Friday, March 15:
Letter from Hans in Zurich, saying he will not be able to see the children. He tells me of his journey to America, and I feel apprehensive, because he is traveling at the same time as Rubinstein, who has an insanely high contract, and whose sponsors must therefore do all they can to ruin his competitors. Should I write to him about this?
R. is feeling better and works. After lunch he receives, from a member of the Dresden orchestra, the most extraordinary revelations concerning Herr Lauterbach, who has, it seems, just been thwarting our attempts! R. writes letters.
In the evening I read him Dollinger’s speech about the Church of England. “Always politics,” R. says, “I see nothing of religion. Not a word about the wonderful dogma of redemption.” Yesterday, when I read some of Hase’s polemic to him, he said, “I feel as if I were listening to an army of 10,000 idiots; and there is only one thing that needs to be done: to trust in the Son, the Redeemer, and to tell the faithful that the Father is the Son’s secret; he must certainly have known of another world, since he went so willingly to his death.”
Frau Heim sends a watercolour by Semper, the Acropolis, and R. accuses me of pride, since I at once start thinking of a gift in return. After Dollinger we read Opera and Drama. “When the rose adorns itself, it also adorns the garden,” said my aunt as she adorned herself, R. joked.