Friday, June 6:
“A son is born, a darling son,” R. sings to the melody of the shepherd boy greeting the month of May in Tannhäuser. I think of the orange room in Tribschen, in which the sun will today have shone on emptiness as it celebrates Fidi’s birth.
Just as somebody is to come upstairs to congratulate me, the bells ring; and at eleven the sounds of an Easter hymn come to me from the church towers; Richard is moved to tears and waves to the trumpeters. I go with Fidi to visit the poor bookbinder’s boy, who is lying in a delirium! R. jokes, “If Fidi writes his von Berlichingen when he is 24, I shall perhaps still be in time to read it!”
Today I am and remain in a serious mood, weighed down with sorrow; how strangely I am being punished, how true does Nature remain to itself! It punishes me through the eldest child of my marriage with Hans, thus showing me how unblessed this marriage was, and it also punishes me by completely destroying my cherished wish to raise a noble being to serve as Hans’s only consolation. Should I send the girl to a boarding school? R. is in favor of it and he is certainly right, but I find it so hard! I feel more full of worries than I have ever been before, and only the thought of atonement sustains me; for I have to acknowledge that my child has a base outlook.
R. goes to the Riedelsberg and returns home late. I read a bit of Grimm on the origin of language, but in the middle of it am overcome by great weariness, and my heavy thoughts this time refuse to be dispelled. It is cold; but in the afternoon we walk to the theater, a powerful Dionysian sight! But gloomy thoughts concerning its completion.
In the evening I finished the Grimm essay; R. disputes the glorification of the English language in it; he says the only language which can be recognized as really beautiful is the one which is still attached to its roots, and it is a false optimism which induced Grimm to say that the mixing of the Latin and Germanic languages had produced perfection; such mixtures, R. says, are an evil, and the purer a language remains as it develops, the more significant it is. “Of course,” he concludes, “Grimm had given up all hope of a German culture (and one can’t blame him), and he was glad that at least one severed tribe had managed to get as far as the English and their culture had done.” Great annoyance with the publisher Fritzsch, who is ready neither with the pamphlet nor with the 8th volume.