Before leaving the Emperor’s speech one is tempted to inquire what should be the attitude of a sovereign towards art and artists.  For the Englishman the doctrine of Individualism—­the thing he is so apt to make a fetish of—­gives an answer, and, it may be, the right one.  The Englishman will probably say that if in any one province of life more than in another freedom should be allowed to originality of conception regarding the form as well as the substance, the manner as well as the matter, it is in the province of art, always provided, of course, that the artist is sane and not guilty of indecency.  The artist, like the poet, is born not made; you cannot make an artist, you can only make an artisan.  The artist, who represents the Creator, the creative faculty, can influence man:  man cannot, and should not try to, influence the artist, but can, and should only, offer him the materials for his art, smooth the way for his endeavour, encourage him in it by sympathetic yet candid criticism, and above all, when he can afford it, by buying the result of his endeavour when it is successful.

This should be the attitude of both monarch and Maecenas:  it is an attitude of benevolent neutrality.  “I know,” such a Maecenas might say to the artist,

“that your artistic faculties move in an atmosphere above as well as on the earth, as I know that above the atmosphere of oxygen and hydrogen which envelops the earth there is an ethereal, a rarefied atmosphere, which stretches to worlds of which all we know is that they exist.  If your spirit can soar above this earthly atmosphere, well and good.  I, for one, shall do nothing to limit or hinder it:  I shall only welcome and applaud and reward whatever effort you make to bring our inner being a step, long or short, nearer to the source of celestial light.  Consequently, I offer you no instructions and put no fetters on your imagination.”

It takes all sorts of art to make an artistic world, as it takes all sorts of people to make the human world:  a world with only classic art in it would be as uninteresting and unthinkable as a world in which every one was of the same character, occupation, and dress.

But it is time to consider the Emperor a little more in detail in relation to his connexion with the arts.  If he were not a first-rate monarch he would probably be a first-rate artist.  He said once that if he were to be an artist, he would be a sculptor.  But if he is not a professional artist he is a connoisseur, a dilettante in the right sense, a lover of the arts, an art-loving prince.  The painter Salzmann tells us how he used to go to the Villa Liegnitz in Potsdam to give Prince William lessons, and how the Empress, then Princess William, used to sit with the pupil and his teacher, discussing technical and art questions.  A result of the teaching, in addition to the pictures mentioned elsewhere, was an oil-painting, a sea-fight, which still hangs in the Ravene Gallery in Berlin.