Sunday, November 16:
We go on talking for a long time about the impact of the preachings; how different the reformers and revolutionaries in Italy and France, how different Savonarola! But that is the nature of the Germans.
When I asked R. how he had slept, he replied, “With worries! I go to bed with worries, and I get up with worries. I find it embarrassing to speak even to my own people here.”
Malwida was not at lunch, but here in the evening; it is too cold, first snow. We continue reading Luther for ourselves.
R. is trying to clarify the origin of the name Parcival. He was looking for it in Greece, since the Celts (Germans) came first of all into contact with the Greeks.
Lusch asks me questions about Hell, Heaven, the soul; I answer as best I can, directing her to the Gospels. R. says I can describe the soul as the Immutable by contrasting it with the mutability of appearances. Regarding the way babies come into the world (does God mold them? but the girls in school were saying the mothers are always ill at the mothers, as with animals).
R. speaks of the influence of Rome through its officials, who introduced Roman law, the sapping of the warrior spirit of the Germans. Frederick the Great scarcely trusting his people, recommending noblemen as officers in his will.
In the evening R. plays the music for Klärchen’s death in Egmont. “These things impress themselves on one’s mind like revelations. I know that I first encountered the Egmont music as a boy through my sister Luise in Leipzig. What an indelible impression! It is these sounds of Klärchen’s death which have accompanied me ever since.”
Of the French pamphlet, R. says he finds it impossible to read such things, and I had to admit that the French, though correct in their feelings, are in their judgments too confused and uneducated; they couple Meyerbeer with Beethoven, Wagner with V. Hugo. The Italians are even worse, for them Dante and Rossini are one and the same.