A MONG the many great qualities of the German Emperor a
sense of humour is not included. In speech after speech he says things of singular and self- revealing simplicity,—things which in a humbler politician might furnish excellent material for the caricaturist, but would have no claim to be regarded in any other light. In the German Emperor—partly because he is the German Emperor, partly because he takes himself so very seriously that we are forced to take him seriously too—there are none of these irresponsible utterances. His speeches, like his public appearances, are always made in uniform. He never unbends, he never makes a joke, he is always in deadly earnest. Happily, nature, even German Imperial nature, has its limits. However exalted. may be the level it has marked out for itself, it will not always maintain it. Though the Emperor is never comic in purpose—the mind retires in conscious impotence before the effort to conceive what the result would be like if he were—he is sometimes comic in result. Excessive seriousness comes to have the effect of humour. The German Emperor never allows us to laugh with him. So in the end we change the preposition, and find relief in laughing at him. No doubt this is very irreverent, and were we German subjects, it might entail inconvenient consequences. But in England laughter is free, and the German Emperor has a singular faculty of provoking it. In itself, of course, there is nothing at all wonderful in this. We meet every day people who excite amusement simply because they can- not fancy it possible that they do anything of the kind. But the difference between them and the German Emperor is immense. They have a high opinion of themselves with little or nothing to justify it. The amusement they cause is due to the incongruity between their own estimate of themselves and the world's estimate. But in the case of the Emperor this incongruity does not exist. It existed, no doubt, for a short time. People could not at first feel sure that there was any foundation for the high opinion he had evidently formed of himself. They do not feel any doubt on this point now. The German Emperor is a Sovereign of very remarkable capacity, and with an admirable appreciation, not only of his position, but of the duties and responsibilities which that position carries with it. But after all this enlightenment, there is still an interval between the world's estimate of the Emperor and the Emperor's estimate of himself ; and while this remains open the Imperial speeches will still make impressions strangely unlike those which their author intended them to convey.
The banquet to the officers of the " battle fleet " which has been engaged in naval manceuvres at the mouth of the Elbe was an occasion which the Emperor was not likely to pass by. A new spirit, he told the officers, has lately entered into the German Navy. When the Emperor came to the throne he found excellent material in the officers, but it was destitute of the informing spirit. The bones were good. solid bones, but they were " very dry." The circumstances in which the German Empire had its origin quite account for this state of things. The officers had ceased, indeed, to be particularists, and had become Germans, but they had not yet realised that it was the Empire that had made them Germans, and that an Empire implies an Emperor. Their minds were full of ideas excellent in themselves, but incomplete without the animating touch of one supreme idea. They were devoted to their profession, anxious to become good seamen, re- solved to devote all their time and strength to the service of their country and the glory of their country's arms. But amid all this there was something wanting, and this solitary defect went far to render the whole worthless. What this something was can only be expressed in the Emperor's own words. " They were not inspired by the complete sense of absolutely belonging to the person of the supreme War Lord." It was quite natural that they should want this sense ; but all the same, it was indispensable that it should be imparted to them. Germans—this is their Sovereign's reading of the national character—stand in special and ex- ceptional need of this personal motive. Other navies will fight from mere patriotism. Their sailors want to see their country win, and they do all they can to ensure that she shall win. Under the influence of this motive, so powerful in other cases, the German naval officer remains unmoved and uninspired. He will fight, and fight well, but not with " the joyous devotion, self-sacrificing labour, obedience, discipline," which make victory certain. These gifts must come from the personal relation, from " the complete sense of absolutely belonging to the person of the supreme War Lord." The German officer must be able to say—with the necessary variation of sex and epithet :— " And I would be the girdle
About his stout Imperial waist, And his heart would beat against me In sorrow and in rest.
And I should know if it beat right, I'd clasp it round so close and tight."
Possibly a slight change would have to be made in the last line but one. Even in poetry it must not be supposed that the Imperial heart can beat other than right.
The Berlin correspondent of the Times thinks it well in reporting this speech to tone it down by a prose commentary. This custom of treating the Navy, he says in effect, as the personal possession of the Emperor, of speaking of " my " Navy, and " my " cruiser, and " my " battleship, at first excited criticism,—possibly we should say, something less flattering than criticism. Now, how- ever, this feeling has passed away. " The emphasis laid upon the personal relationship " is seen to have had a useful effect. The spirit and dash of the officers have become more marked.. Germans may very well be content with the results thus brought about, and abstain from inquiring too curiously into the cause. But to foreigners it is permitted. to remark that other navies which are not, so far as we know, less efficient than the German have not this complete sense of absolutely belonging to the person of the supreme War Lord,—have not even a supreme War Lord to belong to. The officers of the English Navy are thoroughly loyal, thoroughly patriotic, thoroughly resolved to make their country and their Sovereign victorious. But they have never found encouragement in thinking of Edward VII. as the supreme War Lord, or in the sense of be- longing absolutely to his person. The officers of the French Navy, again, are not wanting in any of these virtues, but they have all been learnt under a Republic. It is not really exalting a navy to speak as though its officers were deaf to such commonplace considerations as duty to their country, love of their profession, and the natural determination of brave men to get the better of their antagonists. The devotion of the Highlander to the chief of his clan was wonderful in its occasional results, but it had not the capacity for wear and tear that belongs to that modern loyalty which is the complex product of many simpler emotions. No doubt in Monarchical countries loyalty to the Sovereign still calls forth the virtues that the German Emperor delights to find in the officers of his Navy. But they owe their value to the fact that they sum up and embody a variety of other feelings less easy to name or classify. Were it not for this, how could they outlast every change of government, and be equally effective under a constitutional or an absolute Monarchy, or under no Monarchy at all ? The German Emperor is trying to set back the stream, and to replace the modern conception of loyalty by one borrowed from the past of another race. But in thus trying to displace the nation by the Sovereign, and patriotism by loyalty, he is entering upon an experi- ment which must depend for success upon the personality of the ruler. Granting that devotion to the supreme War Lord has all the virtues which the Emperor finds in it, it is the character of the particular War Lord that has drawn them forth. Is it wise to build a navy on a foundation which may disappear with the Sovereign who has laid it ?
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