Saturday, March 22:
Still a raw wind, bringing R. a cough and tightness in the chest and an ever-increasing yearning for the South. He works.
Returning from a fairly long walk with the children, I tell R. what a curious impression the theater made on me in the bright sunshine—exhortation, consolation, reproach, hope—which of these, or all of them together? R. says, “Sad.”
This leads us, goodness knows how, to the Sistine Chapel. I remember quite clearly R. saying to me as we entered it, “This is no place for lightheartedness—it is like my theater.” R. says no, his first feeling had been one of great repugnance, though he had gradually tried, “for your sake,” to be fair to the artist. I stick up for my memory and say that I had been so struck that he had at once seen through all the drawbacks—the disharmony of the building and its decorations, the ravages of time, the absurdity of the task—and felt warmly for the artist who had used even these poor conditions as a stepping-stone for his flight; in the same way that here one had been able to grasp his ideas in spite of Unger, Niemann, Doepler, and many others, he himself grasped Michelangelo’s genius. But he disputes this! ...
He goes out, attempts a walk in the palace gardens, but is scared off by the raw air and goes to Angermann’s with Fidi, pleased by the boy’s intelligence. On his return home he tells me that he fell flat on his face near the post office; he counters my alarm by saying that he always falls safely, he cannot forget how he once fell down on the Brühl in Vienna, Porges and the others thought, “The master is dead,” but he had not even hurt himself. I leave him at about eleven in the evening to fetch Lusch from a party; on my return I find him awake; he was looking at the Illustrirte Zeitung and showed me the King of the Zulus, who pleased him very much with his finery and his melancholy face. Then he told me that he had written to the conductor Steinbach, having read that he had given Die Meistersinger in Mainz without cuts, but there had been no audience even for the first performance.
Yesterday, before we began to play cards, the vision of Nietzsche’s behavior rose once more in his mind. He said, “N. wrote his thoughts out of season, thus acknowledging that what he admires does not belong in our time but goes beyond it, and now he uses the fact that my enterprise is out of season to criticize it! Can one imagine anything worse than that?” R. connects a remark by Herr Lindau the journalist with his description (“Retrospect”); this gentleman, it seems, has said, “Better to be bad than to be bored.” R. finds this very typical—in Paris they had also said (about Tannhäuser): “Nous voulons nous amuser, nous ne voulons pas de récit” [“We want to be entertained, we do not want recitals”].