For the nineteenth century original types of this kind—where they still happen to exist—are quite adventitious; for the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries they were essential.

That capricious glorying in the most baroque personality possible, that leaning toward individual caricature, inborn in the whole age, agrees indeed very well with the arbitrarily fantastic taste of the Rococo period—of the seventeenth century—but it stands in sharpest contrast to the tendency of the Pigtail in the eighteenth. For to prune down the natural growth, to sober down the fantastic, to make the luxurious poor, emaciated, and uniform, and to weave life, art, and science on the same loom of academic rule—all this is a characteristic which distinguishes the Pigtail from the Rococo. This leaning toward individual caricature nevertheless was maintained throughout the entire age of the Pigtail. Indeed the very figure in the escutcheon of this period, the pigtail of hair, grew out of the contradictory effort to restrain and render uniform the natural luxuriance of the hair, and yet at the same time to append to men's backs a pure freak, a little, absolutely original scroll.

One might say, in short, one extreme challenged the other. When people had banished the old professional clown from the stage, they felt the necessity of running about themselves as clowns. The sober, enlightened age protested against the old folk-tales with goblins, gnomes, elves, and other kindred sprites, but, to make up for it, thousands of living caricatures played in their own rooms the part of goblins and gnomes, and lady shepherdesses appropriated the roles of the elves, nixies, and nymphs.

This phenomenon, however, leads to facts of much deeper significance for the history of culture. Let us first define the conceptions. The words "rococo" and "pigtail" at first applied only to the plastic arts; we are, however, gradually becoming accustomed to employ them to designate the whole period of culture. That is right and commendable, for those words have been taken from real life, from experience by the senses, whereas, as a rule, we almost always fabricate lifeless scholastic terms for such things.

The Rococo—in the plastic arts—presupposes the Renaissance, and I believe it has even been called the Renaissance gone crazy. One might say more justly that when the Renaissance got intoxicated it became the Rococo. And if the Rococo is the drunken debauch of the Renaissance then the Pigtail would be the seediness which follows after it.

But I must rein in my steed to a quieter pace and give a more scholastic definition.

In the Renaissance, antique forms were born again, at first within and beside the medieval, finally replacing them entirely. But the new age of the sixteenth century had new needs, new senses, new passions, which the antique could satisfy no more fully than could the Gothic. When a person is no longer an old Roman he cannot quite build and fashion like the old Romans. For this reason the antique was pulled and stretched and fitted on the new man as well as could be managed. It is, however, just as hard to adapt forms of art as to alter coats which have been cut out for some one else's body. Only a few of the greatest architects and sculptors succeeded for a little while in reconciling the inner contradiction between the new life and the old art. No period of art had so short a flourishing period as the genuine Renaissance; when it came into the world it bore the birthmark of mannerism on its forehead.

This mannerism in its fulness and maturity is the Rococo. The burly men and women bubbling over with life, in whom the stormy spirit of the age of discovery and invention, of social revolution and religious reformation, had not yet spent itself, finding the forms of the antique too confined and yet not wishing to give them up, pulled and stretched them, added to them scrolls and crossettes, nay, even shattered them to fragments and then held fast to their ruins, indeed even went so far as to find these caricatures and ruins more beautiful than the original. The Rococo is violent in chains, insolent in constraint, drunken in sobriety. It is the art of a rich, voluptuous, mystic, restless age.

Then came war and desolation, poverty and misery. Decadent men become dry and pedantic. Oppression and tyranny without engender pedagogism within. Thus the art of the Rococo became in the eighteenth century poor, sober, squeezed into rules, deprived of every passionate impulse which formerly might have reconciled us to its efflorescence. Mannerists of genius can glitter alluringly, pedantic ones are deterringly boring. The Pigtail is the dried-up Rococo, trimmed according to academic rules. The luxurious Rococo flora, composed of all kinds of plants, poisonous herbs, and weeds is presented to us, in the age of the Pigtail, as a dead herbarium on blotting-paper.

