Saturday, April 5:
R. says, “I have begun the day with a witticism; I shall propose to the friends we are expecting tomorrow, Nietzsche and Rohde, that I take them on a walk to the sources of the Iamblichus.” On the German neglect of their own language: if a German writes well, he then becomes affected, because in everyday use he takes no trouble. Goethe was the first to treat language in a divinely naive way; Lessing did indeed condemn affectation, but he did not himself achieve this naive power, since he was always writing criticism.
Memories of Walter Scott; virtually all his novels masterpieces. R. recalls an episode in The Fair Maid of Perth in which the head of a persecuted clan sees all his supporters falling around him and takes flight. Reflections on the King: Lohengrin greeted with acclamation, then having second thoughts about the duel. It was recently reported again in the newspaper that the King is ordering, for himself alone, performances of plays in which Louis XIV appears, and that he is having a castle built on a steep slope above Tegernsee, which will take five years to complete and cost 1,000,000 florins annually. Also that he has given the singer Nachbaur a massive suit of silver armor and granted him the use of the royal stables. News from New York: the Wagner Society there is giving a concert for Bayreuth.
After lunch, when I look long at R., he says, “I suppose you are making Puschmann studies of me.” I reply that I have no need to do that, since I am completely convinced that both of us are mad! “Maybe we do not think too well of the world,” he says, “but what may really look like madness is that, with all our...”
We read Schiller’s splendid poem “Longing.” R. then deals with several things in connection with the house. Reflections that . . . (resuming after several days, I no longer know what I wished to say).
R. dreamed that I was leaving for Pest with the Krockows; he ran after me, declaring that he was coming too, was then delayed, unable to find his things, etc. When I told him it was not nice of him to dream so nastily about me, he answers that he has once experienced my leaving for Pest, and he talks of a lover’s distress when he knows his beloved to be in the power of another who can decide over her. In the first frenzy, he says, one might put up with it, but in the long run the situation would become dishonorable.
In the evening dictation. (Lulu in bed.)