Thursday, August 30:
R. remarks how much pleasure he sometimes gets from a simple note; he works, but is not feeling well, and talks about sending for Cramer, the mesmerist: “If only such grave matters were not so ridiculous!” He plays me the sonata for Math. Wesendonck and laughs heartily at its “triviality,” as he calls it. He says he has never been able to write an occasional piece. This sonata is shallow, nondescript, the Albumblatt for Betty Schott is artificial; only with the Idyll had he been successful, because in that everything came together in the way he describes it in the first verse of his poem.
Read Herodotus in the evening.