Part 27

Prince Henry returned to Germany on March 17th, a Doctor of Law of Harvard University.

There have been moments when people in America were influenced by other sentiments than those of entirely respectful admiration for the Emperor. It was with mixed feelings that the American public heard the news of his telegraphed offer to President Roosevelt in May, 1902, when, as the telegram said, the Emperor was "under the deep impression made by the brilliant and cordial reception" given to his brother, Prince Henry, to present to the American nation a statue of--Frederick the Great, and coupled with the offer a proposal that the statue should be erected--of all places--in Washington! No one doubted the Emperor's sincere desire to pay the highest compliment he could think of to a people to whom he felt grateful for the honour done to Germany in the person of his brother, but nearly every one smiled at the simplicity, or, as some called it, the want of political tact shown by offering the statue of a ruler whose name, to the vast majority of Americans, is synonymous with absolute autocracy, to a republic which prides itself on its civic ways and love of personal freedom. The gift was accepted by the American Government in the spirit in which it was offered, the spirit of goodwill. And why not? To the Emperor his great ancestor's effigy is no symbol of autocracy, but the contrary, for to the Emperor and his subjects Frederick the Great is as much the Father of Prussia, the man who saved it and made it, as Washington was the Father of America. Besides, the spirit in which a gift is offered, not its value or appropriateness, is the thing to be considered.

Irritation in England was still strong against Germany on account of the latter's easily understood race-sympathy with the Boers during the war just over, but the fact did not prevent the Emperor from accepting King Edward's invitation to spend a few days at Sandringham with him in November this year on the occasion of his birthday. The Emperor took the Empress and two of his sons with him. The hostile temper of the time, both in England and Germany, was alluded to in a sermon preached in Sandringham Church by the then Bishop of London. It was notable for its insistence on the necessity of friendlier relations between England, Germany, and America, the three great branches of the Teutonic race. After the service the Emperor is reported to have exclaimed to the Bishop: "What you said was excellent, and is precisely what I try to make my people understand."

As a proof that this was no merely complimentary utterance, but the expression of a thought which is constantly in the Emperor's mind, an incident which happened at Kiel regatta in the month of June previously may be recalled. The American squadron, under the late Admiral Cotton, was paying an official visit to the Emperor during the Kiel "week" as a return honour for the visit of the Emperor's brother, Prince Henry of Prussia, to the United States the year before. There was a constant round of festivities, and among them a lunch to the Emperor on board the Admiral's flagship, the Kearsarge. Lunch over, the Emperor was standing in a group talking with his customary vivacity, but, as customary also, with his eyes taking in his surroundings like a well-trained journalist. Suddenly he noticed a set of flags, those of America, Germany, and England, twined together and mingling their colours in friendly harmony. He walked over, gathered the combined flags in his hand, and turning to the Admiral exclaimed in idiomatic American: "See here, Admiral; that is exactly as it should be, and is what I am trying for all the time."

While in England the Emperor, in company with Lord Roberts and Sir Evelyn Wood, inspected his English regiment, the 1st Royal Dragoons. A curious and amusing feature of the visit was a lecture before the Royal Family at Sandringham by a German engineer, for whom the Emperor acted as interpreter, on a novel adaptation of spirit for culinary, lighting, and laundry purposes. The Emperor's practical illustration of the use of the new heating system, as applied to the ordinary household flatiron, is said to have caused great merriment among his audience.

Germany's home atmosphere about this time was for a moment troubled by an exhibition of the Emperor's "personal regiment" in the form of a telegram to the Prince Regent of Bavaria, known in Germany as the "Swinemunde Despatch." The Bavarian Diet, in a fit of economy, had refused its annual grant of £5,000 for art purposes. The Emperor was violently angry, wired to the Prince Regent his indignation with the Diet and offered to pay the £5,000 out of his own pocket. It was not a very tactful offer, to be sure, though well intended; and as his telegram was not an act of State, "covered" by the Chancellor's signature, while the Bavarians in particular felt hurt at what they considered outside interference, Germans generally blamed it as a new demonstration of autocratic rule.

One or two other art incidents of the period may be noted. A domestic one was the gift to the Emperor by the Empress of a model of her hand in Carrara marble, life-sized, by the German sculptor, Rheinhold Begas. The Emperor, it is well known, has no special liking for the companionship of ladies, but he confesses to an admiration for pretty feminine hands. Another incident was the Emperor's order to the painter, Professor Rochling, to paint a picture representing the famous episode in the China campaign, when Admiral Seymour gave the order "Germans to the Front." It is to the present day a popular German engraving. The year was also remarkable for a visit to Berlin of Coquelin aîné, the great French actor. The Emperor saw him in "Cyrano de Bergerac," was, like all the rest of the play-going world, delighted with both play and player, and held a long and lively conversation with the artist. Lastly may be mentioned a telegram of the Emperor's to the once-famed tragic actress, Adelaide Ristori, in Rome, congratulating her on her eightieth birthday and expressing his regret that he had never met her. A basket of flowers simultaneously arrived from the German Embassy.

