Monday, February 2:
He did not have too bad a night, and his spirits are sufficiently restored for him to ask me whether I think that art has ever achieved what is meant by beauty, that is to say, something that excludes all stirrings of pain or discontent. I think it has, in isolated Greek statues, but not in painting. He says it is possible that the Greeks possessed this quality, for otherwise the theory would be absurd, but even in Greek sculpture it is nobility rather than beauty that one discerns.
Much complaining about Germany; he intends to make a collection of the heads of German professors, to show exactly what he means. “Where are there any true Germans left? The heroic tribes all perished during the migration period, and only the Philistines remained. The Prussians are there just in order to beat the French from time to time, when they get too arrogant, but the French remain the world’s gods and rulers.” And: “We Germans are now like Bismarck’s body, puffed up and in a constant state of agitation.”
In the evening friend Stein recommends to us Dühring’s description of the Commune. R. says the Commune undoubtedly contained some people of integrity, but what he holds against it is its childishness in believing that the power of property, which has existed since Cain and Abel, could be destroyed in this way. Before risking human life, people should consider what they are doing and ask themselves whether they can.
A way of altering Licinius’s “all too monotonous” entrance in La Vestale had occurred to him, and he plays it to me; I tell him that his alteration makes all the rest sound dead. He calls Spontini, with his monotony and poverty of invention, the father of Italian opera, saying that Cherubini was different.