Sunday, February 22:
R. had a restless night; in connection with it he says, “Some wild dream is sent to fray me,” and we go on to discuss the lines that follow—“The God that in my breast is owned”—and R. says, “It is not the profundity of this poem, but its felicity of expression, the true strength of the poet, which is so striking.”
This leads us to content and form and the absurdity of thinking that one can have anything to say without finding the right form for it, as is claimed for Schumann and Cornelius, for example. “It is different in philosophy, which, as Lichtenberg rightly says, deals with things which language was not made to express. That is why the Indians created a language for it.” “Byron has power of expression, this poetic gift, but only to utter banalities.”
R. thinks that the short story is now the best literary form. He would like to read Cain again, to see whether [Byron] touches on the bloodless sacrifice, not acceptable to Jehovah.
In the evening R. gets very heated about the nihilists; our friend Joukowsky observed that a picture by Raphael is worth more than whole generations of human beings, to which R. replied that his art stems from a state of rottenness which these people feel an urge to terminate, and once blood has flowed, the desire to protect pictures is despicable and false. “I shall not burn them”—with these words he goes off, leaving our friend deeply affected.
[Added two pages later but referred back to this point: “Departure of the sister, whom R. describes as a moral genius; I thank her, not only for her nursing, but also for the example she sets.”]