Sunday, December 21:
Visits of congratulation! Some letters besides; friend Lenbach writes expressing great satisfaction with Hoffmann’s sketches. An unknown man in Brussels reports the great success of Tannhäuser there. None of this exists for R. at all; he does not even read the letter. Departure of our good friend Gersdorff, who is now beginning a new career as a farmer, to some extent at our urging. R. outlines to him the fine activity now facing him and how he might turn out to be of use to his friends by offering them a refuge and saying to them, “Abandon your cares and do as you please, without thoughts of earning a living.” In the evening we read an article by Herr Hillebrand attacking Gervinus; the aim very laudable, but the execution dry and blunt. “One can see,” says R., “that a man like this has never reflected on the problems of existence and eternity, does not have that eye for the nature of all things which makes one so tranquil and serene; he is a stranger to those feelings which enable one so lightly to bear the transient, vexatious nature of things, indeed not to notice them at all.”
As we are talking about the way in which J. Grimm regarded language, using quotations even from the Vossische Zeitung, I ask R. whether one might not say that he saw language the way a dramatist sees a character, as a living entity, and had also presented it in the same way, without making critical remarks about what would or would not become it well.