Sunday, September 14:
Friend Feustel, arriving from Munich in the early morning, has hopes that the King will take over the guarantee! Splendid weather; the sun of the Hohenzollerns shone today as yesterday: “I must be sure to order it for my festival,” says R. The Prince visits church, opera house, palaces, but not our theater, which stands there by itself, solitary and remote, the cross to which we are nailed, the temple in which we pray.
In the morning we sat together; at lunch Malwida. When she speaks approvingly of the participation of women in the legislature, R. reads her the chapter on women’s emancipation from Constantin Frantz’s Naturlehre des Staats, and we are full of admiration for its classical clarity of style and the precision of its thinking. “Another truly German original,” says R.
The Crown Prince departs and takes the good weather with him. In the afternoon in the garden. In the evening read Lichtenberg’s letters about the German theater with great enjoyment; very impressed by his description of Garrick’s French costumes in Hamlet. R. agrees with Garrick; everything is just a masquerade nowadays, he says, even if one decides to be rightly done in Racine’s own time. “That is why I went back to the myth,” R. says, “to Siegfried, who goes around more or less in shirt sleeves and wears a hat such as one can still see being worn here and there by peasants.” One can learn from Lichtenberg how one should deal with a genius—not criticize, but learn, ask oneself: Why does he do that?
The Crown Prince has taken the good weather away with him; rain is now falling from the heavens in streams.