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.
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