e most secret
instinctive tones of the emotional life of a bygone world, the natural
sounds of their souls, which are so entirely different from our own and
which would be lost for us--since picture and word stand too far
off--had they not found fixed expression in musical composition. The
character-picture of the last century, as portrayed by the historian of
culture, is lacking in that peculiar soulful lustre, that mysterious
little luminous point which shines upon the beholder from the eye of a
well-painted portrait, if such things as the knowledge of the eye for
natural scenery and the ear for music of the age are not included among
the features of the character-picture.

THE STRUGGLE OF THE ROCOCO WITH THE PIGTAIL[17]

By W.H. RIEHL

Translated by FRANCES H. KING

No time is so rich as the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in humorous
original types of a distinct _genre_, who built for themselves a world
apart. Everywhere in this period we meet with eccentrics by profession,
who with deliberate intention play, as the actors say, a "charged"
character-part. Their freaks and gambols were considered worthy to be
handed on to posterity in memoirs and books of anecdote, and whoever
wanted to be a gentleman was obliged, in some particulars at least, to
be a fool. The romantic adventures of the Middle Ages returned again in
a new costume, in less fantastic but far more humorous forms; Don
Quixote exchanged his helmet for a wig.

For the nineteenth century original types of this kind--where they still
happen to exist--are quite adventitious; for the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries they were essential.

That capricious glorying in the most baroque personality possible, that
leaning toward individual caricature, inborn in the whole age, agrees
indeed very well with the arbitrarily fantastic taste of the Rococo
period--of the seventeenth century--but it stands in sharpest contrast
to the tendency of the Pigtail in the eighteenth. For to prune down the
natural growth, to sober down the fantastic, to make the luxurious poor,
emaciated, and uniform, and to weave life, art, and science on the same
loom of academic rule--all this is a characteristic which distinguishes
the Pigtail from the Rococo. This leaning toward individual caricature
nevertheless was maintained throughout the entire age of the Pigtail.
Indeed the very figure in the escutcheon of this period, the pigtail of
hair, grew out of the cont