The periods of the history of art are measured only in round numbers. Thus the plastic artist may well say that the Renaissance belongs to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Baroque to the seventeenth, and the Rococo and the Pigtail to the eighteenth. But for the historian of culture, on the other hand, this calculation is a little too round. German literature during a good part of the Rococo period already belongs to the Pigtail, and it frees itself from the Pigtail in the very densest Pigtail period of the architect and the sculptor. Palestrina and Orlando di Lasso represent the aftermath of the Middle Ages in the period of the Renaissance; Haendel and Bach, in the eighteenth century, would have stood much closer to the Rococo than to the Pigtail, if they had not been such original and peculiar geniuses that one cannot quite classify them under these heads at all.

And yet the Rococo strikes a key-note which resounds through the whole history of culture of the seventeenth century, just as the Pigtail does through that of the eighteenth. On that account one need not give up the general character of the period, and yet one can see how the Rococo still presses forward in the Pigtail age. For in the battle of spirits the columns do not advance with even step and even front like the battalions on the parade ground, but here the file-leaders are often a century in advance of the centre.

When, therefore, the history of art and morals of the previous century shows us how at that time discordant spirits nevertheless wrestled with one another on common ground, the excess of fantastic arbitrariness with the most sober, universal pedantry, I call it simply a struggle of the Rococo with the Pigtail.

Men despised real history and broke with it, to be subjected all the more to the tyranny of historical ghosts. While the poets were fettered in blind worship of the unities of Aristotle as of a fundamental historical law, Houdart, without understanding a word of Greek, corrected Homer, whose poetry did not seem to conform sufficiently to rule.

In the characters of the great sovereigns of the eighteenth century, who created new, stricter, more regular forms of government, the same contrast appears between personal arbitrariness and devotion to this universal law founded by them. Frederick the Great, Joseph II., Catherine of Russia, Maria Theresa, Charles XII., Peter the Great, could none of them quite escape from the eccentricity which was considered the necessary attribute of genius. They furnished material, therefore, for countless anecdotes; by personal whims, freaks, and caprices they freed themselves at times from the new spirit of social uniformity and political legal equality. One could not reconcile such anecdote-business with the picture of the antique and medieval hero-kings. In the last two centuries, on the contrary, a king had to be witty if his greatness was not to be considered tedious by the people of the Pigtail. The scandalous chronicle of the Courts was at least as important as the political chronicles of the kingdoms. Through his mother-wit and his good jokes Old Fritz became a popular figure even among his adversaries, and among the people outside of Prussia he still lives on today in the anecdotes of his private life rather than in his princely actions. All the kings and heroes of the Rococo age therefore are rather material for the historical genre picture of the novel and the comedy, than for the genuine historical picture of the epic and the tragedy. One can fully characterize them only by painting a hundred individual traits expressive of their peculiarity and their caprice, and this is incompatible with the great epic style. It is by no means accidental that Scherenberg is unable to get away from the most arbitrary crabbed versification in his historical genre poems celebrating Frederick the Great. The capricious heroes with pigtails do not tolerate smooth verses. The favorite verse-form of their day, however, the stiff alexandrine, characterizes the Pigtail exclusively, not the Rococo.

The small princes imitated the great, and what in the latter had been original traits of character, became in the former amusing caricatures. The one copies Peter the Great's wedding of dwarfs; the other the giant guard of Frederick Wilhelm I. A prince with such a wonderful passion for the bass viol as Duke Maurice of Saxe-Merseburg, who even laid a small bass viol in the cradle of his new-born daughter, was possible only in the eighteenth century. It may be that his subjects did not even call him a fool, but only a man of princely whims. A prince who wields the fiddle-bow instead of the sceptre and thereby keeps his hands "clean from blood and ink atrocities," is a true representative of the Rococo, not of the Pigtail. That Landgrave of Hesse who wished to create a second Potsdam in Pirmasens, and was made blissful by the thought that he could hold his court in the tobacco-reeking guard-room, who celebrated the greatest triumph of his reign when he had his entire grenadier regiment manoeuvre in the pitch-dark drill-hall without the least disorder occurring in the ranks, he is a real Rococo figure, for by his mad fancies he humorously destroyed the long pigtail appended to his actions.

