Thirdly, art, the Emperor says, can only be educative when it elevates instead of descending into the gutter.  Hogarth descended into the gutter.  Gustav Dore depicts the horrors of hell.  Yet both Hogarth and Dore 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.

The Emperor says art “takes its models, supplies itself from the great sources of Mother Nature.”  With all courtesy to the Emperor one may suggest that art, and sane art, takes its models not only from Mother Nature, but also from an almost as prolific a maternal source, namely imagination; and that imagination is limited by no eternal laws we know of, or can even suspect.  Accordingly it is useless to check, or try to check, the imagination by telling it to work in a certain direction—­so long, naturally, as the imagination is not obviously indecent or insane.

Again, the Emperor says that in classical art there reigns an eternal law, the “law of beauty and harmony, of the aesthetic” which is expressed in a “thoroughly complete form” by the ancients.  It is admittedly a delightful and admirable form, but is it thoroughly complete?  Is it the last and only form; and may not the very same law be found by experiment to be at work in future art that cannot be called classical, as it was found to be at work in the various noble schools since classical times?  One must agree with the Emperor that the Greeks and Romans illustrated the “law of beauty and harmony, of the esthetic, in a wonderful manner.”  But it was wonderfully done for their age and intellect.  They did not exhaust the beautiful and harmonious:  far from it.

Neither the world nor mankind has been standing still ever since; certainly the mind of man has not, even though his senses have undergone no elemental change.  Paganism was succeeded by Christianity, and with Christianity came a new art canon, new forms of beauty and harmony—­the Early Italian.  The age of reason followed, bringing with it the Baroque and Rococo canons:  and as time went on, and the world’s mind kept working, came other canons still.  The most recent canon appears to be that of naturalism (the Emperor’s “gutter “) with which artists are now experimentalizing.  None of the canons, be it noticed, destroyed the canon that preceded, because beauty and harmony are indestructible and imperishable.  “A thing of beauty is a joy for ever.”