But if we recall such historical phenomena as
the above-mentioned Maria Theresa sheep-farm, we will find that for
their age the clumsy figures were well portrayed characteristic types,
far rather than caricatures. In them is mirrored the unmanageable
eccentricity of the more original persons in the Pigtail age, so
abounding in constraint and training.
Without this contrast of arbitrariness and restraint, which presents
itself under the form of a struggle of the Rococo with the Pigtail, the
history of culture, and still more the history of art, of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, is quite incomprehensible. The
great political revolution of the nineties could never have been a
product of the rigid Pigtail age, but it could very well have been a
result of the Rococo in the Pigtail. In the Rococo there was still life,
mad, ungovernable life; the Pigtail always had a Hippocratic face. The
virtuosos of personality, the strange Rococo original types, were the
forbears of the literary Storm and Stress writers, the artistic
reformers, the big and little demagogues. The pedants of the Pigtail, on
the other hand, were the prophets of the pipe-clay, the bureaucracy, the
rationalistic mechanical training of young and old in church and school.
And this contrast of the Rococo and the Pigtail still continues today,
but veiled and in a new garment, not only on and in our houses but also
in our public and private life.
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