We are now in 1903. During the preceding years the Emperor's thoughts, as has been seen, were occupied with art as a means of educating his folk, purifying their sentiments, and, above all, making them faithful lieges of the House of Hohenzollern. By a natural association of ideas we find him this year thinking much and deeply about religion; for, though artists are not a species remarkable for the depth or orthodoxy of their views on religious matters, art and religion are close allies, and probably the greater the artist the more real religion he will be found to have.

In this year, accordingly, the Emperor made his remarkable confession of religious faith to his friend, Admiral Hollmann. He had just heard a lecture by Professor Delitzsch on "Babel und Bibel," and as he considered the Professor's views to some extent subversive of orthodox Christian belief, he took the opportunity to tell his people his own sentiments on the whole matter. In writing to Admiral Hollmann he instructed him to make the "confession" as public as possible, and it was published in the October number of the Grenzboten, a Saxon monthly, sometimes used for official pronouncements. The Emperor's letter to Admiral Hollmann contained what follows:--

"I distinguish between two different sorts of Revelation: a current, to a certain extent historical, and a purely religious, which was meant to prepare the way for the appearance of the Messiah. As to the first, I should say that I have not the slightest doubt that God eternally revealed Himself to the race of mankind He created. He breathed into man His breath, that is a portion of Himself, a soul. With fatherly love and interest He followed the development of humanity; in order to lead and encourage it further He 'revealed' Himself, now in the person of this, now of that great wise man, priest or king, whether pagan, Jew or Christian. Hammurabi was one of these, Moses, Abraham, Homer, Charlemagne, Luther, Shakespeare, Goethe, Kant, Kaiser William the Great--these He selected and honoured with His Grace, to achieve for their peoples, according to His will, things noble and imperishable. How often has not my grandfather explicitly declared that he was an instrument in the hand of the Lord! The works of great souls are the gifts of God to the people, that they may be able to build further on them as models, that they may be able to feel further through the confusion of the undiscovered here below. Doubtless God has 'revealed' Himself to different peoples in different ways according to their situation and the degree of their civilization. Then just as we are overborne most by the greatness and might of the lovely nature of the Creation when we regard it, and as we look are astonished at the greatness of God there displayed, even so can we of a surety thankfully and admiringly recognize, by whatever truly great or noble thing a man or a people does, the revelation of God. His influence acts on us and among us directly.

"The second sort of Revelation, the more religious sort, is that which led up to the appearance of the Lord. From Abraham onward it was introduced, slowly but foreseeingly, all-wisely and all-knowingly, for otherwise humanity were lost. And now commences the astonishing working of God's Revelation. The race of Abraham and the peoples that sprang from it regard, with an iron logic, as their holiest possession, the belief in a God. They must worship and cultivate Him. Broken up during the captivity in Egypt, the separated parts were brought together again for the second time by Moses, always striving to cling fast to monotheism. It was the direct intervention of God that caused this people to come to life again. And so it goes on through the centuries till the Messiah, announced and foreshadowed by the prophets and psalmists, at last appears, the greatest Revelation of God to the world. Then he appeared in the Son Himself; Christ is God; God in human form. He redeemed us, He spurs us on, He allures us to follow Him, we feel His fire burn in us, His sympathy strengthens us, His displeasure annihilates us, but also His care saves us. Confident of victory, building only on His word, we pass through labour, scorn, suffering, misery and death, for in His Word we have God's revealed Word, and He never lies.

"That is my view of the matter. The Word is especially for us evangelicals made the essential thing by Luther, and as good theologian surely Delitzsch must not forget that our great Luther taught us to sing and believe--'Thou shalt suffer, let the Word stand.' To me it goes without saying that the Old Testament contains a large number of fragments of a purely human historical kind and not 'God's revealed Word.' They are mere historical descriptions of events of all sorts which occurred in the political, religious, moral, and intellectual life of the people of Israel. For example, the act of legislation on Sinai may be regarded as only symbolically inspired by God, when Moses had recourse to the revival of perhaps some old-time law (possibly the codex, an offshoot of the codex of Hammurabi), to bring together and to bind together institutions of His people which were become shaky and incapable of resistance. Here the historian can, from the spirit or the text, perhaps construct a connexion with the Law of Hammurabi, the friend of Abraham, and perhaps logically enough; but that would no way lessen the importance of the fact that God suggested it to Moses and in so far revealed Himself to the Israelite people.

"Consequently it is my idea that for the future our good Professor would do well to avoid treating of religion as such, on the other hand continue to describe unmolested everything that connects the religion, manners, and custom of the Babylonians with the Old Testament. On the whole, I make the following deductions:--

"1. I believe in One God.

"2. We humans need, in order to teach Him, a Form, especially for our children.

"3. This Form has been to the present time the Old Testament in its existing tradition. This Form will certainly decidedly alter considerably with the discovery of inscriptions and excavations; there is nothing harmful in that, it is even no harm if the nimbus of the Chosen People loses much thereby. The kernel and substance remain always the same--God, namely, and His work.

"Never was religion a result of science, but a gushing out of the heart and being of mankind, springing from its intercourse with God."

