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 class, and with a friendly smile gracefully excuses himself for conferring an “Order of the third class on a musician of the first class,” 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 pass through so many hands to reach him.

The German takes his theatre as he takes life, seriously.  To cough during a performance attracts embarrassing 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 classes.  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 assumes 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 “classical,” 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,