In the matter of personal appearance there are two quite distinct and different Williams. Those who see the young German Emperor on a State occasion think of him as almost a tall man, with a stern, thoughtful face and the most distinguished bearing of any sovereign in Europe. He holds himself with arrow-like straightness, bears his uniform or robes with proud grace, and draws his features into a kind of mask of imperial dignity and reserved wisdom and strength very impressive to the beholder. It is with what may be called this official countenance of William’s that the general public is chiefly familiar, for he assumes it in front of the photographer’s camera, just as he does on parade, at formal gatherings, and even in his carriage when he drives through the streets.
There is nothing to cavil at in this. One of the most important functions of an Emperor must surely be to look like an Emperor.
But in private life, when the absence of ceremonial and the presence of none but friends permit him to unbend, we see quite another William. He does not now give, the impression of being a tall man, and his face wears a softened and kindly expression prone to break into an extremely sweet and winning smile. When this smiling mood is upon him he looks curiously like his uncle, the Duke of Connaught, although at other times the resemblance is not apparent. As a boy he was very white-skinned, with pale flaxen hair. Years of military outdoor life burned his face to a tawny brown, through which of late an unhealthy pallor, the product of overwork and sleeplessness, at times shows itself. His hair is of average darkness, but his small and habitually curled moustache is of a light yellowish colour.
An observer who studied him closely during a whole day when he visited Russia three years ago describes him at the first morning review of troops as carrying himself almost pompously erect, and wearing a countenance of such gloomy severity that everybody was afraid to approach him, so that the officers who saw him for the first time jokingly whispered to one another that a new William the Taciturn had come into being. But in the afternoon, when the Czarina presided over a little garden party, limited almost to the circle of royalty, William appeared in a straw hat and jaunty holiday costume, smoked cigarettes continuously, and laughed and chatted with everybody as gaily and affably as any little bank bookkeeper snatching an unaccustomed day in the country.
The dominant feature of his make-up is a restless and tireless physical energy. In this he is perhaps more English than German. The insular tendency of his out-of-door tastes is very marked. Probably there is no gentleman on the Continent who keeps a keener or more interested watch upon the details of English sport, year by year, than William does. Oxford will not soon forget his characteristic telegram to Max MÜller, recently, congratulating the University crew upon their victory in the annual race, and every British yachtsman looks forward to this season’s regatta at Cowes with added interest, from the fact that the Emperor intends personally competing with his newly-purchased yacht.
William rides like an Englishman—which is another way of saying that he cuts a better figure in the saddle than most of the other Hohenzollerns, notoriously bad horsemen as a rule, have done. He has all the British passion for the sea and matters maritime. In his speech to the officers of the English fleet at Athens he said that his interest in their navy dated from the earliest days of his boyhood, when he played about Portsmouth dockyard and gained impressions of the vastness and splendour of British shipping which had vividly coloured his imagination for all time. No other German ruler has ever given so much thought to naval matters, and it is his openly-expressed ambition to give the Empire during his reign a fighting fleet which shall rank among the great navies of the world. During the debates in the Reichstag last March on the excessive naval estimates, he sent to the chairman of that special budget committee a copy of an old painting representing the fleet of the Great Elector, with footnotes in his own imperial hand giving the names and armaments of the various vessels, and bearing the inscription: “To Herr von Koscielski, in remembrance of his manly advocacy of my navy, from his grateful Emperor and King.”
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William’s love of exercise for its own sake is truly English. He fences admirably, is a skilful boatman, swims and bowls well and with zest, and delights in mountain climbing. No other Prussian Prince has ever been so fond of shooting. Hohenzollern notions of this particular sport have for generations been a matter for derision among Englishmen. Even Carlyle, who will hardly be described as a sportsman, was alive to the grotesque features of the Parforce Fagd, that curious institution in the Potsdam Green Forest which owes its origin to Frederic William I. The Saugarten is still there, and young boars, bred in captivity and bereft of their tusks at a tender age, are still released from their pens when the first frosts of autumn fall, and after a start of a few minutes are chased by mounted and gaily caparisoned parties of huntsmen—for all the world like the tame lion hunts of the Sardanapalian decadence pictured for us by the Assyrian palace friezes. But William has never shown much admiration for this pet diversion of the Potsdam officers. His own tastes are for the most laborious and difficult forms of woodland sport, and he is an exceptionally good shot.
