unded 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