aid of Herr Haby, the Court barber, who attends him daily, a nearly level form.
In public, whether mounted or on foot, he preserves the somewhat stern air he evidently thinks appropriate to his high station, but more frequently than formerly the features relax into a pleasant smile. The colour of the face is healthy, tending to rosiness, and the general impression given is that of a clever man, conscious, yet not overconscious, of his dignity. The shortness of the left arm, a defect from birth, is hardly noticeable.
The extirpation of a polypus from the Emperor's throat in 1903, which must have been one of the severest trials of his life when the history of his father's mortal illness is remembered, might lead one to suppose that his vocal organs would always suffer from the effects of the operation. It has fortunately turned out otherwise. His voice was originally strong by nature, and remains so. It never seems tired, even when, as it often does, it pleases him to read aloud for his own pleasure or that of a circle of friends. It frequently occurs that he will pick up a book, one of his ancient favourites, Horace or Homer perhaps, Mr. Stewart Houston Chamberlain's "Foundations of the Nineteenth Century"--a work he greatly admires--or a modern publication he has read of in the papers, and read aloud from it for an hour or an hour and a half at a time. Nor is his reading aloud confined to cla.s.sical or German books. He is equally disposed to choose works in English or French or Italian, and when he reads these he is fond of doing so with a particularly clear and distinct enunciation, partly as practice for himself, and partly that his hearers may understand with certainty. This is not all, for there invariably follows a discussion upon what has been read, and in it the Emperor takes a constant and often emphatic part. It has been remarked that at the close of the longest sitting of this character his voice is as strong and sonorous as at the beginning.
He is still the early riser and hard worker he has always been; still devotes the greater part of his time to the duties that fall to him as War Lord; still races about the Empire by train or motor-car, reviewing troops, laying foundation-stones, unveiling statues, dedicating churches, attending manoeuvres, encouraging yachting at Kiel by his presence during the yachting week, or hurrying off to meet the monarch of a foreign country. He still enjoys his annual trip along the sh.o.r.es of Norway or breaks away from the cares of State to pa.s.s a few weeks at his Corfu castle, dazzling in its marble whiteness and overlooking the Acroceraunian mountains, or to hunt or shoot at the country seat of some influential or wealthy subject. In fine, he is still engaged with all the energy of his nature, if in a somewhat less flamboyant fashion than during his earlier years, in his, as he believes, divinely appointed work of guiding Prussia's destiny and building up the German Empire.
It is because he is an Empire-builder that his numerous journeys abroad and restlessness of movement at home have earned for him the nickname of the "travelling Kaiser." The Germans themselves do not understand his conduct in this respect. If one urges that Hohenzollern kings, and none of them more than the Great Elector and Frederick the Great, were incessant travellers, they will reply that their kings had to be so at a time when the Empire was not yet established, when rebellious n.o.bles had to be subdued, and when the spirit of provincialism and particularism had to be counteracted. Hence, they say, former Hohenzollerns had to exercise personal control in all parts of their dominions, see that their military dispositions were carried out, and study social and economic conditions on the spot; but nowadays, when the Empire is firmly established, when the administration is working like a clock and the post and telegraph are at command, the Emperor should stay at home and direct everything from his capital.
The Emperor himself evidently takes a different view. He does not consider the forty-year-old Empire as completed and consolidated, but regards it much as the Great Elector or Frederick the Great regarded Prussia when that kingdom was in the making. He believes in propagating the imperial idea by his personal presence in all parts of the Empire, and at the same time observing the progress that is being made there. He is, finally, a believer in getting into personal touch, as far as is possible, with foreign monarchs, foreign statesmen, and foreign peoples, for he doubtless sees that with every decade the interests of nations are becoming more closely identified.
In connexion with the subject of the Emperor's travelling, mention may be made of the fact that many years ago he thought it necessary to explain himself publicly in reference to the idea, prevalent among his people at the time, that he was travelling too much. "On my travels,"
he said,
"I design not only to make myself acquainted with foreign countries and inst.i.tutions, and to foster friendly relations with neighbouring rulers, but these journeys, which have been often misinterpreted, have high value in enabling me to observe home affairs from a distance and submit them to a quiet examination."
