Omaha daily bee., 1902-05-11

M0N THE good old days kings an
I8I queens were not expected to know
~ anything about literature; it was
t6nS8I one of the prerogatives of royalty
to be ignorant. The last century
has changed all that. A king has to be a
walking encyclopedia; a queen wins ad-
miration from her people when it is known
that she loves books and has a cultivated
taste. Young princess have to wade through
languages, science and political enCn.my;
small princesses are expected to have a
loving acquaintance with poets and the
better sort of novelists. The change has
come about within our own times; in
nearly every case the younger sovereigns
and royalties generally are highly cultured,
devotees of learning and literature, while
the older crowned heads are as empty of
book knowledge as so many plowboys.
Take the English royal family for an
example. The late Queen Victoria was
undoubtedly a woman of great brain power
and character, she probably knew as much
about the ruling of her immense possess
sicns as any Of her ministers, and some
times ran very close to violating the I'M
written English constitution by putting
direct personal restraint upon the respon-
sible heads of state departments. Yet her
literary taste was utterly beneath con-
tempt. She read a great deal of Tenny-
son, no doubt, but it was mainly because
of a certain sentimentality in which her
poet-laureate met her own womanly feel
ing; what was really fine and great in Lord
Tennyson's work almost certainly left her
unmoved. Her characterization mostly
for publication by a titled secretary-show
that she had no sound literary Judgment.
And her later reading was either in books
of devotion and sermons or in novels Of
the least intellectual order. Her indirectly
expressed approval of a book several times
sent up sales, as in the case of Rhoda
Broughton or Rita" but it almost always
meant that the book was devoid of all real
value. The old queen read simply to while
away the heavy hours. She belonged, able
V man though she was, to the age of I'M
cultivated royal persons.
Her son, the present king. belongs prac-
tically to the same period; he is not in the
hrst bloom of his youth and he. too, is no
great reader, certainly not a thinker or a
critic. Mach less able than his mother, he
practlcally is an uneducated man, except
in the sense that he is a man of this world
.Snd knows life very thoroughly in all its
phases. 1t is nowhere recorded that he
ever expressed an opinion of a book; prob
ably he has read very few. Certainly his
poor attempts at speech making show him
to be completely out of touch with the
world OF thought. He represents fairly well
the jovial medieval monarch who paid
learned men to know things" for him
while he himself went his way in contented
Indifference to all the intellectual life OF
his day.
Prince of Wales and kaiser.
The contrast of the old order with the
new becomes evident in tho aga 90 III. 49,,
the prince of Wales. The prince is not a
conspicuously learned man, not perhaps a
brilliantly gifted man, but he is far ahead
OF the king in his interest in letters and in
thought. To hear him speak in public, IL
only at some ABSURD unwilling ceremony or
the laying Of a foundation stone, is to
recogn u at once a man fairly abreast Of
the intellectual achievement of his day. a
man of personal convictions acquired by
reading and matured by meditation. He is
a well educated, cultivated man, represent
ing the new generation of royalty.
On about the same intellectual plane
stands the much-talked- of kaiser. He. n
is true, is not a great reader Of books. He
has been called the yellow Journalist Of
royalty on account of his love for ultra
modernism, his passion for splurge and
display. Naturally he is a great reader OF
newspapers and magazines; he prefers to
get Information rapidly and in the vivid
popular form in which the ready writer for
The press serves it up. He lets other peo-
pie do the work Of research for him. he
gets his learning at second hand, but he
nothing escape; he is in the closest
touch with modern science, art, literature.
politics and personality. ! have heard a
member Of the German embassy at Paris