Wednesday, May 13:
Still arranging rooms! R. receives some more proofs from Basel, which he finds very opportune, since he still — alas! — cannot get down to his score. Over afternoon coffee he says, after gazing at me for a long time: “A friend! You are my friend. It is not only that you have become my flesh and blood, you are also the only creature on this earth of whom I can say: Here is quietness and rest, here is peace.”
An American tracks us down; he has been sent here by the New York Herald to write reports on the theater, and he wants to spend a week here. We do not read in the evening; an experience with the two elder children has again upset us deeply. Long discussion.
As the evening ends I say to R., “I should like to be with you on a lonely island.” “And so we really are,” says R. “I am now living after my death — that’s something one must achieve. It happened to our good Haydn, who really died when Mozart arrived on the scene but after Mozart’s death wrote his best things and also enjoyed his life. For me, too, how dead the whole world is! I have no feelings left for a world in which Freytag and Gutzkow are the celebrities. Heavens, when I think of my Uncle Adolph! I should have been proud to introduce you to him, to say to you: This is the race from which I stem. The fine and gentle tone of his speech, the noble and free form of his mind: he was a genuine product of the school of Goethe.” Before that he had recalled the parson in Possendorf, “a splendid man” with bushy eyebrows, and also his curate Heine, who came in the evenings to read to them in the honeysuckle arbor, while moths, attracted by the rays of the lantern, fluttered around them, a memory which made such a deep impression on R.’s mind. He glanced through his biography and, astonished at all the detail in it, observed that he had only remembered it all in order to tell me about it. — incurably ill, to death with a stick, saying, “Nobody is bothering about you, poor creature — now at any rate you will find release,” and then buried him beneath a mass of rubble lying in the garden.
At breakfast we discuss the children’s upbringing: what can one do contrary to Nature? We were constrained yesterday to apply to Germany a saying concerning Greece shortly before its conquest by Rome. As long as we are not entirely lost, we cannot be helped. “As long as we are not Prussia” is the feeling in South Germany. Recently, when R. saw some infantry maneuvers, he came home and said, “I enjoyed them, and I thought: Thank God that here at least something is still obeying the laws of rhythm, and that not everything has degenerated into sack coats, cigars, and beards (as Schopenhauer puts it)!”
Visit from our good mayor, who is clearly pleased to see such a handsome house in Bayreuth. R. says that never before has he been on such good terms with the police. He then goes on to speak about Switzerland and his memories of Sulzer — how one could still encounter German communal life there, though unfortunately its heart had been shriveled by the separation from the Reich and the influx of foreigners. In the evening we read the first act of Titus Andronicus with some distaste. Yesterday, when R. was explaining to the children the parable of the tribute money, I clearly realized that in sacred matters these images are like the program of a symphonic work, which one must never try to enjoy at the same time as the work itself: Titian’s splendid Christ and the Tribute Money and Raphael’s Madonnas lose their impact when one hears the words of the Gospels.”