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.
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