, dies away in the Rococo
period in isolated strange individuals. Mesmer, Lavater, Athanasius
Kircher, Cagliostro are such Rococo figures in the very midst of the
Pigtail. Professor Beireis, in Helmstaedt, who in the eighteenth century
still tried his hand at making gold, carried on an incredible jugglery
with his collection of curios and made his enlightened contemporaries
believe that he possessed a diamond weighing six thousand four hundred
carats, which the Emperor of China had pawned with him, would, in former
times, if he had not been duly burned as a magician, have become the
head of a school. In the eighteenth century he merely remained a
mysterious eccentric type whose gaudy collection was gazed upon with
astonishment by all travelers, half charlatan, half savant--in any case,
however, a marvelous virtuoso of personality. In our day even such an
isolated original type would no longer be possible at all. It is
thoroughly Rococo.
The Middle Ages had had its guild secrets. In the period of the Rococo a
trading in secrets by individual scholars and artists had grown out of
it. Among the painters and musicians especially, even the smallest
master carried on his particular legerdemain with the "secrets" of art,
which he alone ostensibly possessed and communicated only to his pupils.
The profession of court fool had died out. In its place the individual
geniuses of folly appeared in the Rococo age, such as Gundeling, the
passive clown, who was made a fool of by others, and Kyau, the
Eulenspiegel of the eighteenth century, who himself hoaxed other people.
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