Sunday, July 7:
R. goes for a walk in spite of the overcast skies; at breakfast he looks at me: “You are so complete, and everything around you so incomplete! ... I was just trying to recall the lines from Götterdämmerung, but they lie wrapped in a cheerful mist.” We recall the lines, and then R. sings the Idyll: “A son has arrived!” - We invoke a blessing on the day, and work begins. For R., who is still looking very well at lunchtime, the day proves tiring, alas!
Friend W. tells us about the Congress dinner given by Herr Bleichröder, who has really been organizing everything; when I laugh over the Bleichröder coat of arms being displayed everywhere, R. says, “Alas, I can no longer laugh about it.”
Some anonymous person, signing himself in a postscript as “warning Erda,” complains of R.’s misuse of his genius to campaign against the Jews - he should leave state and empire to politicians such as Bismarck!
After lunch R. looks through the French piano score of La Muette de Portici to find the blackbird’s call; he finds it at the beginning of the market chorus in D major and tells us that the blackbird in the palace gardens sang it three times in succession.
Then he talks about the Gospels, praises Renan, says that Strauss entirely missed the point, either such studies must set out to show that the subject lacked content, or they must recognize the content and describe it; that is what Renan has done. And anyone who does not in times of sorrow - say, when a child has died - open the Gospels again and feel uplifted by the spirit that breathes through them is not worth much. A short walk with the Glasenapps in the afternoon, thundery rain, in the summerhouse R. talks very movingly about a theft in Riga; some articles of clothing belonging to Minna were stolen, and the maid (Lieschen), horror-stricken, at once accused her lover, who was arrested. The police told R. that, if the stolen articles were worth more than one hundred roubles, the accused man would be sent to Siberia. R. put the value as low as possible, but he could not save the man, since he was a recidivist, and he had to look on as the man was brought in with shaved head and dressed in prison garb, already condemned to Siberia. A terrible sight, and he had then and there sworn never to prosecute anyone again; he could not bear to think of it even now. “I said to myself,” he adds, “si jamais on m’y reprend” [“may I never be caught like that again”].
R. amazes Gl. with his memory for the streets and names in Riga. Coming back to Bleichröder, he says, “They can now regard themselves as Germans, like that Negro who proudly showed the card on which the Spanish government had given him the right to regard himself as a white man.”
Returning home from the summerhouse, he spits up a little blood, talking has tired him; I suppress my concern but go to him in his room: “The world does bad things to me, but in return I have you - be glad that it is so, for otherwise you would not mean so much.” I: “Then I would sooner mean nothing.” - The blood has only come from his throat, but he looks worn out. At supper, talk about Bakunin, “whom one could call the personification of Russia’s future,” “a wild, noble fellow.”