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.

Our South-German peasants still live completely in the Rococo as regards
artistic taste. They have forgotten the Middle Ages and have not yet
found modern art. To the peasant of the Black Forest, the splendid,
baroque, dome-shaped church of St. Blasien is a much greater marvel of
native art than the Freiburg cathedral. Gaudy, exaggeratedly fantastic
Rococo saints are generally considered by Catholic country people very
much more edifying than a picture in the severe style of the Middle Ages
or of the modern school. In the ornamentation of utensils and houses of
our peasants the Rococo style has quite naively been carried along into
our own times, and whoever nowadays wishes to have genuine Rococo chairs
in his parlor not infrequently searches through the peasants' houses.
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, sturdy child's nature, just like large
capital letters. On the other hand he never sympathized with the genuine
Pigtail. The scant, niggardly 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, h