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.

In the spring of 1886 the Prince sent his teacher a sketch for
criticism. Salzmann wired his opinion to Potsdam, and a telegram came
back, "What does 'wind too anxious' mean? is it so stormily painted
that you shuddered at it, or is it not stormy enough?" Salzmann is
also authority for the