Saturday, September 7:
R. slept well; he drinks his Ems water, complains a little still about pressure in his chest, but seems somewhat better. Talk in the morning about all sorts of things, about Nietzsche-how from this corm we raised a flower, but the corm itself remains an ugly thing. About quickness in the uptake, which is what makes for genius and gives a man power over others; he gives as an example Napoleon I at the Battle of Arcole, which he describes to me. After this conversation he gets up, comes to my bed, embraces me tenderly, calling me his “slender happiness,” and goes off to his work saying, “I am an outrageously lucky man,” and adding with a laugh, “You must not be cross that we are so fond of each other.”
At lunch he tells us that in fact he began the morning with a nap, after which he felt terribly heavy, but gradually the weight lifted and he was able to work. But earlier he told me that never again would he compose such passionate scenes as the one he now has in front of him; he had already sworn that while working on Tristan.
Over coffee we come once again to the curious scenes in Russia, to the energy and the seriousness they call for. He tells us Bakunin’s views on Russia-that the only way would be to introduce socialism there without the Proudhon theories, since a community already existed among the people there; when Malwida says that many things have altered since the abolition of serfdom, that individualism has become widespread, R. says, “Yes, civilization always moves in that direction, makes property its goal.”
R. goes off for his afternoon rest; when he comes down again, another consignment of birds has arrived; even if he is aware that his grand way of ordering things is almost always abused, nevertheless these new arrivals cause much merriment, “Berlioz” and “the doctor” very unusual and comic, the pigeons with their hoods very pretty to look at. In the evening he writes a new album leaf for Frau Neumann, “Only he who has never learned to fear will forge Nothung anew.”
Then in his wonderful way he plays to Malwida and me music from Euryanthe (3rd act) and recalls Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient’s exclamation of joy, her radiant expression as she sang it-he could never play it fast enough for her liking, and yet her enunciation utterly clear. These sounds ring out as chaste as Diana’s love for Endymion. But R. forbids me to praise his playing so much!