Saturday, October 19:
Yesterday was so lovely that I could have died in the intoxication of my soul, and yet R. had a bad night! It was only midnight when he first got up and did some reading, Lecky, then again at 2 o'clock, and so throughout the night.
He had a prophetic dream about a flue which collapsed in the kitchen, and the completely blackened bathroom had to be cleaned by Ross; afterward, in the early morning, he heard the chimney sweep at work; then he pulled a large and long white tooth from his mouth and admired it, but then was troubled by a broken tooth cutting his tongue.
I appear at lunch looking wintry in a black velvet dress, which pleases him. How many nice, good, kind things he says to me, what an image he conjures up of me in my unworthiness! He does not look too run down, despite his bad night. In the morning, when I begged him not to work, he said, “You know I never force myself to work; if it comes, then that's all right.”
At lunch he tells me, “Perhaps I shall end by gobbling up the whole Romeo and Juliet march for Titurel.” He says with a laugh: “I am now composing nothing but funeral marches! People will say, 'Is Amfortas dead?' 'No, Titurel!' 'Oh, yes, that fellow back there in the alcove.'” We laugh over the triviality of the public, and R. says, “They must have it in black and white, whatever happens, no surprises!”
He goes for a walk, a very long one, as he tells me on his return, adding that his foot is now better. May he receive all the blessings Heaven and earth can bestow! Today at breakfast he came back to that sentence about “now” and “then,” pleased that history provides him with proof of his conviction, for example, the former and the present-day Italy; for when one bases one's ideas merely on one's own experiences, one runs the risk of deceiving oneself. A reproduction of a picture by Doré showing the retreat of the 10,000, arrival at the sea, gives him great pleasure; he says he likes such pictures, and, looking at it, he remembers Doré with pleasure.
We spoke of the absurdities of the literary life, deciding that Leopardi certainly suffered from a sense of being such a useless creature. Goethe had this feeling, and so does my father, but not Schiller, who was content with the prospect of producing a few good pieces every year.
His walk took him to the Students' Wood, and he returned along the highway past the powder magazine; he says the atmosphere reminded him of Berlioz's “Scène aux champs,” and he talks of Berlioz's curious outward relationship with Nature. I observe that it was like Klingsor and his power over it. “Yes,” says R., “he did not recognize its soul, but he listened to its sounds and captured its scenic atmosphere.”
In the evening read some more of Leopardi's dialogues, though with less enjoyment; R. puts in first place “Plotinus and Porphyrios,” which we read yesterday. R. says Leopardi was a personality of pathological interest, and to be understood only as such. It seems to me that he could not have known the main source of happiness, which is enthusiasm, arising either from art or from love, and this was the cause of his unhappiness. He did not know Shakespeare, Beethoven, Goethe, R. Wagner. R. feels also that Latin antiquity must have an oppressive effect on an Italian. We Germans are luckier, he says, our origins lie in ourselves, and we can delude ourselves that we are able to bring our past back to life; and also we have no civilization behind us.