Sunday, November 3:
Very good night, cheerful awakening, and at breakfast continuation of the conversation about the chapter in Lecky; we decide that the excesses to which the insistence on chastity led constituted a terrible feature; they were due to the impossibility of realizing something felt to lie deep within the human character, the desire to set oneself outside Nature and yet to go on living. Over our afternoon coffee we talk about Blandine, her fate, her strange marriage.
Yesterday I was reflecting on Daniel, how he would have blossomed into life in R.’s company: for him, too, all barriers would have fallen, and in his devotion to R. he would have found the source of a new life. In the afternoon R., returning from his walk, shows me a little notebook, telling me that this is how things are. R. vexed in the early evening by the way people talk about the new law; he points to the words, “This is what our present German statesmen look like,” and declares it to all supporters of the new law.
In the evening a reception at Wahnfried. Frl. Chiorni sings something from Le nozze di Figaro very nicely, then Lohengrin (“Elsa’s Dream” and the monologue from the second act), not very enjoyable in Italian. R. writes in the lady’s album: “Long breath — fine soul.” He accompanies Susanna’s aria so beautifully that I feel all piano players could learn something from him; there are certain virtuoso skills which we find increasingly unenjoyable. I tell R. that such techniques give me the impression of tendrils, sucking life out of the stem, and he says, “Yes, they are parasites.” When the evening ends and we are upstairs, he returns to Susanna’s aria, and he cannot find words to describe his delight in its beauty of feeling; when we are lying in bed he talks also of the later passage, the “Contessa, perdono” — how glorious it all is! He says he would like to have had Mozart as his contemporary. I: “Shakespeare would have suited you better.” He laughs, saying it is difficult to imagine such things.