Saturday, December 1:
Indisposed, my eyes increasingly weak; but R. had a good night and is able to work. Yesterday morning he sang me the theme from the finale of Beethoven's A Minor Quartet and said there is no longer anything in music as beautiful as the modulation and the conclusion of this theme. In the afternoon he goes for a walk alone, since I am unable to accompany him; he returns home and says that, as it did yesterday, the sky bore a faux air de soleil couchant [false air of a setting sun], as if it were saying, “I could, but I don't want to.”
In the evening the third and fourth acts of Henry VI, Part III. R. finds Edward's wooing of Lady Grey a masterpiece of dramatic virtuosity, in spite of its naivete. We cannot stop talking all evening, indeed even when we are in bed, about the power of this poet: he can express what otherwise remains unsaid. R. says he himself has no bent for historical plays, but, if he had ever written his Barbarossa, he would have cast it in the light, rhyming verse of the literature of that time, in order to introduce a popular element into it. But we are now too remote from these subjects, he says; Shakespeare was still bound by tradition to his...