Friday, March 8:
Our lovely Weymouth pine, under which I have so often sat, has been destroyed by the storm! Recently, to my almost greater sorrow, the little palm R. gave me two years ago died. Warm spring weather - the children out of doors, R. very persistently at work, for he is feeling better. Deepest, purest happiness between us!
Yesterday, when the foehn was coloring the lake, we thought of the fairy tale of Ilsebill, and R. said he had once thought of dramatizing it, till he realized that everything would have to be invented, and it is a great mistake to assume that tales which are complete in themselves can be turned into drama - they can only be spoiled. I write to M. Meysenbug, R. corrects Opera and Drama. Rossini melodies keep coming into his mind, inspired by Schopenhauer’s quaint worship. He wishes to have the piano scores of this curiously talented composer. Talking about Die Zauberflöte, he said: “This is folklorish. If it can be said of us Germans that we have no art, we can at least reply that we do have a folk tradition; art stands midway between academicism and folklore, for there have really been no genuine artists since the Greeks. Schiller was in a certain sense a dramatic artist.”
R. tells me that he is extremely interested in Garrick’s rediscovery of Shakespeare at a time when English taste was under French influence. The devices he evolved to replace the Shakespearean theater seem to him excellent. We go for a walk; in the evening we read Schopenhauer’s critique of Kant. In general R. criticizes Schopenhauer for not having paid sufficient attention to the male and female elements, into which everything in this world is divided. Before going to work he tells me that he cannot see the name Siegfried without thinking of Fidi. “What will the boy one day say and think about it?” Before we begin the criticism of Kant, R. reads me the conversation between Gustavus Adolphus and the envoys from Brandenburg; splendid insight into the fine character of the Swedish King. (R. plays me the theme of the end of the world; “Siegfried is in command.”)