A prince in those days had to be a virtuoso of personality. At the same time the etiquette of the Courts, which amounted to the most rigid conformity to rules, formed a strange contradiction to the ambition of the individual prince to shine as an original. It is this same contradiction which also characterizes the art and science of that time, the contradiction between academic conformity to rules and the most arbitrary scroll work, the contradiction between the Pigtail and the Rococo. An old hack-blade of a German prince of the Empire, finding at a state dinner that a foreign prince had loaded too much meat upon his plate, without more ado took away half of it, and this incident admirably denotes the struggle of the age between arbitrariness and etiquette. In order to revenge the slight offense committed against etiquette by the prince, and guest, the host is guilty of a far greater one, and his act was without doubt admired as a real stroke of genius.

In the highest circles of society people often believed they could not amuse themselves better than by voluntarily submitting to the most severe despotism of an external constraint, in order to allow the utmost latitude to personal whims. Herein lies the colossal humor, the deep self-mockery of the age. One of the most remarkable monuments of this self-mockery was founded by a Margrave of Baireuth in the Hermitage near Baireuth. In order to enjoy the pleasures of a sojourn in the country the whole Court had to play at being monks and nuns. By silence and solitude, by painfully shackling themselves with all sorts of wearisome rules imitated from religious orders, the "hermits" had to prepare for social pleasures and Court festivities. In order to enjoy Court life in a new way people disguised it under the serious mask of the cloister; people tortured and bored themselves in order to be merry, and buckled social intercourse into a straitjacket, in order to give it the appearance of an entirely new and free movement.

Even German Pietism, which in the beginning of the eighteenth century gained so many adherents in the world of fashion, showed a piece of Rococo in the Pigtail. It, too, was founded, in part, on a mixture of the most subjective freedom and arbitrariness with the most rigid constraint of a new religious order; therefore it often appeared revolutionary, reformatory, and reactionary, all at the same time. They burst the fetters of benumbed dogmatism and petrified church government in order to inclose every free breath in new fetters. Even the last, most involuntary act of life—dying—had to be performed systematically. Pietistic literature of this time produced a work in four volumes which, with the most minute detail, submits the last hours of fifty-one lately departed persons to a sort of comparative anatomy, so that people could learn from it, scholastically as it were, the best way to die. The author of this work, a Count von Henkel, congratulates a friend, who had been a witness of the "instructive death" of a certain Herr von Geusau, in these words: "It was worth while to have heard a Collegium privatissimum on the art of dying like a Christian, especially from such a professore moribundo."

