THE STRUGGLE OF THE ROCOCO WITH THE PIGTAIL[17]
By W.H. RIEHL
Translated by FRANCES H. KING
No time is so rich as the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in humorous
original types of a distinct _genre_, who built for themselves a world
apart. Everywhere in this period we meet with eccentrics by profession,
who with deliberate intention play, as the actors say, a "charged"
character-part. Their freaks and gambols were considered worthy to be
handed on to posterity in memoirs and books of anecdote, and whoever
wanted to be a gentleman was obliged, in some particulars at least, to
be a fool. The romantic adventures of the Middle Ages returned again in
a new costume, in less fantastic but far more humorous forms; Don
Quixote exchanged his helmet for a wig.
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.
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