ILLUSTRATIONS William II, German Emperor _Frontispiece_ FACING PAGE The Emperor in the Year of His Coronation, 1888 (Age 29) 26 "Our Future Lies upon the Water." The Emperor on Shipboard in the Autumn of 1898 126 The Emperor in 1900 168 I THE HOHENZOLLERN TRADITION Ernest Renan, the author of that once heretical "Life of Jesus," was by temperament unenthusiastic and had further schooled himself to look upon all human events with high unconcern. The great sceptic had been born in 1823; he was therefore sixty-five at the time of the accession of William II, and his declining health, in Horatian phrase, refused to allow him to enter upon any long hope. In looking forward to his inevitable end one thing, he said, afflicted him. He regretted only that he was not to see, in its later and more decisive phases, the unfolding of the multiform personality of the new German Emperor. To him it was an intellectual puzzle, more intricate and more interesting than any he had encountered in the many cycles of the history of the Hebrews or in the complicated schisms of the church. In the early years of his reign the youthful Emperor was regarded with much interest and some concern by his contemporaries generally. He was the chameleon among the royal figures of Europe. One day he receives the Czar at Berlin and proclaims peace to the world. A few weeks later he visits the Sultan at Constantinople, and shortly thereafter he announces to his loyal Brandenburgers that he will lead them on to greater things. What did he mean? Now he is a soldier, jesting with his officers; and, with the rising of another sun, in workman's garb, with the axe upon his shoulder, he goes forth as woodman or laborer on his own estates. At home he was regarded as Benjamin Constant regarded Madame de Staël. He was the "_bel orage_," the beautiful storm which had come upon Europe in the dull and piping times of peace of the last decades of the nineteenth century. He cleared the air of Continental politics in the years of late Victorianism. He was a dilettante of dangerous activities, as Renan had been of antiquated heresies and harmless, outworn systems, and to him Fate seemed to have given the future as a toy. Such, at least, was the view of the famous Portuguese poet Eça de Queiroz, who cast his horoscope in 1891.