He expresses something in the same order of thought in a speech telling of his reflections on the high sea concerning his responsibilities as ruler:
"When one is alone on the high sea, with only G.o.d's starry heaven above him, and holds communion with himself, one will not fail to appreciate the value of such a journey. I could wish many of my countrymen to live through hours like these, in which one can take reckoning of what he has designed and what achieved. Then one would be cured of over self-estimation--and that we all need."
When the Emperor is about to start on a journey, confidential telegrams are sent to the railway authorities concerned, and immediately a thorough inspection of the line the Emperor is about to travel over is ordered. Tunnels, bridges, points, railway crossings, are all subjected to examination, and spare engines kept in immediate readiness in case of a breakdown occurring to the imperial train. The police of the various towns through which the monarch is to pa.s.s are also communicated with and their help requisitioned in taking precautions for his safety. Like any private person, the Emperor pays his own fares, which are reckoned at the rate of an average of fifteen shillings to one pound sterling a mile. A recent journey to Switzerland cost him in fares 200. Of late years he has saved money in this respect by the more frequent use of the royal motor-cars. The royal train is put together by selecting those required from fifteen carriages which are always ready for an imperial journey. If the journey is short, a saloon carriage and refreshment car are deemed sufficient; in case of a long journey the train consists of a buffer carriage in addition, with two saloon cars for the suite and two wagons for the luggage. The train is always accompanied by a high official of the railway, who, with mechanics and spare guard, is in direct telephonic communication with the engine-driver and guard. The carriages are coloured alike, ivory-white above the window-line and lacquered blue below.
All the carriages, with the exception of the saloon dining-car, are of the corridor type. A table runs down the centre of the dining-car; the Emperor takes his seat in the centre, while the rest of the suite and guests take their places at random, save that the elder travellers are supposed to seat themselves about the Emperor. If the Emperor has guests with him they naturally have seats beside or in the near neighbourhood of their host. Breakfast is taken about half-past eight, lunch at one, and dinner at seven or eight. The Emperor is always talkative at table, and often draws into conversation the remoter members of the company, occasionally calling to them by their nickname or a pet name. He sits for an hour or two after dinner, with a gla.s.s of beer and a huge box of cigars before him, discussing the incidents of the journey or recalling his experiences at various periods of his reign.
The Emperor's disposition of the year remains much what it was at the beginning of the reign. The chief changes in it are the omission of a yachting visit to Cowes, which he made annually from 1889 to 1895, and, since 1908, the habit of making an annual summer stay at his Corfu castle, "Achilleion," instead of touring in the Mediterranean and visiting Italian cities. January is spent in Berlin in connexion with the New Year festivities, amba.s.sadorial and other Court receptions, drawing-rooms, and b.a.l.l.s, and the celebration of his birthday on the 27th. The Berlin season extends into the middle of February, so that part of that month also is spent in Berlin. During the latter half of February and in March the Emperor is usually at Potsdam, occasionally motoring to Berlin to give audience or for some special occasion. April and part of May are pa.s.sed in Corfu. Towards the end of May the Emperor returns to Germany and goes to Wiesbaden for the opera and Festspiele in the royal theatre; but he must be in Berlin before May has closed, for the spring parade of the Berlin and Potsdam garrisons on the vast Tempelhofer Field. His return on horseback from this parade is always the occasion of popular enthusiasm in Berlin's princ.i.p.al streets. In early June the Emperor stays at Potsdam or perhaps pays a visit to some wealthy n.o.ble, and at the end of the month the yachting week calls him to Kiel. Once that is over he proceeds on his annual tour along the coast of Norway.
September sees him back in Germany for the autumn manoeuvres. October and November are devoted to shooting at Rominten or some other imperial hunting lodge, or with some large landowner or industrial magnate. The whole of December is usually spent at Potsdam, save for an annual visit to his friend Prince Furstenberg at Donaueschingen.
Naturally he is in Potsdam for Christmas, when all the imperial family a.s.semble to celebrate the festival in good old German style.
In music, as we know, he retains the cla.s.sical tastes he has always cultivated and sometimes dictatorially recommended. Good music, he has said, is like a piece of lace, not like a display of fireworks. He still has most musical enjoyment in listening to Bach and Handel. The former he has spoken of as one of the most "modern" of composers, and will point out that his works contain melodious pa.s.sages that might be the musical thought of Franz Lehar or Leo Fall. He has no great liking for the music of Richard Strauss, and his admiration of Wagner, if certain themes, that must, one feels, have been drawn from the music of the spheres, be excepted, is respectful rather than rapturous. Of Wagner's works the "Meistersingers" is "my favourite."
