rth 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,