In a race of beings so little modeled after the accepted lines of pulchritude, all this was laughable. But to the German, condemned to a vise-like seriousness and to childlikeness, it became significant and weighty. It was such a grateful revelation not to have to dream of his loved ones through the unsatisfactory medium of German clothing.
With his customary excess of logic he plunged headlong into these ardent waves of the realm of Venus rising unimpeachably from the sea in her immortal bareness. He began to systematize this demonstration. Some of the political parties seemed to be in line to favor this revealment of another radical tenet. German philosophers made ready to seize upon it with huge mental biceps and labor to incorporate it beneficently into the Teuton pansophy. Even doctors of theology were said to view the novel dispensation through the blue spectacles of their didacticism, and to hesitate and stumble over the question of greeting these glad visions of a glad apocalypse. What was truer Protestantism than that there is the natural body as well as the spiritual body, and that it would be virtuous to behold outwardly the former as it was virtuous to recognize inwardly the latter?
The campaign became almost lively. Of course the young Germans, whose fathers and mothers in their youth had raved over Wagner and thus shocked their elders, raved over a departure that linked such possibilities of frankness and loveliness so delectably together. The Von Tielitzes and Messers were in the seventh heaven.
But Germany, being a northern country ruled severely in the main by old men, was bound to feel in the end more comfortable in clothes. Climate governs male and female alike and shapes their habits to its own tyrannical mandates. The Teutons were doomed to suggest flannel. So a vast moral revulsion in the form of the much German clothedness finally rose up and overwhelmed the religion of Nudity—the Nackt Kultur. Although the Teuton male likes to contemplate himself and be contemplated as candid Mother Nature made him, he could not adapt himself to the idea of his fleshy women appearing naked before a critical and commenting world. Momus had at last arrived in ancient Deutschland and was feared.
While the movement, which was presuming to cover Germany with sculptures of its heroes in complete undress, honored itself by such fitting testimonials to their lordliness, Fritz curiously shrank before public statues depicting his fat housewife in like absence of attire. This was illogical besides being unsatisfactory to those who had insisted on worshipping the German female form al fresco. The vital point being thus dodged, there was left nothing interesting in the way of legs for the Naked Cult to stand on, and it dropped out of sight as suddenly as it had risen to view. Prejudice is Plebeian and blind and to the blind and Plebeian high art of course goes with low morals. The Plebs are always in the crushing majority. So the odd German mind jumped to the other extreme and for a few months got ashamed of little daughters going barefoot or playing with naked animal toys.
Gard had been able to warm up small sympathy for the modern military authors and iron and blood philosophers whom he found in vogue in Germany. On the other hand, cold water had unexpectedly been thrown on the retreating Goethes and Schillers whom he had come to venerate with grammar and lexicon. As the Germans were proving to be wide of what his anticipations had set as a mark, he had begun a serious course of reading not only about the modern race but about its origins, curious to know of the early developments of this strange people who belonged to civilization yet was so considerably and constitutionally outside the realm of its Christian development.
In this study he became attracted to Charlemagne and that epoch. Of them he had learned little at college. Of course the Germans had "bagged" Charlemagne, as an Englishman would express it, in addition to their other seizures right and left in the face of an indulgent, even supine, world. But Gard discovered that while they had kept the puissant Carolingian snatched to their breasts, the chivalrous side of the great medieval evolution which ended in fostering the romantic ideal of womanhood in its chastity, daintiness and colorful spell, had never reached much east of his capital—Aix-la-Chapelle. His heroic size, his practical religious pretensions and assumptions, his campaigns to seize control of foreign lands—all such Carolingian features and manifestations were imitated and adopted as German motifs, but the corresponding gallant exaltation of the gentler sex was not included. The polished courts of self-denying love, the Troubadours, the salons, the refining influences that gradually raised woman to her modern sovereignty of a graceful liberty and charm, never characterized Deutschland.
Besides, women becoming idols through his own sexual restraint compelled a self-sacrificing procedure that did not appeal to Fritz. To him those many feminizing influences had naught to do with strength in battle or in toil. They were dangerous, softening, and coddled the elements of defeat. He wanted work and fighting and children, always children, but with the lustful appetites of the undisputed male.
His Berthas and Gretchens, who had been exceptional figures in the warring camps of the ancient Teutons, were therefore only transferred into a similar yet menial relation in the housed home. And there they have typically remained—in its cook room and nursery. The fact that the Buchers, though coming, as they boasted, from one original, unmixed, stationary stock there in that middle spot of old Europe, had displayed themselves as social and political parvenus, led to Kirtley's reflecting: