Sunday, January 24:
A good night and in consequence a harmonious morning; at the same time thinking out a plan by which I might soon bring the other children to my side, and how I will arrange things generally in the uncertainties and difficulties of the situation. This gives me comfort.
From Dresden R. has received a letter from Dr. Lang, who remains loyal in spite of our constant rebuffs, written at midnight after the Meistersinger performance. The success, it seems, was quite extraordinary. Happy mood embracing both report and reporter. Unfortunately R.’s passion for silk materials brought forth a remark from me which I should have done better to leave unsaid, for it produced a bit of ill feeling.
Yesterday a carpenter, a plumber, a veterinary surgeon in the house—a singular stirring in my enchanted life; I had to laugh over my own impression and was unable at all to imagine that I would ever again want to visit a theater or even watch a large number of people moving about. I miss nothing in my seclusion—except the children.
In the morning arranged books. In the afternoon a letter from Mitterwurzer, who reports that the King of Saxony attended the performance and at the end was still applauding vigorously even after the singers’ third curtain call, which is said never to have happened before.
R. is replying to Mme Laussot and demanding through her the manuscript of Jesus von Nazareth from Princess Wittgenstein, who, although she was only lent it, does not want to give it back. Greed of possession or religious caution? Whichever it is, her cynical effrontery is the same.
After lunch, in the children’s presence, R. plays parts of the second act of Tristan. Whether I am becoming increasingly vulnerable or morbidly sensitive I do not know, but there are certain powerful impressions which I can hardly bear any longer. I literally shudder at the power of genius which suddenly lays bare before us the unfathomable secrets of existence, even when there is nothing I cherish and esteem more than this divinely daemonic power. I find myself thinking of R.’s words (on the death of Schnorr [von Carolsfeld]), “Art is perhaps a great crime”; and certainly those can be accounted happy who, like animals, know nothing of it, though this sort of happiness seems to me like eternal darkness.
I watch till I am blind, hear till I am deaf, feel to the point of oblivion all its splendor; I am drawn to the shining, star-filled abyss, look irresistibly down, and sink senseless into it. We poor women who can only love, well may we be pitied when we divine the genius’s secret! And yet what are we without this complicity in genius?
Very exhausted, I lie down and pass from a sort of coma into sleep; afterward the children and the Lessing biography.
In the evening Richard rather worn out, but we undertake the end of Henry VI. In the face of that, mortals can only be silent. But when one thinks that people stage Richard III separately—or, even worse, that some buffoon dares to turn the three parts of Henry VI into two and put these on the stage—then one asks oneself what is the point of genius, when after centuries it can command no respect, and its manifestations become the prey of charlatans.