Tuesday, June 11:
R. had a bad night; he had to get out of bed at 12:30 and again at 3:30. He goes into my sitting room and is amused by the 3 dogs, who come out of the kennel one after another like a platoon and go for a walk on the terrace.
Conversation about the Schopenhauer letters, which we finished yesterday, R. deploring the mistaken ideas about the dissemination of his philosophy; R. goes on with it and says: “These donkeys who do not believe in God and who think that such figures as Jesus of Nazareth or a great creative genius move according to the ordinary processes of Nature! They cannot understand that what prevails here is a special urge, a noble need which in the end produces something good. But one must not think in this connection of the old Jewish God.”
I ask him to write about this, for in his one essay on the subject he had dealt only with the relationship of religion to the state. “So you want me to start writing again? You do it - you understand pretty well what I mean.” “Yes, I understand, but you must do the writing.” “All right, but not until after Parsifal and the biography, and then there are the symphonies, too: you’re to get one on each birthday.”
After purchasing some things for Daniela’s departure, I find R. in the garden, and we spend in chat one of those loveliest of hours to which I cry, “Oh, stay a while, you are so fair!” The dismal news of wholesale prison sentences of 5 to 10 years for lèse majesté, which offers the prospect in five years’ time of a terrible generation of human beings, leads us in the evening to the subject of Egmont and his discussion with Alba, in which “these things are talked about in such human terms, not at all political.” R. reads it to us; unthinkable that nowadays anyone would even listen to such noble language. “What trivialities a similar conversation between the Emperor and Bismarck would produce!”
The collections being made for the families of the Kurfürst victims also arouse R.’s indignation: “With all the funds that have been approved, the taxes that have been paid, for the state not to give its aid!”
Before supper he informs me that he has just written down a theme “with a rising fifth”; he plays it to me, it is full of noble melancholy, tragic. Then he reads to me the fine pages in Renan (p. 73 onward) about the unification of Jesus with God. R. develops this subject further in his mind, calling this God which dwells within us “the inborn antidote to the will” - not at all the Faustian God, who can set nothing in motion outwardly; with our God one does not sell oneself to the Devil. Since R. is coughing a little, I am once again deeply concerned. Apart from this, I do not see suffering as an enemy; almost everywhere I look I see the sign of the cross, in the window frames, in the cornices, in the trees - everywhere it rises up before me, exhorting, consoling, but within me all courage fails when such worries assail me. They rage within me like a furnace, and then, alas, God speaks no more!”