Sunday, October 5:
I find the following piece of paper, not discovered, on my table, laid there by R., who found it in the American newspaper, which he otherwise never looks at. [See note headed “R.’s appearance at Lowenberg” under this date.] It makes us laugh heartily.
After lunch R. talks about his first parents-in-law and the proletariat; his contacts with these strange poor people, the father periodically disappearing with some woman, during the conception of Lohengrin and Tannhäuser...
My mother writes; she encloses newspaper clippings which report on the theater in Bayreuth; she also tells me that E. Ollivier bears a grudge against me for my German feelings!
Sitting over his score, R. says: “Two corni! That used to be the first thing to do, to write down the Italian words when one was writing a score.” Recently he spoke of his inability to show brilliance, musical embellishments, and so forth: “For me it was never a choice between brilliance and earnestness. I just could not provide the former. Or runs? I find such attempts to please repellent, even when these occur in Beethoven, when the virtuoso is supposed to step forward and show what he can do.”
We talked about Shakespeare’s early death. R. says he finds Guizot’s 86 years encouraging, but none of the politicians have a heart; his withdrawal to Stratford, doubtless disgusted with the theater, except for one or two good actors; he would have had the same attitude toward his company as Bach had toward his choir pupils, and what would he have found, apart perhaps from a Lord Seymour? Doubtless the worm gnawed at his heart. Oh, if only one knew! “His works did not create a culture, otherwise they could not have disappeared.” R. praises in Nietzsche’s work his remark about the “seekers”: we do not have any classical figures, i.e., no flourishing period, after which a line could be drawn. “They all console themselves with the word Epigonentum and are fortified in their slovenliness.”
Read Walachian fairy tales with the children, and in the evening Frithiof’s Saga and the Saga of Rolf and His Warriors in Uhland. Ever-growing delight in this Germanic literature, so much closer to us than the Greek. Our amusement over the American newspaper persists all day; R. says, “I am just surprised.” I also read aloud something concerning R.’s appearance in Lowenberg, but he cannot bear hearing his own person described.
At supper, R. said how touched he had been to meet two little girls, aged 6 and 4, the elder of whom was carrying a sack of potatoes on her back and yet, in spite of the heavy load, was continually joking with the smaller child. He spoke to them, and the girl replied politely and clearly. He then gave them some money, which she accepted gratefully, saying, “My mother will be very pleased when I bring her this, for my father is ill and cannot work.”
As we are joking together about the fairy stories which are being spread around concerning R., he says, “I have become a veritable Robin Hood.”