Saturday, July 27:
R. slept well. In the morning he gives me the single hairs from his eyebrows which had grown too long above his left eye, and I am carrying them around with me. The fact that he has hardly any eyebrows seems to me to show the complete absence of animality in his nature.
When I tell him that I have written to my father to explain my failure to visit him, since my presence here is necessary for R.'s tranquillity, he says, "Yes, when one misses someone it is impossible to work." R. is working! The discovery of the orchestral sketch for the new scene in Tannhäuser recalls to R. the time when he was composing it: "It was my best time in Paris, I forgot all the misery around me. But of course it is different now, when I no longer work to forget, but to give you pleasure."
He tells me he must give up reading the Balzac novel in the afternoon; it absorbs him too much and disturbs his necessary morning tranquillity. After I have given the children their lessons I read the correspondence between Marianne Willemer and Goethe; a gracious and modest person, and some very pretty play-acting! R. says, "They were all of them painters". Passion banished, a friendly, melancholy, yet serene calmness.
Went for a walk with R.; took Fidi to swimming school, and R. goes in with him to keep an eye on him. At lunch R. mentioned the difficult point at which he has had to take up work again; when I acknowledge the difficulty, he says to me, "But it will all get finished one day." Dull weather, but we were able to have our coffee in the summerhouse; as we part for our afternoon rest, R. says with a laugh, "Your father would be cross with us again." "Why?" "Well, because we are so fond of each other!" Radiant, serene, he recalls his dismal past.
But the heavens outside are overcast, and R. feels worn out by his walk. In the evening reading manuscripts for the Bayreuther Blätter, without much enjoyment. R. talks in disgust about Nietzsche's denial of inspiration as shown by the Beethoven sketchbooks; it would be better, he says, if such sketches were not published, as if the search for a form for a particular inspiration were a denial of its existence!
I observe how even in the most modest realms of thought this process is reflected: yesterday I had clearly discerned a parallel between W. Scott and Balzac, that the former saw an apparition before him and gave it shape, without analyzing its psychological motives, whereas the latter took the apparition apart and examined it atom by atom, through which process it came together as a whole; what I could not possibly express well in words had been as clear as day in my mind, and if I had to express it, my task would be with the help of hard work to reproduce this lightning-flash vision. Played through some chorales in the evening; R. prefers the stark form of Luther's "Ein feste Burg" to any of its later arrangements, even the one by Bach. He finds the modernization of old German songs distasteful. Herr Pliiddemann played us one such. The difficulties of party connections emerged during this visit, and R. found himself misled into declaring in Angermann's that he had need of nobody, and that the Society of Patrons hindered more than it helped him. A sharp remark from our friend Schure brings R. to the saddest, most grievous of experiences. We describe to the Wolz.'s our doubts about the sweet habit of life, and when we read the passage, R. says to me, "Suddenly I feel offended by the prose here; we both feel the same about iambic pentameter, and yet here, at this moment, I find prose disagreeable."