Tuesday, April 27:
R. has a slight chill, Loldi and Fidi not well. News that Siegfried is not a success in Cologne!
Much talk about Dante in the past few days; R. is put off by his receding forehead, and the rigid dogmatism in his poems is disturbing. He says there are certain things human beings have been able to express only in symbols, and the church has committed the crime of consolidating these and forcing them on us as realities through persecution; it is permissible for art to use these symbols, but in a free spirit and not in the rigid forms imposed by the church; since art is a profound form of play, it frees these symbols of all the accretions the human craving for power has attached to them. But Dante did not follow this method. And even the appearance of Saint Francis has proved an embarrassment, he says, since it was wrongly used to gain support for the church at the very time the most genuine Christians, the Waldenses, were being persecuted.
R. does not feel very well all day, and he does not go out of doors. Visit from Herr Plüddemann, who makes quite a nice impression on us.