Saturday, March 22:
First day of spring, Goethe’s dying day; he came into the world at noon on a hot August day and left it on the threshold of spring; fire and mildness! I reflect how R.’s nature consists, like his works, of a mixture of great strength and delicacy; his mouth, ears, skin are as fine and delicate as a woman’s, his bone structure sturdy, even gnarled.
We greet each other very cheerfully at breakfast; Herr Zumpe, the copyist, had told me of a text in which cardinals silently light candles to one another, and we are still amused by it today. “Oh, how I should like to write poetry, to start on a poem and to close my eyes and ears to the world!” I ask him whether he does not feel inclined to work on his score, but he is fearful of being interrupted.
Fidi pleases me; yesterday he recognized the parade ground and said, “It’s always muddy there, because of all the soldiers trampling.” At lunch R. thinks of his song “Dors, mon enfant”; he laughs and says, “You can see I didn’t know then what it was to have a child. It was something like that, too, with Tristan and his Isolde. No, once the thing is already there, the work of art turns out more realistic, like the ‘Schlafe, Kindchen, schlafe’ in the Idyll.”
In the afternoon a walk with R. to Herr Gross, Feustel’s gaffe in asking the Duke of Coburg for letters of recommendation to England. In the evening dictation, but it now unfortunately puts a strain on R. Talked about Fidi; R. says, “I should like quite deliberately to put him out of the reach of my influence, so that he is free of me, as Siegfried was of Wotan, he might even stand up to me as an opponent!” The Emperor’s birthday celebrated with toasts and cheers.