What renders all this the more remarkable is the fact that his left arm is practically paralyzed. He has trained himself to hold the rein with it when he rides, but that is the sum of its usefulness. This defect dates from the occasion of his birth, and is ascribed to the ignorance or ineptitude of a physician. The arm is four inches shorter than its fellow, and has a malformed hand with only rudimentary fingers. The arm is so wholly limp that William has to lift its hand to even place it on the hilt of his sword with his right hand. It is in this posture, or else in the breast of his coat, that he customarily carries it when out of the saddle. All his photographs show it thus disposed of. At the table he has a combined knife and fork, which slide into each other. He uses this with much dexterity, first to cut up his meat and then to eat it, all of course with one hand.
To have become a skilled marksman under such a weighty disadvantage indicates great patience and determination. William uses a very light English gun, having abandoned in despair the attempt to get any made to his liking in Germany, and carries it on his shoulder with the stock behind him. At the proper moment he brings the weapon forward by a movement of his right arm, with incredible swiftness and deadly accuracy of aim.
Of much graver importance, of course, is the internal inflammation of the ear, formerly complicated at times with an acute earache, with which he has now been afflicted for a number of years. Just what the affection is no one has yet been able to determine. It grows worse in cold and wet weather, and that is about all that is known of it. The physicians disagree as to its character. William himself, though occasionally suffering grievously from it, has never been alarmed about it, and really believes it to be a local ailment. Its existence naturally enough suffices to create a certain uneasiness in the minds of his friends, and of Germans generally, and serves as the fruitful source of alarming rumours by which, from time to time, the virtue of Continental bourses is systematically assailed. But no responsible professional man seems to regard it as necessarily dangerous. This year, although the Emperor’s appearance shows evident signs of the wear and strain of his great burdens upon his strength and spirits, this particular affection is said to be less troublesome than usual.
Undoubtedly, however, this annoying and wearying burden of the flesh has a great deal to do with William’s disposition towards nervous excitability and restlessness. A man with the earache cannot be expected to hold calm mastery over all his moods. It is a reasonable assumption, too, that to this affliction is in some measure due his phenomenal and unseasonable physical activity. Sometimes it happens that he is unable to sleep at all, and he habitually keeps notebooks and pencils within reach of his bedside, upon which to work until the demon of insomnia is exorcised. Upon occasion, for distraction, he routs out the garrison of Berlin, or some regiment of it, before daybreak. In any case he rises at five.
Both at home and when abroad the amount of labour he gets through in a day is almost without parallel. It is a commonplace experience for him to do four hours’ work in his Berlin study in the early morning; then take a train to Potsdam and spend the remainder of the forenoon in reviewing troops; then trot back in the saddle with his staff over the distance of eighteen miles; devote the afternoon to the transaction of business with his Ministers and officials; receive and return the calls of two or three visiting royal personages; then dine somewhere where a speech must be made, and get back to the palace for more work before bedtime.
In Constantinople and the scarcely less Oriental Athens they still recall his energetic daily routine with bewildered astonishment. He was up long before the drowsy muezzins from the minarets summon the faithful at the hour of prayer—rattling indefatigably about to see all the sights, reviewing the Sultan’s troops, inspecting all the chief military establishments, War Ministry, military school, artillery barracks, and what not besides, asking questions of everybody who had anything to tell, peering into every nook and cranny with an insatiable curiosity, working through it all upon notes of instruction and reference to be forwarded to Berlin every evening, and then sitting up until all the others were yawning with sleep.
Of course he could not bear the strain of this constant activity if he were not endowed with two great gifts—prodigious physical vitality and imagination. Mere strength alone, mated with dulness of mind, would be broken down and destroyed by the wear and tear of such a life. William is, physically and mentally, the heir of the best things which European royalty has to offer. He inherits the bodily force and resolution of the Hohenzollerns, the savoir faire and comeliness of the Guelphs, the intellectual acuteness and philosophical tastes of the Coburgs, and the romantic mediaeval Ascanien strain which Catherine II took to Russia and her granddaughter brought back again to Weimar—a leaven half divine half daemonic, which swings between genius and madness. The product of these marriages might be expected to be what he is—by far the most striking personality in the whole gallery of contemporary kings.
