Thursday, November 11:
R. very pleased, because I had a good night; he had taken Siegfried away and told the maid to watch over him in his own rooms. At breakfast I told him it was not right that we had ignored Schiller’s birthday, which was yesterday. “Well,” he said, “yesterday was the very day on which, while I was working, I felt inwardly pleased by Schiller’s picture opposite me, and I pictured to myself his whole essence.” I remembered then that I had also told Lulu about Sch. We had the same dream, R. and I—that we embraced each other.
In the morning arranged books in the study. At lunch R. declares: “I have been thinking again about Don Quixote and, considering it from the angle of its ironic outlook on the world, I was reminded of a dialogue by Plato; it is in him, too, this irony, but there it appears free, confident, nothing is pressing on it. Whereas one senses the horrible pressure of Catholicism on Cervantes’s noble spirit; the way he finds it necessary to make the poor Morisco praise the Inquisition! In the Greek one sees the Olympic wreath, in the Spaniard the starving poet, treated by the nobility, just as D. Q. was treated, like a plaything, in a world hostile to things of the spirit. Oh, the misery of having been born in this millennium!”
Then, concerning Luther: “How right my uncle was always to call him the godly man.”
In the evening R. reads The Fight with the Dragon to the two eldest children in his wonderful way, then says to me: “In my youth I did not at all understand the beauty of this poem, its masculine perfection. One must read such things from time to time in order to understand what such human beings mean.”
Letter from Catulle Mendès: the Brussels director has gone back on his word—just as we expected.