"This I can even now tell you--the impression which the Siegesallée has made on the foreigner is quite an overpowering one; everywhere respect for German sculpture is making itself perceivable. May you always remain on these heights, may such masters stand by my sons and sons' sons, should they ever come into existence! Then, I am convinced, will our people be in a position to love the beautiful and honour lofty ideals."
At the Berlin Art Museum next year, after praising the devotion of his parents to art, and especially of his mother, "a nature," he said, "about which poesy breathed," he continued:--
"The son of both stands before you as their heir and executor: and so I regard it as my task, according to the intention of my parents, to hold my hand over my German people and its growing generation, to foster the love of beauty in them, and to develop art in them; but only along the lines and within the bounds drawn strictly by the feelings in mankind for beauty and harmony."
The Emperor's speech to the sculptors, if it contains some questionable statements, is a thoughtful address by one who is himself an artist, though not perhaps an artist of a high class. His artistic endowments, transmitted from his parents, have been already indicated. In reference to them he said to the official conducting him over the Marienburg in later years, when the official expressed surprise at the Emperor's art-knowledge:--
"There is nothing wonderful in it. I was brought up in an artistic atmosphere. My mother was an artist, and from my earliest youth I have been surrounded by beautiful things. Art is my friend and my recreation."
The highest praise of a work of art is to say of it that it pleased, or would have pleased; his mother. Of her he said, "Every thought she had was art, and to her everything, however simple, which was meant for the use of life, was penetrated with beauty." When giving his sanction to a plan, a park, a statue or a building he always thinks--"Would it have pleased my parents--what would they have said about it?" The Kaiser Friedrich Museum and the Kaiser Friedrich Memorial Church, both in Berlin, testify to the Emperor's gratitude to his parents for their artistic legacy.