The French Neo-Romanticists, who declare war in the most decided manner against all literary traditions of the eighteenth century, nevertheless absolutely revel in material furnished by that time; the gentlemen in wigs have become their most profitable heroes, and in real life, as well as in our novels, we can find no more modern way to decorate our parlors and our furniture than by covering them with the scroll work of the wig-age. This is only an apparent contradiction. It is not the Pigtail but the Rococo that we are reviving so industriously, not the academic constraint of rules, but the subjective arbitrariness, the spirit of the original, freakish types. This untrammeled caprice of the Rococo age seems to us as fresh as nature compared with the well planned symmetry of our modern conditions, which no longer permit one to be a real fool, and therefore do not allow any dazzling figures of romance to come to the surface, just as the eighteenth century, on its part, no longer engendered any real dramatic characters. If Rousseau, as soon as the spirit of coarseness came over him, hurls the most spirited abuse at everybody, if the peasant poet, Robert Burns, "a giant original man," as Thomas Carlyle calls him, suddenly appearing among the puppets and buffoons of the eighteenth century, is gaped at like a curiosity in the salons of Edinburgh on account of his rough simple nature, then we too can find delight in the natural strength which is hidden in the Pigtail under the form of the Rococo. Even the historian of art, who grows indignant over the extinction of the historic sense in that age, over the vandalism with which an arrogant lack of understanding destroyed the monuments of the Middle Ages—even he must, at the same time, admire the self consciousness which speaks in this vandalism, the defiant belief in the wisdom of their own age, which boldly remolded everything to suit their own taste because they were finally persuaded that this taste was the only true one. It is a peculiar sign of conscious strength and of vitality breaking out in the midst of the sickly life of a degenerate age. We can almost envy the old pigtails for this blind belief in themselves, which grows out of the boastful arbitrariness of the Rococo, in the midst of and in spite of the constraint of the Pigtail, and is closely connected with the mad cult of originality practised by so many individual types. We have strong doubts concerning the excellence of our advanced mental development, while in the days of our great-grandfathers nobody doubted that that age, which we properly stigmatize with the sobriquet of the Pigtail Age, was really the golden age of art and science.

Our South-German peasants still live completely in the Rococo as regards artistic taste. They have forgotten the Middle Ages and have not yet found modern art. To the peasant of the Black Forest, the splendid, baroque, dome-shaped church of St. Blasien is a much greater marvel of native art than the Freiburg cathedral. Gaudy, exaggeratedly fantastic Rococo saints are generally considered by Catholic country people very much more edifying than a picture in the severe style of the Middle Ages or of the modern school. In the ornamentation of utensils and houses of our peasants the Rococo style has quite naively been carried along into our own times, and whoever nowadays wishes to have genuine Rococo chairs in his parlor not infrequently searches through the peasants' houses. The pleasure which the peasant takes in the Rococo, which has bravely survived so many changes in taste, is easily explained. The peasant himself is an original, rather, 'tis true, as a species than individually, and the brilliant, fantastic, affected, violent quality of the Rococo appealed to his rough, sturdy child's nature, just like large capital letters. On the other hand he never sympathized with the genuine Pigtail. The scant, niggardly dress-coat of this period was never adopted as the prevailing costume of the people, any more than the fashion of wearing the hair in a real pigtail, and the bare facades of the academic Pigtail architecture never became epoch-making in popular, architecture. The peasant only appropriated to himself the Rococo out of the Pigtail of the last century.

We pedantic city people, on the contrary, in the outer construction of our houses, in their joiner-like, barrack architecture with the monotonous rows of windows, have all this time remained prisoners of the Pigtail; but in the gaudy, whimsical decoration of our rooms, on the other hand, we have reached the Rococo once more, and only very recently have we begun to improve by going back to the powerful individualism of the Renaissance—as, for instance, in many of the new streets in Munich. There is, however, nothing adventitious about this, for, in general, a more personal, original life is flourishing in our bourgeoisie than there was twenty years ago.

In the Rococo period there was an endless amount of portrait painting, and this partiality to having one's picture done in oils, pastel, engraving, in silhouette and in miniature medallion, maintained itself throughout the entire Pigtail period. It was conformable to the spirit of the times and to one's rank to look upon one's own features as something not to be despised, and not a soul suspected that there was any personal vanity in it.

In the same way that people had their portraits executed by the engraver, they also liked to depict their own likeness in their letters, diaries, and memoirs. The custom came to us from the French in the seventeenth century, and, as a real child of the Rococo, triumphantly survived the struggle with the Pigtail, and lasted on into the nineteenth century. No man nowadays can carry on such extensive friendly correspondence as was universally carried on from fifty to a hundred years ago. This self-inspection, this importance attached to little personalities, disgusts us. The letters of Gleim, Heinse, Jacobi, Johannes Mueller suffice to make us feel fully conscious of this disgust. We should now call the man a coxcomb who considered his precious ego so important that he had to carry on, year in and year out, a yard-long correspondence about himself. General interests have grown, private interests have shriveled up, but thereby, indeed, the original types of the old days have become impossible.

