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.
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