Tuesday, November 26:
R. had a very bad night, I am sure because he again drank some beer yesterday while working. ... He spent part of the night out of bed, and laughs as he tells me that he took up Chopin again and was put off completely by its exaggerated style. "I was just thinking how the peculiarity of the French lies in their gaiety and friendliness, their wit, and I remembered Champfleury and his father - and then all this exaggeration, all these descriptions! That is Russian. And then all those quotations in Polish - who speaks Polish except for the Poles? Well, perhaps a Russian police agent."
[Added in margin: "R. says that two of his friends sought to make an impression on him with the same phrase: 'At last something one can praise with full cheeks.' They were Uhlig, talking about a Volkmann trio, and Laube, about König's Die hohe Braut." ] He then talks about the bad German habit of speaking in superlatives, "something we learned from Goethe, who wrote certain words, omitting the article, for reasons of brevity."
Then: "I am really curious to see what Israelchen [Disraeli] will do, how he will reveal his positive side. It is always difficult to reconcile oneself with the world after criticizing it. What sophistries will he use to show us that revelation is only possible if we all recognize the God on Mount Sinai? But I can understand why such a man appealed to the Queen and the dissatisfied Tories." "The poison he gave them must have been very refined," he said yesterday.
After lunch he goes for a little walk in the garden; he has done some work but is tired after his bad night. At lunch he again laughed over Chopin and all the declamatory passages in it; he says that Goethe, when he is quoted, is made to look like a peasant boy! He is referred to, he says, as "POlympiste." I: "NOlympien." "Olympiste would be Curtius, I suppose." I: "Yes, that is his difference from Zeus." We tell the children the anecdote about the "accident et malheur" of N. III, which R. likes so much. At lunch he says, "The downfall of a civilization is only a matter of time, like the completion of Parsifal!" After lunch we talk about what R. intends to read next - probably Darwin again, and he says with a sigh: "Oh, only Beethoven can give one true pleasure. That is what is divine about music: that it shows us everything in a mirror image, and yet it is entirely us, the attention of every nerve is held by it - it is the loveliest of delusions!" He speaks of the mazurka he saw danced in Leipzig: "It gave the impression (as they filed past) of a flock of birds, crows or swallows, moving along, and the movements were so free, so natural, so spontaneously rhythmic - nothing artificial as in our dances." He says it was really beautiful.
My morning reading to the children (Lysander) provides the topic for our conversation, and R. says he must catch up on the historians who supplied the material for Plutarch, he knows only the greatest of them. Then news of socialist excesses in Italy, police reprisals - all this calls for an inquiry to find out whether the Jesuits are involved. R. thinks it is possible (there is talk of the Pope's being poisoned), and he exclaims, "The way we have, in our present civilization, of looking to the police for salvation!" "How sad it is," he sighs, "not only having nothing to be pleased about, but also being unable to do anything about it - one just talks in a vacuum." Earlier he said, "If ever I perpetrate such nonsense again, I shall link it to Disraeli, it is always a good thing when one can call on someone in such an important position." R. in a run-down condition all day, he does go outdoors for a while, but it does not help particularly, and he is not looking well when he sits down beside me in the hall after the dancing lesson. When I question him about it, he says: "Oh, it is only that I always live by extremes. It must make things tiresome, but also perhaps pleasant, for the people who live with me; it is either utter dejection or else this gaiete du cerveau - there is no other term for it."
In the evening Disraeli, less significant than in that one conversation, and, as R. says, the whole thing so unsettled because of its message. Conveying messages always fails in art, however good the intention (R. quotes Heinse's Die seligen Inseln as an example). Warm weather, R. sees some little blackbirds and finches emerging; "Poor creatures," he thinks, "you'll soon have to be looking for a hiding place."