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 cla.s.s and occupation. Several stories in ill.u.s.tration 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 Prophete" 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 cla.s.s, and with a friendly smile gracefully excuses himself for conferring an "Order of the third cla.s.s on a musician of the first cla.s.s," 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 pa.s.s through so many hands to reach him.
The German takes his theatre as he takes life, seriously. To cough during a performance attracts embarra.s.sing 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 mediaeval 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 cla.s.ses. 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 a.s.sumes 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 "cla.s.sical," 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 soupcon 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 Amba.s.sador Jules Cambon at the French Emba.s.sy 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 Amba.s.sador, 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 amus.e.m.e.nt."
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 att.i.tude towards sport is not altogether the same as the English att.i.tude. 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-a-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 compet.i.tion 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 att.i.tude 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 Bulow--and also, by the way, Princess Bulow--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 Const.i.tution. 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 Bulow, 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."
But let us see how the Emperor appears to his contemporaries. Dr. Paul Liman, who has made the most serious attempt to sketch the character of the Emperor that has yet appeared in German, writes:--
"We see in him a nature whose ground-tone is enthusiasm, phantasy, and a pa.s.sionate impulse towards action. Filled with the highest sense of the imperial rights and duties a.s.signed to him, convinced that these are the direct expression of a divine will, he has inwardly thrown off the bonds of modern const.i.tutional ideas and in words recently spoken, where he claimed responsibility for fifty-eight million people, converted these ideas into a formula that, while unconst.i.tutional, is yet moral and deeply earnest.
These words were doubly valuable as giving insight into the soul of a man who can be mistaken in his conclusions and means, but not in his motives, since these are directed to the general weal. Here, too, we find the explanation of the fact that at one time he comes before us surrounded with the blue and hazy nimbus of the romantic period, and at another as the most modern prince of our time. Out of the rise in him of the consciousness of majesty there grows a greater sense of duty, and instead of keeping watch from his turret over his people he loses himself in detail. And precisely here must he fail, because modern life with its development is far too rich in complications and activities to admit of its submitting to patriarchal benevolence. And because an artistic strain and a strong fantasy simultaneously work in him, he moves joyfully beyond the limits of the actual to raise before our eyes the highly coloured dream of the picture of a time in which all men, all nations, will be friendly and reconciled--an artist's dream. Here is something characteristic, something unusual, to give particular charm to a personality which has no parallel in the history of the dynasty hitherto. There may be concealed in it the seed of ill.u.s.trious deeds, but only too often disappointment and contempt lie scornfully in wait when the deed is accomplished. For the heaven we erect on earth always comes to naught, and the idealist is always vanquished in the strife with fact."
So far, Dr. Liman. Mr. Sydney Brooks, in a sketch in _Maclure's Magazine_ for July, 1910, writes:--
"The drawback to any and to every _regime_ of paternal absolutism is that the human mind is limited. The Kaiser will not admit it, but his acts prove it. It is not given to one man to know more about everything than anybody else knows about anything; and the Kaiser, who is a good deal of a dilettante, and believes himself omniscient, at times speaks from a lamentable half-knowledge, and occasionally has to call in the imperial authority to back up his verdicts against the judgments of experts.
"Unquestionably his mind is of an unusual order. It is a facile, quickly moving instrument; it works in flashes; it a.s.similates seemingly without effort, and it is at its best under the highest pressure. The Kaiser is not to be laughed at for wanting to know all there is to be known, but he may justly be criticized for failing to distinguish between the attempt and its failure....
"Is it all charlatanerie? Is it all of a part with his speech in Russian to the regiment of which the Czar made him honorary colonel, a studied trumpery effort, designed for a momentary effect? Is the Kaiser just glitter and tinsel, impulse and rhapsody, with nothing solid beneath? Is it his supreme object to make an impression at any cost, to force, like another Nero, the popular applause by arts more becoming to a _cabotin_ than a sovereign? Vanity, restlessness, a consuming desire for the palm without the dust--an intense and theatrical egotism--are these the qualities that give the clue to his character and actions?
