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 _mot