e 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