. 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
passive 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.
Muenchhausen, 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, fo