Friday, December 3:
R. at his work, I in the study: get the children to write something for their father. At lunch we talk about the peculiarities of the Germans, like R. Pohl, for example, who, with his miserable job (subeditor with the Baden-Badener Journal), and in spite of keeping such terrible company, nevertheless remains so much of a German that, for the sake of his artistic convictions, he has turned down a position as correspondent with the English Athenaeum. Only a German has convictions in matters of art; all the rest consider such things puerile.
At the mention of bad company I said, “I shall save Fidi from that.” “Then he really will be vulnerable to it. Things cannot be done negatively, only positively. The only way is to arouse in him a feeling for ideals, so that he can offer a manly resistance. If he can look on things in a thoughtful way, sensuousness and vulgarity will have no power over him. I know that my father and my mother encouraged this sense of the ideal in me, however unsettled and frugal our circumstances. Once that is done, disgust with all the baseness will appear at the proper time. I have experienced all the bad things it is possible to know.”
After lunch R. goes to town and brings back a letter from the students at Jena; after the performance of Die Meistersinger in Weimar they drank a Salamander to R.’s health. (Last night I dreamed about Hans, that he walked through the living room, pale and agitated.) In the evening Cratylus without much pleasure, since R. finds the philological treatment somewhat childish.