Friday, November 8:
R. slept well in spite of his cold. At breakfast, when he returns to the subject of Renan and I tell him I cannot imagine any of the present famous German writers being able to formulate such thoughts, he says, “They are too difficult, too much concerned with ‘progress.’” But then he adds, “Nietzsche could have done it.” I tell him that Nietzsche has requested that the Blätter not be sent to him. “I’m glad he has taken it to heart,” R. says.
At lunchtime a telegram about the dress rehearsal. (Inserted here a telegram from Vienna dated November 7: “Dress rehearsal successfully completed. Jager in good voice till end and excellent. Best prospects for performance. Regards, Richter, Seidl.”) After lunch I tell R. that, in the course of my lessons with the children, my reflections on the Semper theater and the Dionysian theater in Athens led me to thank Fate that the project was never carried out in that cold building on the banks of the Isar, complete with ballrooms and royal box. Instead, it remains an ideal, pure and eternal, and Athens remains the past. The people who served Fate in this matter had not for that reason been any less reprehensible, I say, but Fate itself was kind. R. agrees with me, and we go on to discuss how nothing is absolute, everything is always conditioned by time and circumstance.
I say this is why I do not like to see monuments erected, huge things aimed straight at eternity, all they suggest to me is accumulation and imitation; the Gothic church should be banished from the city, mystery plays in the courtyards, Shakespeare’s plays done on his stage, the Ring in our “barracks” — an eternal reproach and an eternal symbol. “That is a very tragic view,” R. says quietly, and continues reflectively: “One sees to what extent everything depends on individuals when one thinks, for example, of how Luther was influenced by Saint Paul. One might say that the whole of Christianity has been dependent on the personality of Saint Paul, and Luther allowed himself to be guided entirely by him; as we too are guided by the wonderful revelation of Christ, by the few frightened apostles of limited intelligence and the senile Saint John who passed the revelation on to us.” Watching me as I listen to him, he says, “Are you putting on your gemmish expression again?” He explains what he means: “Like an engraved gem.” [A few words based on wordplay omitted.] In the morning, when we were talking about Renan’s ideas and then the Germans, he said he was glad all the same that he had gone through the war with feelings of joy, and not with the feelings he has now.
In the evening he brought back from Angermann’s, where he went for a glass of beer, a copy of Der Sammler, to read to me some anecdotes about Bismarck. “He’s a stout fellow, and pretty remarkable for a Prussian.”