What other dynasty in Western Europe does not envy William his six handsome, sturdy, and superbly healthy little sons? Seeing them with their shining, bright-eyed faces and ordinary well-worn clothes, one cannot but reflect upon the contrast afforded at Vienna, where the great rival house of Hapsburg is dying miserably out in pallid epileptics and vicious dullards.
These six fine boys, the oldest of whom is now in his tenth year, are reared in the Spartan traditions of the Hohenzollerns. Winter and summer they are up at six o’clock and into their cold tubs with merciless punctuality. As a rule they breakfast with their father half an hour later, and throughout the meal he talks with them alone. They salute him on entering, and again on leaving, in military fashion; even at this tender age a considerable portion of their education is upon martial subjects. The Emperor, in his recent speech at Bonn, indicated an intention of having the Crown Prince eventually matriculate there, but for the present, as soon as the lads outgrow their private tutors it is understood that they are to go to the great cadet school at Lichterfelde, just outside Berlin. Evidently the gymnasium has no part in the plans for their education.
The predominance of the military idea, which envelops even these little baby princes, is indeed the keynote to every phase of their father’s character. He is first of all a soldier. He lives a plain and simple life; the service and routine of his palaces are those of an officer’s mess. He is a heavy eater, with a preference for homely dishes; he smokes great numbers of light Dutch cigars which cost about three halfpence each. He addresses all persons whom he meets in an official capacity in the terse form and curt, sharp tone of a drill sergeant. Although in private conversation with friends his voice is soft and pleasant, all his public speeches are declaimed in a harsh and rattling voice, with abruptly ended sentences. His relations with other Germans, from the kings down to the peasants, are, in short, those of a commanding officer on the parade ground. This attitude does not suggest tact, or lend itself to roundabout’ methods. The bluntly-expressed rescripts to the officers of the army which William from time to time has issued, complaining about the harsh personal treatment of the men, denouncing gambling and extravagant living, and so on, might easily have provoked a spirit of discontent in a country less wholly ruled by the idea of military discipline.
Naturally enough, his innate liking for display and scenic effects is strongly coloured by militarism. He cannot see too many uniforms about him, and he literally inundates Berlin with martial pageants. One might suppose that the effect of this would be to satiate the Berliners, but they maintain a most vigorous and unabated interest in seeing the troops march by, and throng the sidewalks every time as if the spectacle had all the excitement of novelty.
In almost every other country the personal tastes or whims of the sovereign, if he be at all a man of the world, leave a certain mark upon the every-day dress of the people about him. The Prince of Wales, for example, during the quarter century in which he has assumed the social work of his mother’s reign, has made a good many changes in the fashions of men’s clothes—changes which have been respected in Melbourne and Washington and Toronto as well as in London. But hardly anybody in Germany has ever seen the adult William in citizen’s clothes—and positively no one ever thinks of him save as in uniform.
As William is a soldier in manners and habits, so his conceptions of government and of domestic statecraft are largely those which might be expected in a chief of staff. He addresses his people always as their commander-in-chief. The starting-point of his resolve to get rid of Bismarck and bring in new men like Miquel and Caprivi, was his discovery that the Chancellor and the various political parties and factions which he alternately bullied and cajoled were really so many impediments standing between him and his subjects. The Hohenzollern desired to speak directly to the people, as a general to his army, and he has swept aside whatever stood in the way. Such a posture does not, at first sight, seem to promise much for progress and enlightened development, but it must be remembered that universal service in the army has had the effect of familiarizing all other Germans with this same point of view, so that really sovereign and subjects get on much better together than in many countries nominally more free.
