Saturday, October 16:
Very wretched night with Siegfried, who is much plagued by his rash. I and R. in very melancholy mood. The children to their lesson. I to meet them. Fine, warm moonlight, the coloring almost southern.
In the evening Don Quixote. We see how unsatisfactorily one reads in one's youth and how superficially the second part has been judged. R. says he would like a room expressly devoted to honoring every single genius such as Cervantes.
R. remarks how C.'s genius creates exactly like Nature, and he and Shakespeare belong among the poets in whom, as in Homer, one does not notice the art, while, for example, the Greek tragedies, Schiller, Calderon, seem like high priests, constructing their forms, as it were, out of a thought.
The figure of Don Q. is a counterpart of Hamlet, he says, in regard to the mixture of the sublime with the ridiculous. And everything always human. In this figure Cervantes has depicted himself; he must often have felt like that in relation to the outside world, and his glorious humanity, e.g., his judgment on the knights of the Court, resembles the manner in which C. himself speaks about the poets of the same period.
What is striking about the second part is the development of the characters. Sancho has become a different person, yet remains the same; he has gone on to personify the poet himself. He sees everything, everything interests him. When D. Q. enters Don Diego's house, the writer observes that it was above all the stillness of it which pleased him.
At supper we talk about Shakespeare's unknown fate. R. believes that he wrote a good number of his plays after his retirement to Stratford. Concerning Falconbridge and Edmund, those two love children: I say that this cannot be discerned in Edmund, but R. says it can. All regular relationships fall by the wayside; here we see strife between father and daughter and there between father and son, while in him Nature shows its power, having produced this one resolute being.
Coming back to D. Q., R. says that Goethe created something similar in Werther, that is to say, a book in which one is not conscious of the art behind it. When Cervantes tries to be an artist, he turns into an academician, conventional; his genius is absolutely unconscious, like an elemental force. Today he said much more in this manner, always divine, unique.