Tuesday, July 2:
While I am sleeping, R. brings his photograph to my bed: “it was supposed to beg forgiveness.” Unfortunately R. is very unwell, and much domestic vexation comes on top of it. We always seem to end up with a “bohemian household.” Telegram from Marie Muchanoff, she is arriving tomorrow.
R. cannot work. Melancholy; at lunch he says: “If it were not for the children, I would ask you whether you would not like to leave the world with me. But there they are, and with them hope; without them we should feel all too dismal in this world.” Which the greater, Wotan or Siegfried? Wotan the more tragic, since he recognizes the guilt of existence and is atoning for the error of creation.
Walk; fight between Rus and another dog, R. pulls huge Rus by the tail, which takes a lot out of him. Darwin is giving him pleasure, and he agrees with him that, in comparison with the old world, there is moral progress in the fact that animals are now accepted as part of it.
In the evening Gibbon, death of Theodosius, with continued enjoyment. “The right reading for aristocratic English statesmen.” R. agrees with me when I say it seems likely that Constantine embraced Christianity in order to rejuvenate the crumbling Roman world with new strength and to salvage the Roman idea of world dominion after the disappearance of Roman personalities. All of it politics, as right up to the present day, which is also why they, the priests, cannot give up the thought of world dominion.
We cannot get over our astonishment that dramatists do not go for their material to Gibbon, who has done so much spade work, brought the characters so individually to life: the episode of Gregory of Nazianzus, his triumph and subsequent defeat; Ambrosius and Theodosius, all of them tremendously interesting conflicts involving human beings. “Yes,” says R., “the figures are there, but the ‘figurers’ are missing.”