The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Volume 08 / Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English

by Unknown

The periods of the history of art are measured only in round numbers. Thus the plastic artist may well say that the Renaissance belongs to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Baroque to the seventeenth, and the Rococo and the Pigtail to the eighteenth. But for the historian of culture, on the other hand, this calculation is a little too round. German literature during a good part of the Rococo period already belongs to the Pigtail, and it frees itself from the Pigtail in the very densest Pigtail period of the architect and the sculptor. Palestrina and Orlando di Lasso represent the aftermath of the Middle Ages in the period of the Renaissance; Händel and Bach, in the eighteenth century, would have stood much closer to the Rococo than to the Pigtail, if they had not been such original and peculiar geniuses that one cannot quite classify them under these heads at all.

And yet the Rococo strikes a key-note which resounds through the whole history of culture of the seventeenth century, just as the Pigtail does through that of the eighteenth. On that account one need not give up the general character of the period, and yet one can see how the Rococo still presses forward in the Pigtail age. For in the battle of spirits the columns do not advance with even step and even front like the battalions on the parade ground, but here the file-leaders are often a century in advance of the centre.

When, therefore, the history of art and morals of the previous century shows us how at that time discordant spirits nevertheless wrestled with one another on common ground, the excess of fantastic arbitrariness with the most sober, universal pedantry, I call it simply a struggle of the Rococo with the Pigtail.

Men despised real history and broke with it, to be subjected all the more to the tyranny of historical ghosts. While the poets were fettered in blind worship of the unities of Aristotle as of a fundamental historical law, Houdart, without understanding a word of Greek, corrected Homer, whose poetry did not seem to conform sufficiently to rule.

In the characters of the great sovereigns of the eighteenth century, who created new, stricter, more regular forms of government, the same contrast appears between personal arbitrariness and devotion to this universal law founded by them. Frederick the Great, Joseph II., Catherine of Russia, Maria Theresa, Charles XII., Peter the Great, could none of them quite escape from the eccentricity which was considered the necessary attribute of genius. They furnished material, therefore, for countless anecdotes; by personal whims, freaks, and caprices they freed themselves at times from the new spirit of social uniformity and political legal equality. One could not reconcile such anecdote-business with the picture of the antique and medieval hero-kings. In the last two centuries, on the contrary, a king had to be witty if his greatness was not to be considered tedious by the people of the Pigtail. The scandalous chronicle of the Courts was at least as important as the political chronicles of the kingdoms. Through his mother-wit and his good jokes Old Fritz became a popular figure even among his adversaries, and among the people outside of Prussia he still lives on today in the anecdotes of his private life rather than in his princely actions. All the kings and heroes of the Rococo age therefore are rather material for the historical genre picture of the novel and the comedy, than for the genuine historical picture of the epic and the tragedy. One can fully characterize them only by painting a hundred individual traits expressive of their peculiarity and their caprice, and this is incompatible with the great epic style. It is by no means accidental that Scherenberg is unable to get away from the most arbitrary crabbed versification in his historical genre poems celebrating Frederick the Great. The capricious heroes with pigtails do not tolerate smooth verses. The favorite verse-form of their day, however, the stiff alexandrine, characterizes the Pigtail exclusively, not the Rococo.

The small princes imitated the great, and what in the latter had been original traits of character, became in the former amusing caricatures. The one copies Peter the Great's wedding of dwarfs; the other the giant guard of Frederick Wilhelm I. A prince with such a wonderful passion for the bass viol as Duke Maurice of Saxe-Merseburg, who even laid a small bass viol in the cradle of his new-born daughter, was possible only in the eighteenth century. It may be that his subjects did not even call him a fool, but only a man of princely whims. A prince who wields the fiddle-bow instead of the sceptre and thereby keeps his hands "clean from blood and ink atrocities," is a true representative of the Rococo, not of the Pigtail. That Landgrave of Hesse who wished to create a second Potsdam in Pirmasens, and was made blissful by the thought that he could hold his court in the tobacco-reeking guard-room, who celebrated the greatest triumph of his reign when he had his entire grenadier regiment manoeuvre in the pitch-dark drill-hall without the least disorder occurring in the ranks, he is a real Rococo figure, for by his mad fancies he humorously destroyed the long pigtail appended to his actions.

A prince in those days had to be a virtuoso of personality. At the same time the etiquette of the Courts, which amounted to the most rigid conformity to rules, formed a strange contradiction to the ambition of the individual prince to shine as an original. It is this same contradiction which also characterizes the art and science of that time, the contradiction between academic conformity to rules and the most arbitrary scroll work, the contradiction between the Pigtail and the Rococo. An old hack-blade of a German prince of the Empire, finding at a state dinner that a foreign prince had loaded too much meat upon his plate, without more ado took away half of it, and this incident admirably denotes the struggle of the age between arbitrariness and etiquette. In order to revenge the slight offense committed against etiquette by the prince, and guest, the host is guilty of a far greater one, and his act was without doubt admired as a real stroke of genius.

In the highest circles of society people often believed they could not amuse themselves better than by voluntarily submitting to the most severe despotism of an external constraint, in order to allow the utmost latitude to personal whims. Herein lies the colossal humor, the deep self-mockery of the age. One of the most remarkable monuments of this self-mockery was founded by a Margrave of Baireuth in the Hermitage near Baireuth. In order to enjoy the pleasures of a sojourn in the country the whole Court had to play at being monks and nuns. By silence and solitude, by painfully shackling themselves with all sorts of wearisome rules imitated from religious orders, the "hermits" had to prepare for social pleasures and Court festivities. In order to enjoy Court life in a new way people disguised it under the serious mask of the cloister; people tortured and bored themselves in order to be merry, and buckled social intercourse into a straitjacket, in order to give it the appearance of an entirely new and free movement.

Even German Pietism, which in the beginning of the eighteenth century gained so many adherents in the world of fashion, showed a piece of Rococo in the Pigtail. It, too, was founded, in part, on a mixture of the most subjective freedom and arbitrariness with the most rigid constraint of a new religious order; therefore it often appeared revolutionary, reformatory, and reactionary, all at the same time. 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. 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. We can almost envy the old pigtails for this blind belief in themselves, which grows out of the boastful arbitrariness of the Rococo, in the midst of and in spite of the constraint of the Pigtail, and is closely connected with the mad cult of originality practised by so many individual types. We have strong doubts concerning the excellence of our advanced mental development, while in the days of our great-grandfathers nobody doubted that that age, which we properly stigmatize with the sobriquet of the Pigtail Age, was really the golden age of art and science.