“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.”

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.”