Wednesday, June 18:
R. did not have a good night. A gray day; he cannot start on his cure yet. We went to bed last night with much merriment, thinking of Eva’s inexplicable talent for mimicry: in Muggendorf she gave us a wonderful imitation of the wife of a confectioner here. Yet this morning I find R.’s face very drawn, he looks run down. Oh, life, oh, death! . . .
However, as always, our tired spirits, once joined together, succeed in reviving; I tell him all the funny stories my life in Bayreuth brings to my ears, and he laughs, saying he hopes I shall soon be finished with the education of my children, so that I can write it all down. Heavens, if my poor little inspirations have taken his mind off things for an instant, they have more than served their purpose! At lunch he announces that he has finished his article; he says he has taken things very far.
Coming back to the swarm of insects from Faust’s cloak (the Midsummer Night’s Dream Overture), he says, “Weber depicted elves differently.” Over coffee talked about Charlotte Corday, of whom he has just been reading in Carlyle. “Through madness we express what is divine in ourselves; such deeds are akin to madness.”
This morning, when I told him that through him the Germans could pull themselves together and come to despise the Jewish element which had kept him from them for so long, he said, “Yes, the fact that men like Hanslick in Vienna, for instance, have been left in peace by young people is not a good sign-it shows that they have lost their nerve.” It is wet all day, and R. can manage only a short walk in the palace gardens, which he does not enjoy. In the evening we are alone together, always a pleasure.
We chat for quite a while, and then R. reads Carlyle’s The French Revolution to me. The phrase “Barrack-room faith” greatly delighted him yesterday, and he observes that here in our country everything is now barrack-room faith. During the evening he told me he had had an idea which he still had to work out; he preferred not to tell me what it was, for then he would give away his “point.” “Or shall I tell you?” “Whatever you feel is right.” He: “Homer blind, Beethoven deaf-those are the two poles.”