Tuesday, February 6:
R. tells me in detail about his audience with the Grand Duke of Weimar, who greeted him with particular warmth as a poet and said to him that, if Tannhäuser were, so to speak, a local Thuringian work for the people of Weimar, Die Meistersinger had stirred up genuine German feelings.
His reports on the Jewish community, on the other hand, are ever more diverting and incredible. During the afternoon, as we blissfully sit beside each other, R. says to me: “I should like to know in what way I should have come to grief if I had not won you! For since we have been intimate, I have never had the faintest feeling that we could ever be separated. It was just the nature of our union which remained unclear to me, and out of sympathy I wanted it to remain so.”
Yesterday he spoke a lot about Gustavus Adolphus, whom he is coming to respect more and more; his hero’s popular way of speaking in particular gives him great joy, as for example to the Brandenburgers: “I shall seize you roundly by the ears.” Some articles by Herr Riehl seem to us very pitiable: malice, everything is made to look as if it is being done only for the sake of Bayreuth, and stupidity.
A criticism of Tasso by Herr Hettner also fills me with disgust, as I have just recently received a profound and very definite impression from this consummate poetical work. Prof. Nietzsche has sent me the book Caroline, without a doubt the most insipid thing it is possible to imagine.
We conversed in the evening on Riehl: “How deep-rooted it must be that such a good-hearted philistine, who has his merits, suddenly turns so malicious and nasty.”