and the comedy, than for the
genuine historical picture of the epic and the tragedy. One can fully
characterize them only by painting a hundred individual traits
expressive of their peculiarity and their caprice, and this is
incompatible with the great epic style. It is by no means accidental
that Scherenberg is unable to get away from the most arbitrary crabbed
versification in his historical _genre_ poems celebrating Frederick the
Great. The capricious heroes with pigtails do not tolerate smooth
verses. The favorite verse-form of their day, however, the stiff
alexandrine, characterizes the Pigtail exclusively, not the Rococo.

The small princes imitated the great, and what in the latter had been
original traits of character, became in the former amusing caricatures.
The one copies Peter the Great's wedding of dwarfs; the other the giant
guard of Frederick Wilhelm I. A prince with such a wonderful passion for
the bass viol as Duke Maurice of Saxe-Merseburg, who even laid a small
bass viol in the cradle of his new-born daughter, was possible only in
the eighteenth century. It may be that his subjects did not even call
him a fool, but only a man of princely whims. A prince who wields the
fiddle-bow instead of the sceptre and thereby keeps his hands "clean
from blood and ink atrocities," is a true representative of the Rococo,
not of the Pigtail. That Landgrave of Hesse who wished to create a
second Potsdam in Pirmasens, and was made blissful by the thought that
he could hold his court in the tobacco-reeking guard-room, who
celebrated the greatest triumph of his reign when he had his entire
grenadier regiment manoeuvre in the pitch-dark drill-hall without the
least disorder occurring in the ranks, he is a real Rococo figure, for
by his mad fancies he humorously destroyed the long pigtail appended to
his actions.

A prince in those days had to be a virtuoso of personality. At the same
time the etiquette of the Courts, which amounted to the most rigid
conformity to rules, formed a strange contradiction to the ambition of
the individual prince to shine as an original. It is this same
contradiction which also characterizes the art and science of that time,
the contradiction between academic conformity to rules and the most
arbitrary scroll work, the contradiction between the Pigtail and the
Rococo. An old hack-blade of a German prince of the Empire, finding at a
state dinner that a foreign prince had loaded too much meat up