THE NAKED CULT
The German, in all this physical aspect, is not a little like an
unabashed ape. Accordingly the foreigner in Deutschland is impressed
by the popular worship of the wide-hipped female. The Teuton can
leave little to be inferred but that he is more interested in the
magnet of her developed hips than in the magic of her brain.
American women, with their slender waists and chaste frigidness born
of Plymouth Rock, with their rulership in the home, their influence
permeating conspicuously in matters of public interest out of the
home, their entire freedom to be courted and married or let alone in
unbounded respect--how long would these conditions have been
permitted by the Gothic Kaiser if heedless America had fallen into
his gradually tightening grip? Doubtless to his view Yankee women
were treated too much like dolls. They are not breeders of
soldiers, makers of kingdoms. They do not rear children for the
State. What have they desirably in common with the disciplined
Hausfrau who becomes the mother of the ruling future generations?
_She_ is properly the chattel of the Government.
And so it is not enough, as Gard recognized, for Frau or Fräulein to
be massive of line and fond of being upholstered in dense colors in
order to satisfy the general grossness of her male. It is not enough
that she should be armed with strong hands, planted on large feet,
and decorated in the German's favorite rococo manner of abounding
breasts, to gratify his cyclopean aspirations.
"Big hips mean big women and big women mean big empires." The sex
fecund, ardent for mating and offspring, is the type. And thus
fatness, which obviously and indisputably fills out the picture, is
a popular German female attribute. Von Tielitz and Messer made it
plain that obesity and width of girth characterized the transient
objects of their amours. And their allusions gave every evidence
that the famous Naked Cult, to the fascinations of which Fräulein
Wasserhaus, with her bared and redundant bosom, was yielding, had
been claiming the German youth for its own.
Germany was recovering from this rage for nudity which had assumed
some proportions. Starting from the only artistic section of the
Empire, namely Bavaria, this cult had knocked even against the
gloomy portals of the Pommeranian churches in the north. The Teuton
had suddenly discovered that it was right and proper in his godship,
as it was in the realm of the Greek deities, to go about naked. It
was natural, healthful, and both beautiful and moral.
German men and women, in their divinity, should bathe, drink beer,
dance together nude. What else did Grecian sculpture teach to these
the modern Greeks--the true legatees of all that was Hellenic? What
else did painting inculcate but the beauty of undraped couples
wandering through landscapes? What more majestic spectacle than that
of the Teuton father, mother and children going out for an afternoon
promenade, clothed only in the ingenuous consciousness of their
human greatness?
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:
"The German thinks of a wife as in the kitchen, while a wife appears
to the Frenchman as in the salon, to the Briton, as in an English
garden."
So this gradual elevating of the sex toward an ethereal height in
all respects, toward pure associations which, through the epochs of
chaste saints, chivalry, gallantry, social freedom, were to uplift
men by the graces of lofty feminine enchantment, took place westward
of the Rhine. And Germany, if the sporadic Heine is excepted, had no
Shelleys, no Chopins, and scarcely any of that rare, delightful
perfume of human existence which western and southern mankind quite
typically adores as the ultimate extract of beauty because it is
associated with the spiritual elegance of womanhood....
* * * * *
On Kirtley's leaving that day, Von Tielitz and Messer showed
themselves generously ready to share their amorous acquaintanceship.
They insisted on his going with them sometime to the smallest,
quaintest inn in Dresden where they were at present cultivating
friendly relations with "Fritzi." In short petticoats she served the
best hot sausages in Saxony. To an American student of life and
language in Germany she was pictured as absolutely necessary. For,
although originally from the Thuringian forest, she spoke the Saxon
dialect "shockingly well."
Kirtley laughed it off as a part of the ribald fun.
The young Germans wound up their list of salutations with Der Tag!
"What do you mean by Der Tag?" he inquired. The others grinned
significantly.
"Wait and see. It will be something _kolossal_." And they called out
after him:
"Don't forget about Fritzi!"
That night Gard, laden with heavy feelings, tumbled into his German
bed piled with its equatorial bolsters. Could Elsa marry a man like
Friedrich? Ought she to be permitted to? Could she really love him?
Wouldn't she be horrified if she knew fully about him? Or would she,
like German women in general, seem to care little about the morals
of her future mate? Likely, as Gard fancied, it was this knowledge
of him that sent her now and then in evident unhappiness to her
room.
She was a pure and very worth-while girl. He could not ignore that
her healthful, productive example was a stimulus to him. It would be
a sturdy prop in his long sensitive, susceptible physical
recovery--and afterward. Was it really not a kind of _duty_ to try
to save her from sharing the fate of Von Tielitz, and win her if he
could?