Thursday, November 7:
R. had a restful night, but he has a heavy cold and a headache. We talk about my father, whose failure to reply to our letter has a curious effect on us. “There is one thing I can definitely say to your father,” R. remarks, “and that is that I am now under a better influence than he — he can’t deny that now!”
Some women seem unable to realize that happiness in dealing with a man of genius lies in seeing this blossom in its own individual way; they want to be Beatrices, whereas I want to be Dante, to be molded entirely by him, my ego destroyed, myself wholly absorbed in him. When he comes to fetch me for lunch, he says he has pulled everything apart, whereupon I quote to him the French proverb, “Chateau démoli est à moitié reconstruit” (“A demolished castle is half rebuilt”).
At lunch he says he would like to write some marches, even if only funeral marches for ladies: one of them would turn out very ecclesiastical, the other “subaltern”; we soon get his meaning and laugh heartily. “Oh, no,” he continues, “I wish for nobody’s death, my enemies, as far as I am concerned, can live as long as they like, but there are some specters in this world who are thoroughly superfluous.” Today he does not go out, because of his cold, but he writes letters, including one to the producer in Prague. The projected Indus railway interests R. very much, he says: “When one thinks of the difficulties Alexander encountered in his campaign there, and now sees these activities, one feels really astounded, as previously by the Pacific railway.”
He thinks I am becoming fatter and regrets that I did not look as I now do when my father was here. I tell him I am only well when I am alone with him, for then I feel purified of original sin, and that benefits me physically as well. At lunch he told us several legends from Lecky about the saints; he said he would soon overtake me in this respect, but one ought not to pay too much attention to the details, for it was all so pedantic that it aroused one’s disgust. There had been only one saint who included animals in his compassion and who felt what he, R., has always felt — that for an animal there is no element of reconciliation in suffering, whereas a human being can always overcome it through cognition. He is very impressed by Renan’s statement about our present times: that human functions could persist for a while without faith, just as an animal could still continue to live after its brain was removed, but the situation could not last long.
In the evening he takes out As You Like It to look up the passage on animals when Jaques is being discussed, and he reads all Jaques’s scenes to us and also Touchstone’s, to our continual amazement. He points out how the princes in Shakespeare always dwell on the theme of justice, as the Duke does here when he reminds Jaques of his former life. Then he says that costume in Shakespeare is still similar to ours, yet idealized; impossible to play this comedy in frock coats. And thus the evening passes in talk about the impact of the sublime; a general review of R.’s past life enables me to remark on the extent to which idealism is the source of his kindness and consideration; he has always seen through everything, I say, but he could never bear to admit it, he preferred to seek excuses or extenuating circumstances even for weaknesses of the very worst kind. He says, however, that the people who declared that he was no longer productive were right: if we had not come together, this would really have been so. He recalled Betz and Niemann and felt a desire to write to them, for what they did here was truly extraordinary, he said, beginning with their participation in the stone-laying ceremony. He also meant to write to Otto Wesendonck, who had also behaved well formerly.