It is anticipating by a few months, but part of a speech the Emperor made in Potsdam at the confirmation of his two sons, August Wilhelm and Oscar--two Hohenzollerns as yet not distinguished for anything in particular--may be quoted in this connexion. Naturally he began by comparing his sons' spiritual situation with that of a soldier on the day he takes the oath of allegiance: they were vorgemerkt, that is, predestined as "fighters for Christ." "What is demanded of you," the imperial father went on, "is that you shall be personalities. This is the point which, in my opinion, is the most important for the Christian in daily life. For there can be no doubt that we can say of the person of the Lord, that He is the most 'personal personality' who has ever wandered among the sons of men.... You will read of many great men--savants, statesmen, kings and princes, of poets also: but nevertheless no word of man has ever been uttered worthy of comparison with the words of Christ; and I say this to you so that you may be in a position to bear it out when you are in the midst of life's turmoil and hear people discussing religion, especially the personality of Christ. No word of man has ever succeeded in making people of all races and all people enthusiastic for the same cause, namely, to imitate Him, even to sacrifice their lives for Him. The wonder can only be explained by assuming that what He said were the words of the living God, which are the source of life, and continue to live thousands of years after the words of the wise have been forgotten. That is my personal experience and it will be yours.

"The pivot and turning-point," he continued,

"of our mortal life, especially of a life full of responsibility and labour--that is clearer and clearer to me every year I live--lies simply and solely in the attitude a man adopts towards his Lord and Saviour;"

and he concludes by exhorting his sons to disregard what people may say about the cult of Christ being irreconcilable with the tasks and responsibilities of "modern" life, but simply to do their best, whatever their occupation, to become a personality after Christ's example.

This is a sound and just statement of Christian faith, and it is quoted here to justify the view that the Emperor's soldiers and his Dreadnoughts, his mailed fist and shining armour, are built and put on in the spirit of precaution and defence. The attitude, it cannot of course be denied, is based on the un-Christlike assumption that all men (and particularly all peoples and their governments and diplomatists) are liars; but in his favour it may be urged that for that saying the Emperor could cite Biblical authority. And yet there is an inconsistency; for the saying is that of one of those same wise men whose words, the Emperor admits, are transitory and mortal.

It is possible that the Emperor had a presentiment of some kind that his life was now in danger, and that the presentiment may have attuned his thoughts to meditation on Christ's life and teaching; for it is a fact, well worthy of remark, that in the fear of death man's one and only relief and consolation is the knowledge that there was, and is, a mediator for him with his Creator. The address at his sons' confirmation was delivered on October 17th, and on Sunday morning, November 8th all the world, it is hardly too much to say, was astonished and pained to learn, by a publication in the Official Gazette, that the Emperor the day before had had to submit to a serious operation on his throat. The announcement spoke of a polypus, or fungoid growth, which had had to be removed; but all over the world the conclusion was come to that the mortal affliction of the father had fallen on the son and that the Emperor was a doomed man. Most providentially and happily it was nothing of the sort. On the 9th the Emperor was out of bed and signing official papers, on the 15th he was allowed to talk in whispers, and on the 17th it was declared by the physicians that all danger was over and that no more bulletins would be issued. On December 14th the Emperor received a congratulatory visit from the President of the Reichstag, who reported to Parliament his impression that "the Emperor had completely recovered his old vigour (great applause) and that his voice was again clear and strong."

The Emperor had passed through what one may suppose to have been the darkest hour of his life. He was naturally in high spirits, and a few days after went to Hannover, where he made a martial speech in which he toasted the German Legion for having "by its unforgettable heroism, in conjunction with Blücher and his Prussians, saved the English army from destruction at Waterloo," a view, of course, which to an Englishman has all the charm of novelty.

One or two further memorable incidents of 1903 may be recorded. Theodore Mommsen, the now aged historian of Rome, the greatest scholar of his time, died in November. He was in his day a Liberal parliamentarian of no mean ability; but for such men there is no career in Germany. However, as it turned out, the German people's loss proved to be all the world's gain. A son of the historian now represents a district of Berlin in the Reichstag. Two years before the historian's death an exchange of telegrams in Latin took place between him and the Emperor. The occasion was the Emperor's laying the foundation-stone of a museum on the plateau where the old Roman castle, known as the Saalburg, stands. The Emperor telegraphed:

"Theodoro Mommseno, antiquitatum romanarum investigatori incomparabili, praetorii Saalburgensis fundamenta jaciens salutem dicit et gratias agit Guilelmus Germanorum Imperator."

To which the historian, with a modesty equal to his courtesy, replied: "Germanorum principi, tam majestate quam humanitate, gratias agit antiquarius Lietzelburgensis."

Mention may also be made of a very characteristic speech of the Emperor's this year at Cüstrin, where he was unveiling a monument to a favourite Hohenzollern, the Great Elector. Cüstrin, it will be remembered, is the town where Frederick the Great, another of the Emperor's favourites, was imprisoned by an angry father, along with his friend Lieutenant Katte, when Frederick was trying to escape the parental cruelty and violence.