The difficulties of government in Germany are almost wholly social and economic. The Prussian artizan, perforce, spends seven years at school and three years in the army before he seriously takes up his trade and sets to working for himself. He marries early and has a swarm of children, and the necessity of toiling to support all these in an overcrowded and underpaid labour market grinds upon his temper. He has, to begin with, a racial tendency to think highly of himself and to criticize other people; he is afforded only too much justification for his rooted dislike of aristocrats, employers, and rich people generally, who in Germany are much less generous and considerate than in some other countries. Thus he is peculiarly open to the arguments and allurements of the social democratic propaganda.
The Kaiser’s idea is to meet and counteract this by appealing to the workman’s military recollections and pride. It is difficult for outsiders to realize the potency of this appeal. Americans and Englishmen see the scores of thousands of young Germans who expatriate themselves to escape military service, and assume, therefore, that it must be a hateful thing. To those who look forward to it this may be true. But to the poor German artizan who looks backward upon it this term of service in the army is apt to seem the pleasantest period of his life. By comparison with the hardships of his later independent struggle for existence, he comes to regard this time when he was fed and clothed and instructed and lodged, and wore a uniform, with affectionate regret.
William, with what seems a sound instinct, lays great stress upon keeping alive and strengthening this army spirit. His wish is so to extend a semi-military organization throughout the social structure that every German may continue to feel that he belongs to the army. To this end he encourages the founding in each village of a Landwehrbezirksverein, or military club, where veterans and reservists are invited to come and read the papers over their beer and pipes, take charge of anniversary celebrations, promote local shooting festivals, and keep Social Democrats at a healthful distance. This plan is reported to be working well in small places, but it has not been thus far of much service in cities and factory centres, and in Mainz the attempt has just been abandoned owing to the discovery that all the members had become Social Democrats. But it is important to notice that since William has actively interested himself in the condition of these lower social strata, and sharply rated employers and army officers for harsh treatment of their men, the tone of the Socialists in the Reichstag toward him has been quite as civil as that of the other members.
For a young man descended from such phenomenally thrifty people as the Hohenzollerns and Wettins have always been, William has remarkably lavish, not to say prodigal, notions about money. He was left a very rich man by his father’s death, and a complaisant Reichstag shortly thereafter largely increased the amount of his civil list, but for all that prudent Germans shake their heads over the immense schemes of expenditure to which he is already committed. The outlay upon the renovation of the Old Schloss in Berlin, entered upon in the first months of his reign, startled these good souls, but that turned out to be a mere drop in the bucket. The whole park arrangements at Potsdam are to be altered, and the unsightly old Dom—or cathedral—facing the Lustgarten in Berlin, has been torn down to make room for a magnificent ecclesiastical edifice worthy of the German capital. This means a heavy bill of expense, and Berliners hear with mingled emotions that their Royal Opera House is also to come down, to be supplanted by a wonderful new structure rivalling in dimensions and cost the Grand Opera House in Paris.
This last plan reflects the most marked artistic sense discoverable in William. He is passionately fond of the theatre, and has enlightened views about its popular usefulness. In decorating the tragedian, Ludwig Barnay, he has put on record an act by a Prussian King which not even his grandfather, the old Kaiser, enamoured of all things connected with the stage as he was, could be brought to contemplate. He delighted in the company of players to the end of his days, but he always frowned when the possibility of stars and ribbons was hinted at. William’s action, therefore, deserves special notice. It must be admitted that his attitude toward the drama is dictatorial to a degree—very like that which a general might be assumed to occupy toward a band of mummers allowed inside the camp to amuse the soldiers; but the German drama is framed to resist a great deal of pressure to the square inch, and is indeed rather the better for it. Very comical are the stories told in Berlin of the way in which William personally superintended the rehearsals of Wildenbruch’s “The New Lord” last winter, criticizing and instructing the actors, and rearranging the distribution of the cast to suit his notions of their several capabilities. The fact that the drama had for its principal incident the Great Elector’s dismissal of his father’s Minister, Schwarzenberg, doubtless accounted for much of the Emperor’s personal solicitude as to its proper presentation. But it is not in William’s nature to refrain from meddling and dictating about anything, no matter how trivial, in which his interest is aroused.
