Sunday, August 18:
A good night and a nice day; R. tells me a story from the Ducs which has amused him — about Emperor Fr. III relating the fable of the bear. He says that Fidi’s voice frequently sounds to him like a drop of water falling into water, so full is it. He says he dreamed that Fidi already had a beard, something like Glasenapp’s.
Splendid weather; R. resolves on a drive, and we set out at 4 o’clock. Delight in the air, the sky, our being alone together, above all in the stillness of the woods. “All this talk with strangers, even with friends — it is just a waste of time, an empty nothing, I can literally feel it here in my breast!” As we pass by a stone, I say, “One must let it lie,” and this leads R. to thoughts of the beauties of Faust and “its quiet, refined humor; when R[ichard] III says, ‘Let it strike,’ it’s not the same kind of humor.”
Meeting with a chamber-music player named Thiele, who played under R.’s direction 30 years ago; since R. praises him, I ask whether he became a concertmaster. “Oh, no,” R. says, “they always appoint those from outside, it must be someone famous, and you can’t become that by staying in one spot.” We drive home via the Fantaisie, and Frau Jager, who also happens to be at the Waldhütte, remarks that our carriage looks like a summer pavilion — and it is true that we are in the gayest of spirits. “The pressure is vanishing,” R. says of his chest, and he is looking splendid. He talks about Christianity and Buddhism, how Christ could not have approached his people with visions of eternity, which the Indians grasped so easily; he chose the kingdom of Heaven, which is yours if you are good, and no expression could be better than that, so vague and at the same time so certain. Again it is Renan to whom R. owes this view of his.
Then, goodness knows by what leap of imagination, he comes to “The King of Thule,” in which, as he jokingly says, a “point” is lacking; Goethe provided a picture, but no happening; he will not accept that the dying mistress could have given the King a cup, but then he decides that this gives it its heathen air, remarking that she probably thought to herself, “This fellow never stops drinking,” and so gave him something to remember her by! I observe that it is all left vague in a folklike way. It reminds R. of a poem called “The Song of the Swan,” which his sister Rosalie had also thought not quite right; a hunter, tired of life, threw himself into the water, was rescued by a swan, but now, having regained his taste for life, has always to be expecting the swan, summoning him to death. Then he remembers that when, after a concert in Leipzig given by Frau Schroder’s daughter Wilhelmine, he had played the Venusberg theme at the Brockhauses’, Mendelssohn had asked eagerly, “What is that?” R.: “Do you think I am going to reveal it to you?” and Mendelssohn immediately sat down and played it himself.
In the evening R. reads to me the passage in Opera and Drama about Antigone; when I express to him my admiration for this work, R. says, “I was completely obsessed with it at the time, I could not have composed a single note of music, so absorbed was I in it.” Our poor friend Nietzsche seems to have got quite a lot of his ideas on humanity from it.