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 upon his plate, without more ado took away half of it, and this incident admirably denotes the struggle of the age between arbitrariness and etiquette.  In order to revenge the slight offense committed against etiquette by the prince, and guest, the host is guilty of a far greater one, and his act was without doubt admired as a real stroke of genius.

In the highest circles of society people often believed they could not amuse themselves better than by voluntarily submitting to the most severe despotism of an external constraint, in order to allow the utmost latitude to personal whims.  Herein lies the colossal humor, the deep self-mockery of the age.  One of the most remarkable monuments of this self-mockery was founded by a Margrave of Baireuth in the Hermitage near Baireuth.  In order to enjoy the pleasures of a sojourn in the country the whole Court had to play at being monks and nuns.  By silence and solitude, by painfully shackling themselves with all sorts of wearisome rules imitated from religious orders, the “hermits” had to prepare for social pleasures and Court festivities.  In order to enjoy Court life in a new way people disguised it under the serious mask of the cloister; people tortured and bored themselves in order to be merry, and buckled social intercourse into a straitjacket, in order to give it the appearance of an entirely new and free movement.

Even German Pietism, which in the beginning of the eighteenth century gained so many adherents in the world of fashion, showed a piece of Rococo in the Pigtail.  It, too, was founded, in part, on a mixture of the most subjective freedom and arbitrariness with the most rigid constraint of a new religious order; therefore it often appeared revolutionary, reformatory, and reactionary, all at the same time.  They burst the fetters of benumbed dogmatism and petrified church government in order to inclose every free breath in new fetters.  Even the last, most involuntary act of life—­dying—­had to be performed systematically.  Pietistic literature of this time produced a work in four volumes which, with the most minute detail, submits the last hours of fifty-one lately departed persons to a sort of comparative anatomy, so that people could learn from it, scholastically as it were, the best way to die.  The author of this work, a Count von Henkel, congratulates a friend, who had been a witness of the “instructive death” of a certain Herr von Geusau, in these words:  “It was worth while to have heard a Collegium privatissimum on the art of dying like a Christian, especially from such a professore moribundo.”