ennobling of our people in mind and character.... I beg of you
that you continue to stand by me, each in his own way and place,
serving the spirit of idealism, and waging war against
materialism and all un-German corruptions of the stage."

After various utterances showing his steady purpose in the same
direction, there came out, in one of the later years of my stay,
sundry remarks of his showing a new phase of the same thought, as
follows: "The theater should not only be an important factor in
education and in the promotion of morals, but it should also
present incarnations of elegance, of beauty, of the highest
conceptions of art; it should not discourage us with sad pictures
of the past, with bitter awakenings from illusions, but be
purified, elevated, strengthened for presenting the ideal. . . .
Our ordinary life gives us every day the most mournful realities,
and the modern authors whose pleasure it is to bring these before
us upon the stage have accepted an unhealthy mission and
accomplish a discouraging work."

In his desire to see the theater aid in developing German ideals
and in enriching German life, he has promoted presentations of
the great episodes and personages in German history. Some of
these, by Wildenbruch and Lauff, permeated with veins of true
poetry, are attractive and ennobling. Of course not all were
entirely successful. I recall one which glorified especially a
great epoch in the history of the house of Hohenzollern, the
comical effect of which on one of my diplomatic colleagues I have
mentioned elsewhere; but this, so far as my experience goes, was
an exception.