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.
Pages:
613
614
615
616
617
618
619
620
621
622
623
624
625
626
627
628
629
630
631
632
633
634
635
636
637