Unfortunately for precision of thought and speech, though useful for the man in the street, the word “art” has been pressed into the service of metaphor more than almost any other word in language.  We are told in turn that everything is an art—­hair-dressing, salad-dressing (a different kind), lying, flying, dying.  The Germans are trying to make an art of life.  Whistler wrote about the “Gentle Art of Making Enemies.”  One hears of “artful hussies” and “artful dodgers.”  People are described as “artful” in the small diplomacies of intercourse.  Jugglers, acrobats, sword-swallowers, “supers” at the theatre, the men who play the elephant in the pantomime would all be mortified if they were not addressed as “artists,” In short, everything may be called an art.

But what, truly, is art?  The question is as hard to answer satisfactorily as the questions what is truth or what is beauty?  The notion “art” usually occurs to the mind as contrasted with the notion “nature”; the word is derived from the Sanskrit root ar, to plough, to make, to do; and accordingly art may be taken to be something made by man, as contrasted with something made, or grown, or given by God.  How art came into existence it is of course impossible to do more than conjecture.  The necessities of primitive man may have stimulated his inventive powers into originating and developing the useful arts for his physical comfort and convenience; and his desire for recreation after labour, or the mere ennui of idleness, may have urged the same powers into originating and developing the fine and plastic arts for the entertainment of his mind.  Or, lastly, if no better reason can be found, and though Sir Joshua Reynolds laid it down that all models of perfection in art must be sought for on the earth, it may be that seeing and feeling instinctively the glory and beauty of the Creation, mankind began gradually, as its intelligence improved, to burn with a longing to imitate, reproduce, and represent them.

However art arose, it seems true to say, as a German writer has well said, that when a work of art, whether a poem or a picture or a statue, causes in us the thought that so, and in no other way, would we ourselves have expressed the idea, had we the talent, then we may conclude that true art is speaking to us, whatever the idea to be expressed may be.  Everything demands thought, but our thoughts are an unruly folk, which never keep long on the same straight road, and love to wander off to left and right, here finding something new and there throwing away something old.  The artist, when he conceives a plan, has to fight with the host of his thoughts and find a way through them.  They often threaten to divert him from it, but on the other hand they often lead him to his goal by novel paths along which he finds much that is new and valuable.

This is a doctrine that, sensible though it is, would hardly be subscribed to by the Emperor, to whom no new movement in art strongly appeals, and who thinks that such movements, unless founded on the old classical school, the Greek and Roman school of beauty, ought, in the public interest, to be discouraged.  However, let him speak for himself.  He set forth his art creed in a speech which he delivered on December 18, 1901, to the sculptors who had executed the Hohenzollern statues in the famous Siegesallee at Berlin, and which ran substantially as follows:—­