Friday, July 26:
R. had a good night, and in the morning I again hear sounds of Parsifal. Oh, how blissful I feel! But we have been deprived entirely of our summer; today it is again continually wet and cold.
R. said yesterday, Thursday, that he had been looking in the encyclopedia for Schwanzknochen, and had found Schumann instead! "My God, he, too, has now been dead for 22 years!" R. tells us at lunch that in the morning he had vacillated between Paul and Virginia, mentioned in Le Curé de village, and Parsifal and Kundry. He is enjoying the novel.
Over coffee discussion about Die Jungfrau von Orleans, which I am reading with Blandine, its weakness the idea that it is necessary to apportion blame. R. says, "The temptation of love was impossible here, but through it Schiller showed that he knew what the public wanted." Joan is also not sufficiently naive, he says; it jars to hear her speaking about the tender shepherdess, but that lies in the nature of dramatic writing: "He did become something of a theatrical writer," R. says. The Montgomery scene is embarrassing, the poet's noble design too apparent, and the scenes between Dunois and La Hire about their love are also disagreeable; but as a whole it is touchingly exalted.
R. tells me that in his youth the ending, with Joan in chains, her liberation, then the victory, her death, the recovery of the flag to serve as her shroud, all this had moved him indescribably. Of the short dialogue between La Hire and Dunois he says: "That is a coccyx, a leftover from French tragedy, where there always had to be something; the French missed this in my Rienzi, though I did also have a coccyx in it."
In the afternoon he reads Balzac and admires his gift for identifying himself in such detail with some apparently insignificant character; in this respect, he says, Balzac was superior to W. Scott. To be written about in summary fashion makes one feel so insignificant: out of his professor before and during the class, for example, Balzac would have made a complete novel. At lunch we tried to remember whether in Egmont Goethe described sleep as "sweet," and what word he then used for the habit of life; it could not have been "violent," R. feels, and it is something very delicate we are here talking about.
The correspondence between Goethe and [Marianne] Willemer does not interest R.: "As if people knew nothing of Goethe except his relations with women!" He attempts to play some of Parsifal but has forgotten almost all of it: "As a musician I'm not worth the price of a mongrel!" he says with a laugh. In the evening we talked again about his article. He: "Yes, Schopenhauer and others have already spoken about the misfortune that Christianity was propped up on Judaism, but nobody has yet said, 'That is God!'" Reports of the stupid things singers are doing with the role of Tannhäuser in imitation of Niemann, to the delight of audiences, provokes from R. the sorrowful exclamation, "And I cannot speak the truth."