That strange union of charlatanism and science, of prognosticating mysticism and sharp-eyed observation which in the Renaissance had, as it were, become incorporated in large learned guilds, such as the astrologers, alchemists, theosophists, etc., dies away in the Rococo period in isolated strange individuals. Mesmer, Lavater, Athanasius Kircher, Cagliostro are such Rococo figures in the very midst of the Pigtail. Professor Beireis, in Helmstaedt, who in the eighteenth century still tried his hand at making gold, carried on an incredible jugglery with his collection of curios and made his enlightened contemporaries believe that he possessed a diamond weighing six thousand four hundred carats, which the Emperor of China had pawned with him, would, in former times, if he had not been duly burned as a magician, have become the head of a school. In the eighteenth century he merely remained a mysterious eccentric type whose gaudy collection was gazed upon with astonishment by all travelers, half charlatan, half savant—in any case, however, a marvelous virtuoso of personality. In our day even such an isolated original type would no longer be possible at all. It is thoroughly Rococo.

The Middle Ages had had its guild secrets. In the period of the Rococo a trading in secrets by individual scholars and artists had grown out of it. Among the painters and musicians especially, even the smallest master carried on his particular legerdemain with the "secrets" of art, which he alone ostensibly possessed and communicated only to his pupils.

The profession of court fool had died out. In its place the individual geniuses of folly appeared in the Rococo age, such as Gundeling, the passive clown, who was made a fool of by others, and Kyau, the Eulenspiegel of the eighteenth century, who himself hoaxed other people. In the learned Athanasius Kircher the charlatan of genius struggles continually with the pedant; that is the great struggle which continued throughout the entire age, in religion, art, science, and statecraft—the struggle of the Rococo with the Pigtail. The repugnant inner lack of truthfulness of so many important personages of this age has its roots in this unadjusted struggle. In order to appear a real original, one dared not be quite simple, truthful, and open. Muenchhausen, the notorious liar, is a genuine Rococo caricature in the Pigtail age.

The most original of all the original people in those days ended up as caricatures. The Rococo is the conscious humor of the Pigtail; for that reason it can still be used artistically today, whereas the Pigtail, which is totally lacking in the humor of self-knowledge, has long been artistically dead. Even today when a genre-painter wishes to paint real lifelike caricatures he paints them in Rococo costume. Hasenclever's Hieronymus Jobs, for example, would appear to us absolutely exaggerated, if the figures in these pictures did not wear pigtails and wigs. Only in this unique age of the Rococo does it seem to us possible that such freaks could have walked the earth in the flesh. And we are not wrong in so thinking; for the mania to be an original type, a virtuoso of personality, in that day turned innumerable persons into genuine caricatures. A certain Count von Hoditz, in the middle of the eighteenth century, founded a so-called "Maria Theresa sheep-farm" (in honor of the Empress) on his estate Roswalde, in Silesia, and here his subjects and villeins had to play at Greece and Rome, year in and year out. Temples were erected to Thetis, Diana, Flora, etc., and peasants went about dressed up as haruspices and augurs. The Pontifex slaughtered a sheep on the sacrificial altar, the oracle was consulted in a cave, and in a temple dedicated to the sun young priests kept up an ever-flaming fire. On this estate an actor was master of the hunt, librarian, theatre director, high priest of the sun and—schoolmaster, all in his own person; and Frederick the Great was so pleased with the Silesian Arcadia that he celebrated it in a poetic epistle. If one tried nowadays to give an accurate description of this bare reality in a novel it would look like the most exaggerated caricature. The Rococo, however, can bear the strongest laying on of color and the most distorted forms. It was not without some reason that, in those days, they loved to chisel or carve on every house door and on the neck of every violin a hideous face which is making grimaces and sticking out its tongue. Many of the figures in Moliere's and Holberg's comedies, and in the innumerable farces written in imitation of them in the eighteenth century, now appear to us clumsy, extravagant caricatures. But if we recall such historical phenomena as the above-mentioned Maria Theresa sheep-farm, we will find that for their age the clumsy figures were well portrayed characteristic types, far rather than caricatures. In them is mirrored the unmanageable eccentricity of the more original persons in the Pigtail age, so abounding in constraint and training.

