Saturday, June 1:
R. did not have a very good night, and he read friend W.'s pamphlet on language. In the morning he asks me whether I have thought about Fidi's birthday: "He was born in what is really the German May," he said yesterday. He works and, as he tells me, produces seven or eight bars. "What I have let myself in for!" he frequently exclaims. "It goes far beyond Tristan, though I showed enough of the sufferings of love in the third act of that."
We take the children to the agricultural show; the cocks in particular fascinate R. He remembers how at the livestock exhibition in Paris, during the sixties, he had dearly wanted to buy a cock priced at 800 francs, though he had barely a cent to his name: "I thought if I owned that bird I should really feel like somebody." A cock with a splendid wig reminds him of Berlioz, with its violent nervous movements; the disheveled wig of another reminds him of Beethoven's tousled hair; the din of the crowing amuses him vastly, and he wishes he had a poultry yard like that. He also enjoys the cows and the bulls, and after an hour we leave the little exhibition greatly pleased and go for a short walk in the palace gardens.
R. returns home, while I accompany Lusch into town; then I go home and we chat until suppertime, just as if we had not seen each other for ages, I delighting in his healthy appearance and his nearness. In the evening we finish Kenilworth, then R. reads me various scenes from Schiller's Maria Stuart (the Queen's council, Leicester and Mortimer). The scene between Elizabeth and Mortimer strikes us as somewhat too drastic, and the short exchange of words between Mortimer and Leicester at the end of their conversation seems rather artificial, for it is not all that brief, being stretched out in iambic pentameter.
But the elegance of the language strikes one again and again; R. remarks how different it is from the elegance of Shakespeare's language, in which the peculiar nobility of expression is brought about by the forcefulness of the characters, whereas in Schiller it is really a court language, a lofty convention. Today, through the kind offices of Marie Schleinitz, I received a photograph of Lenbach's portrait of R. The expression in it appeals to me greatly, that tender, earnest, transcendent, kind expression which, as I look, becomes radiant. But the children do not like this "sad picture," in which to them he looks so old and glum; they see their father as cheerful, youthful, amiable, and indeed radiant cheerfulness is a prominent feature of his character.
R. observes that here the artist has sacrificed everything for the sake of a single expression, or rather he has exaggerated everything, age, weariness, to convey the single impression of transcendence, just as in the profile portrait he exaggerated the sharpness of the features in order to create an impression of boldness. He says it is not a restful picture, such as the great painters can conjure up. He feels it is too morose.