radictory effort to restrain and render
uniform the natural luxuriance of the hair, and yet at the same time to
append to men's backs a pure freak, a little, absolutely original
scroll.

One might say, in short, one extreme challenged the other. When people
had banished the old professional clown from the stage, they felt the
necessity of running about themselves as clowns. The sober, enlightened
age protested against the old folk-tales with goblins, gnomes, elves,
and other kindred sprites, but, to make up for it, thousands of living
caricatures played in their own rooms the part of goblins and gnomes,
and lady shepherdesses appropriated the roles of the elves, nixies, and
nymphs.

This phenomenon, however, leads to facts of much deeper significance for
the history of culture. Let us first define the conceptions. The words
"rococo" and "pigtail" at first applied only to the plastic arts; we
are, however, gradually becoming accustomed to employ them to designate
the whole period of culture. That is right and commendable, for those
words have been taken from real life, from experience by the senses,
whereas, as a rule, we almost always fabricate lifeless scholastic terms
for such things.

The Rococo--in the plastic arts--presupposes the Renaissance, and I
believe it has even been called the Renaissance gone crazy. One might
say more justly that when the Renaissance got intoxicated it became the
Rococo. And if the Rococo is the drunken debauch of the Renaissance then
the Pigtail would be the seediness which follows after it.

But I must rein in my steed to a quieter pace and give a more scholastic
definition.

In the Renaissance, antique forms were born again, at first within and
beside the medieval, finally replacing them entirely. But the new age of
the sixteenth century had new needs, new senses, new passions, which
the antique could satisfy no more fully than could the Gothic. When a
person is no longer an old Roman he cannot quite build and fashion like
the old Romans. For this reason the antique was pulled and stretched and
fitted on the new man as well as could be managed. It is, however, just
as hard to adapt forms of art as to alter coats which have been cut out
for some one else's body. Only a few of the greatest architects and
sculptors succeeded for a little while in reconciling the inner
contradiction between the new life and the old art. No period of art had
so short a flourishing period as the genuine