The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries Volume Viii Part 52

The pleasure which the peasant takes in the Rococo, which has bravely survived so many changes in taste, is easily explained. The peasant himself is an original, rather, 'tis true, as a species than individually, and the brilliant, fantastic, affected, violent quality of the Rococo appealed to his rough, st.u.r.dy child's nature, just like large capital letters. On the other hand he never sympathized with the genuine Pigtail. The scant, n.i.g.g.ardly dress-coat of this period was never adopted as the prevailing costume of the people, any more than the fashion of wearing the hair in a real pigtail, and the bare facades of the academic Pigtail architecture never became epoch-making in popular, architecture. The peasant only appropriated to himself the Rococo out of the Pigtail of the last century.

We pedantic city people, on the contrary, in the outer construction of our houses, in their joiner-like, barrack architecture with the monotonous rows of windows, have all this time remained prisoners of the Pigtail; but in the gaudy, whimsical decoration of our rooms, on the other hand, we have reached the Rococo once more, and only very recently have we begun to improve by going back to the powerful individualism of the Renaissance--as, for instance, in many of the new streets in Munich.

There is, however, nothing advent.i.tious about this, for, in general, a more personal, original life is flourishing in our _bourgeoisie_ than there was twenty years ago.

In the Rococo period there was an endless amount of portrait painting, and this partiality to having one's picture done in oils, pastel, engraving, in silhouette and in miniature medallion, maintained itself throughout the entire Pigtail period. 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 Muller suffice to make us feel fully conscious of this disgust.

We should now call the man a c.o.xcomb 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., 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 Helmstadt, 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 p.a.w.ned 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 pa.s.sive clown, who was made a fool of by others, and Kyau, the Eulenspiegel of the eighteenth century, who himself hoaxed other people.

In the learned Athanasius Kircher the charlatan of genius struggles continually with the pedant; that is the great struggle which continued throughout the entire age, in religion, art, science, and statecraft--the struggle of the Rococo with the Pigtail. The repugnant inner lack of truthfulness of so many important personages of this age has its roots in this unadjusted struggle. In order to appear a real original, one dared not be quite simple, truthful, and open.

Munchhausen, the notorious liar, is a genuine Rococo caricature in the Pigtail age.

The most original of all the original people in those days ended up as caricatures. The Rococo is the conscious humor of the Pigtail; for that reason it can still be used artistically today, whereas the Pigtail, which is totally lacking in the humor of self-knowledge, has long been artistically dead. Even today when a genre-painter wishes to paint real lifelike caricatures he paints them in Rococo costume. Hasenclever's Hieronymus Jobs, for example, would appear to us absolutely exaggerated, if the figures in these pictures did not wear pigtails and wigs. Only in this unique age of the Rococo does it seem to us possible that such freaks could have walked the earth in the flesh. And we are not wrong in so thinking; for the mania to be an original type, a virtuoso of personality, in that day turned innumerable persons into genuine caricatures. A certain Count von Hoditz, in the middle of the eighteenth century, founded a so-called "Maria Theresa sheep-farm" (in honor of the Empress) on his estate Roswalde, in Silesia, and here his subjects and villeins had to play at Greece and Rome, year in and year out. Temples were erected to Thetis, Diana, Flora, etc., and peasants went about dressed up as haruspices and augurs. The Pontifex slaughtered a sheep on the sacrificial altar, the oracle was consulted in a cave, and in a temple dedicated to the sun young priests kept up an ever-flaming fire.

On this estate an actor was master of the hunt, librarian, theatre director, high priest of the sun and--schoolmaster, all in his own person; and Frederick the Great was so pleased with the Silesian Arcadia that he celebrated it in a poetic epistle. If one tried nowadays to give an accurate description of this bare reality in a novel it would look like the most exaggerated caricature. The Rococo, however, can bear the strongest laying on of color and the most distorted forms. It was not without some reason that, in those days, they loved to chisel or carve on every house door and on the neck of every violin a hideous face which is making grimaces and sticking out its tongue. Many of the figures in Moliere's and Holberg's comedies, and in the innumerable farces written in imitation of them in the eighteenth century, now appear to us clumsy, extravagant caricatures. 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. The genuine original types of the Rococo, however, the fantastic virtuosos of personality, have, indeed, long since been gathered to their fathers and will not return.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 1: This peculiarity distinguishes Gotthelf's _Bauernspiegel_ from the nearly contemporary _Oberhof_, the episode of Immermann's _Munchhausen_ which is intended as a popular contrast to the aristocratic society represented in the larger part of that novel. Cf.

Vol. vii, p. 169.]

[Footnote 2: Editor's note.--Numerous omissions have been made in the course of the narrative, reducing the length of the original text by about one fifth. Wherever necessary for the continuity of the story, the essence of the excluded portions has been supplied by synopses. These synopses are printed enclosed in brackets.

Permission Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., Ltd., London.]

[Footnote 3: This old country saying is founded on the similarity in sound between _sechse_ (sixes) and _hexe_ (witch).]

[Footnote 4: Permission Bernhard Tauchnitz, Leipzig.]

[Footnote 5: _Translator's note_. In Mecklenburg the cows are always milked in the fields.]

[Footnote 6: Translator's note. The Kammer is the chief government office in Mecklenburg, and Mr. von Rambow was a member of it.]

[Footnote 7: A mortgage or lien, a corruption of _Hypothek_.]

[Footnote 8: _Translator's note_.--This story is founded on fact, and during Reuter's last visit to Stuer (from the 13th of December, 1868, till the 29th of January, 1869) he discovered this great amus.e.m.e.nt that he had been given the very room in which the director of the establishment told him the hero of the tale had been attacked by a neighbor's bees while he was lying helpless in the "packing" sheets. See Duboc's "Auf Reuterschem Boden" in Westermann's "Monats-Hefte."]

[Footnote 9: _Translator's note_.--A common saying in Mecklenburg, the origin of which is unknown.]

[Footnote 10: From _Bunte Steine_]

[Footnote 11: From _The Natural History of the People_.]

[Footnote 12: Hilly woodland in the eastern part of the Island of Rugen.]

[Footnote 13: From _Studies in the Culture of Three Centuries_.]

[Footnote 14: Claude Lorraine himself, who according to tradition is said to have made studies near Munich, did not go into the high mountains, but, quite in keeping with the eye for natural scenery of his time, remained on the plateau.]

[Footnote 15: From _Studies in the Culture of Three Centuries_.]

[Footnote 16: France centralizes in this respect also and at present (1858) a council is being called together in Paris to reestablish the catholicity of European orchestral pitch.]

[Footnote 17: From _Studies in the Culture of Three Centuries_.]