The young Kaiser was never what is called a bookish man, and, as has been said before, the tremendous pressure of his daily work now leaves him no time whatever for reading. But he still manages to secure a certain amount of leisure for association with intimate friends, and among these are a number of highly-cultured men. He gets from them what others are obliged to seek in books. His inclinations seem to develop steadily in the direction of respect for intellectual people and products. It is a part of the phenomenon of belated growth which we have traced from his thirtieth birthday; mentally and spiritually cramped up to that time by the despotic influence of the small Bismarckian clique, he had still the strength and ability to expand his mind and character with splendid swiftness when finally the bonds were thrown off. One of the pleasantest features of the Labour Conference gathering in Berlin was the kindly and appreciative way in which William gave his chief attention to the venerable Jules Simon, talked with him intelligently about his works, and presented him with what of all possible gifts he would most prize—some of the manuscript French writings of Frederic the Great. It is more than likely that a twelvemonth before William did not know anything at all about either Jules Simon or his books.
His special liking for the scholarly King of Sweden, and his annual choice of the sombre solitudes of the Norwegian coast for his summer season of entire rest, are very interesting evidences of this progressive mental elevation. William has a natural tendency to deference and a display of youthful humility toward able men much older than himself, as all who have seen him in the company of his grandfather, Moltke, Windhorst, or Bismarck must have noted, but his attraction toward the learned and gentle Scandinavian monarch is hardly to be put down to that score. Most other princes of William’s age, or even much older, devote as little time to King Oscar as politeness will permit, and for choice prefer to spend their holidays at Homburg or Monte Carlo.
No gambling Casino or mere frivolous watering-place so much as knows William by sight. He detests the whole spirit of these princely resorts. He drinks with tolerable freedom at dinner, and is neither a prig nor a prude. But he is distinctly a moral man. People who are close to him aver that he is sincerely religious, and that by no means in a latitudinarian sense. So far as his actions have thrown light on this subject they have indicated a spirit of theological tolerance. In the fourth month of his reign, when the Senior Council of the Evangelical Lutheran Church sought to overturn the election of the heterodox Professor Harnack to the chair of Church History and Dogma at Berlin, William emphatically tossed aside their protest and confirmed the selection of the University. At about the same time he delivered a public rebuke to certain enthusiasts who sought to commit him to an approval of Jew-baiting, and since then, as we have seen, Dr. Stocker has gone for good. Last winter the Emperor gave a most interesting and characteristic proof of this broad-minded spirit. Two earnestly religious young Germans named Haase and May, belonging to a sect called the New Church, the basis of which is non-resistance, refused on moral grounds to do military service. Their persistence naturally brought them into collision with the courts, and they were sentenced to six weeks’ imprisonment. William heard of the case, and, while it would not do to remit the punishment, he issued directions that their stay in prison should be made as comfortable as possible. Upon their release he personally gave the money to pay their passage to America, whither they sailed with the intention of becoming missionaries.
When William ascended the German throne, under such unpleasant and prejudicial conditions, the world thought of him as an ill-conditioned and wildly-reckless young swashbuckler, whose head would speedily be turned by the intoxicating sense of power, and who would make haste to plunge Europe into war.
Three years of authority have worked such a change in him—or, perhaps better, have brought to the top so many strong and admirable qualities in him which had been dwarfed and obscured by adverse circumstances—that the world has insensibly come to alter its opinion of his character. We think of him no longer as a firebrand. He preserves enough of the eccentricities of a nervous and impetuous individuality, it is true, to still impart to public scrutiny of his words and deeds an element of apprehension. One still instinctively reads the reports of his speeches with an eye cast ahead for wild or thoughtless utterances—and only too often, as in the case of the “salamander” remarks to the Borussian Students’ Corps at Bonn the other day, finds what was anticipated. But even in this matter of an over-hasty and unrestrained tongue three years have wrought an important improvement, and in almost all other respects he is unquestionably a better man and a better ruler than the world took it for granted he would be. Doubtless as time goes on we shall come to regard him in a still more altered light.
At present what can be fairly said is that he stands out with clearness from among European sovereigns as a living and genuine personality—a young man of imagination, of great activity and executive ability, taking gravely serious views of his duties and responsibilities, keenly anxious to do what he believes to be right, and increasingly disposed to look to wise and elevated sources of judgment for suggestions as to what is right.
THE END.
