Sunday, February 25:
R. had a good night and is able to work; he has now completed the first scene in ink. “I have given Siegfried a cry! The fellow cries out like a wild goose.”
I write letters, to Malwida and Fritz. Cohn’s uselessness is disturbing R.; if only he can finish his work uninterrupted!
There is talk of an assassination attempt on Prince Bismarck. A Pole and a Jesuit.
At lunch our conversation turns on Calderon’s comedies, and R. praises the way in which he makes his heroes all much the same - the loving man, the jealous man - in order to leave as much room as possible for the manipulation of chance. Otherwise one falls into the modern habit, in which one character constantly repeats a proverb, another sneezes, and so on.
Storm; R. goes out, however. In the evening he works on the foreword to the essays (Riehl, Hiller, etc.). We see a little black dog, very like Fitzo, wandering around the meadow during the storm; we try to catch it, but it disappears into the Robbers’ Park. News comes from Karlsruhe that almost the entire orchestra wants to play, which means that the performance of the 9th Symphony would be assured; but what about everything else?
Vreneli, whom I went to see, made me very happy with a remark: she said that R. has become so much calmer and gentler, that his present manner cannot be compared with what it was in Munich.
In the evening we read Schopenhauer, and when I ask R. for some explanations, he gives them in such a lively manner that I tell him he reminds me of the professor of philosophy in Moliere’s play, who in the end lashes out with his fists. This amuses him greatly.
“The way the will sometimes takes matters into its own hands can be seen in me,” R. says. “It had its ideas for me, and since I should otherwise have stopped cooperating, it brought us together in real life - independent of the fact that outside of time and space we belong to each other anyway - with the result that I started cooperating again. It’s just like an employer raising the wages when he sees his employees leaving him.”