"I do not think so altogether. The Kaiser has scattered too much. In an age of specialists on many subjects he speaks like an amateur. He is always the hero, and often the victim, of his own imagination; like a star actor, he cannot bear to be outshone; he is morbidly, almost pruriently, conscious of the effect he is producing. And on all matters of intellect and taste his influence makes for blatant mediocrity. But he is not meretricious; at bottom he is not by any means as superficial and insincere as he often seems.
He is one of those men in whom an instinct becomes an immutable truth, an idea a conviction, and a suspicion a certainty, by an almost instantaneous process; and, the process completed, action follows forthwith. The Kaiser is always resolved to do the right thing; the right thing, by some quaint but invariable coincidence, is whatever he is resolved to do."
These appreciations from afar may be as sound as they are brilliant, but they rather refer to the non-essential parts of the character of the Emperor in the first flush of imperial glory than to the essential character as it has developed with the years.
As a man--he will be dealt with as monarch presently--his essential character must be judged from his conduct, and conduct extending over a good many years. One might say, conduct and reputation, but that reputation is so often the result of a confused mixture of superficial observation, gossip, t.i.ttle-tattle, envy, hatred and uncharitableness, and, in the case of an Emperor, of merely picturesque and effective writing.
There is another source which would materially help us in forming a judgment, but it is wholly wanting in the case of the Emperor. No private correspondence of his is, as yet, available to the world.
Again, a man's character is determined by his motives, if it is not the other way about; in any case, a man's motives are for the most part inscrutable and can only be deduced from conduct, while the world usually makes the mistake of explaining conduct by attributing its own motives. Tried, then, by the standard of conduct, the only one available, the Emperor, as a man, shows us a high type of humanity. It may not, probably does not, appeal to Englishmen wholly, but there are features of it which must command, and do command, the respect of people of all nationalities. And, first of all, he is a good man; good as a Christian, good as a husband, good as a father, good as a patriot. With all the power and temptation to gratify his inclinations, he has no personal vices of the baser sort. He is moderate in the satisfaction of his appet.i.tes, whether for food or wine. He is no debauchee, no voluptuary, no gambler. He is faithful to old friends and comrades. He has high ideals, and is not ashamed of them. He is neither indolent nor fussy; neither a cynic, nor an intriguer, nor a fool; he is neither wrong-headed nor stubborn; he is honest and sincere to a degree that does him honour as a man, if it has sometimes proved perilous and blameworthy in him as a monarch. He is optimistic, and on good grounds. He is no physical or intellectual giant, but he is a man of more than average all-round intelligence and capacity. If this appreciation is correct, or even approximately correct, it is a testimonial, whatever may be its worth, to great merit.
Yet the Emperor as man has his failings and drawbacks, though they are such as time is almost sure to diminish or eradicate. Notably in his earlier years he lacked judgment, the power of balancing considerations and arriving at conclusions from them which men more gifted with poise would endorse as logical and inevitable. He does not, like spare Ca.s.sius, see quite through the deeds of men, as his friendship for Count Phili Eulenburg and the malodorous "Camarilla" go to show, and his choice of Imperial Chancellors, his grand viziers, has not in every instance been happy. He has less tact than character, as he showed once in Vienna, where he greatly pained the Foreign Minister, Count Goluchowski, one day at a club by calling to him, "Golu, Golu, come and sit beside your Kaiser." He has the German masculine enjoyment in a kind of humour which would have delighted Fox and the three-bottle men, but would sadly shock the susceptibilities of an Oxford aesthete. He has a share of personal vanity, but it springs from the desire to look the Emperor he is, not because he supposes for a moment that he is an Adonis. He is theatrical in exactly the same spirit--the desire imperially to impress his folk in the sense of the German word _imponieren_, a word that needs no translation. If he has lost much of Dr. Liman's "romantik," he still retains the "scatteredness" of Mr. Sidney Brooks, though the Emperor would rather hear it called "many-sidedness." _En resume_ he has the defects of his qualities, but to no man or woman's unmerited loss or injury, and if we weigh the good qualities with the bad, we find a fine balance remaining to his credit as a man.
The fierce light which beats upon a throne, if it is apt to dazzle the bystander, helps those at a distance, especially in these days of the still fiercer light of modern publicity, to judge fairly the throne's occupant. The character of the Emperor as monarch ought, therefore, as far as is possible in the absence of archives marked "secret and confidential" and yet lying in the ministries of all countries, to disclose itself nowadays with reasonable clearness. Yet, even still, different and conflicting opinions regarding it are to be gathered in Germany and out of it.