Thursday, February 8:
R. talks of the wretched present times. He says he will just have to put his trust in a new generation; he has now lived through three: his own, which grew up under the influence of Weber, up to the 1830 Revolution; the generation from then until ’48, which, like Hans, received its youthful impressions from Meyerbeer; and the people of the 1849 Goethe jubilee, who after our painful experiences found everything good and celebrated with jubilees.
“Now I am living through the third, and this third saeculum I am living through I owe to you,” he then says to me. He works, and at midday is able to play me his sketch for the Prelude.
I write to Prof. Nietzsche and give the children lessons. In the afternoon I go for a walk with R., and on the quay we see a poor dog run over; a yelp, a cowering, then a wild leap into the air before falling back, then tossed aside. “That’s how it was with Fitzo,” R. exclaims. “It is as if it were being shown to us. He, too, was tossed aside in that way, like an old rag.”
Then I could no longer keep silent, and I told him how it had been with Fitzo. We are very despondent. “A human being should not feel pity,” R. says. “Nature doesn’t want it; he should be as cruel as the animals; pity has no place in the world.” I suggest that pity should not be expressed, just acted on. R. is very oppressed; he cannot forget the dying animal’s leap into the air.
We read Schopenhauer; then I tell Richard about the “barbarian advantages” on which Goethe says we must courageously insist. “Yes,” says R., “Faust, the Ninth, Bach’s Passions are barbarian works of that kind, that is to say, works of art which cannot be compared with a Greek Apollo or a Greek tragedy; which affect the individual, do not become part of the general picture; it was this feeling which brought me to the art of the future.”
Fidi gives us much, much joy. “I am too happy,” R. says. “I do not enjoy my happiness enough. I am still afraid of leaving the world without having enjoyed it.”
I cannot bring myself to like the sketch of R. which Lenbach sent me to look at, and R. says, “I feel really sad that artists see in me only a sharp caricature or a thorough philistine!”
Frau Wille announces the engagement of her son to a Comtesse Bismarck.