Without this contrast of arbitrariness and restraint, which presents itself under the form of a struggle of the Rococo with the Pigtail, the history of culture, and still more the history of art, of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, is quite incomprehensible. The great political revolution of the nineties could never have been a product of the rigid Pigtail age, but it could very well have been a result of the Rococo in the Pigtail. In the Rococo there was still life, mad, ungovernable life; the Pigtail always had a Hippocratic face. The virtuosos of personality, the strange Rococo original types, were the forbears of the literary Storm and Stress writers, the artistic reformers, the big and little demagogues. The pedants of the Pigtail, on the other hand, were the prophets of the pipe-clay, the bureaucracy, the rationalistic mechanical training of young and old in church and school. And this contrast of the Rococo and the Pigtail still continues today, but veiled and in a new garment, not only on and in our houses but also in our public and private life. The genuine original types of the Rococo, however, the fantastic virtuosos of personality, have, indeed, long since been gathered to their fathers and will not return.



FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 1: This peculiarity distinguishes Gotthelf's Bauernspiegel from the nearly contemporary Oberhof, the episode of Immermann's Muenchhausen which is intended as a popular contrast to the aristocratic society represented in the larger part of that novel. Cf. Vol. vii, p. 169.]

[Footnote 2: Editor's note.—Numerous omissions have been made in the course of the narrative, reducing the length of the original text by about one fifth. Wherever necessary for the continuity of the story, the essence of the excluded portions has been supplied by synopses. These synopses are printed enclosed in brackets.

Permission Kegan Paul, Trench, Truebner & Co., Ltd., London.]

[Footnote 3: This old country saying is founded on the similarity in sound between sechse (sixes) and hexe (witch).]

[Footnote 4: Permission Bernhard Tauchnitz, Leipzig.]

[Footnote 5: Translator's note. In Mecklenburg the cows are always milked in the fields.]

[Footnote 6: Translator's note. The Kammer is the chief government office in Mecklenburg, and Mr. von Rambow was a member of it.]

[Footnote 7: A mortgage or lien, a corruption of Hypothek.]

[Footnote 8: Translator's note.—This story is founded on fact, and during Reuter's last visit to Stuer (from the 13th of December, 1868, till the 29th of January, 1869) he discovered this great amusement that he had been given the very room in which the director of the establishment told him the hero of the tale had been attacked by a neighbor's bees while he was lying helpless in the "packing" sheets. See Duboc's "Auf Reuterschem Boden" in Westermann's "Monats-Hefte."]

[Footnote 9: Translator's note.—A common saying in Mecklenburg, the origin of which is unknown.]

[Footnote 10: From Bunte Steine]

[Footnote 11: From The Natural History of the People.]

[Footnote 12: Hilly woodland in the eastern part of the Island of Ruegen.]

[Footnote 13: From Studies in the Culture of Three Centuries.]

[Footnote 14: Claude Lorraine himself, who according to tradition is said to have made studies near Munich, did not go into the high mountains, but, quite in keeping with the eye for natural scenery of his time, remained on the plateau.]

[Footnote 15: From Studies in the Culture of Three Centuries.]

[Footnote 16: France centralizes in this respect also and at present (1858) a council is being called together in Paris to reestablish the catholicity of European orchestral pitch.]

[Footnote 17: From Studies in the Culture of Three Centuries.]

THE END