Wednesday, July 30:
Since the weather is nice, R. starts on his cure, drinks a glass of Rakoczy, and goes for a walk in the palace gardens with Boni. Perhaps it did not agree with him, or the outing yesterday put too much of a strain on him, for he is again complaining of tightness in the chest. “You are troubled in your soul,” he says, “I in my chest, I feel very limp and have to push myself to do anything.”
R. had a letter to write to Breitkopf und Härtel, who have brought out a “popular” edition of Tristan und Isolde! He urges them to engrave the score of Lohengrin, which after all has caused them no losses.
Herr Rubinstein told us recently of a poem in Kladderadatsch: “It is decreed in Bismarck’s plan that all he owns must every man pay tax on”; this leads us to Mendelssohn’s song, and today R. plays to me the moving strains he himself discovered for the first line of the text: “Es ist bestimmt in Gottes Rat.” He wrote this down in his notebook in the winter of 1858. When I tell him I have been dictating to the children how paper and ink are made, R. says, “Nobody ever taught me that, and yet I knew it; I once saw a poor scribe making ink for himself out of oak apples, since he had no money to buy any.” Everything is like that with him - he knows, though nobody has in fact ever taught him. He copies his article and shows me the many alterations he has made.
In the evening we are disturbed by some particularly harsh treatment of our Siegfried. R. is so upset that I regret having told him about it; I did so in order to receive his advice, out of fear that I might be becoming too insensitive. But it would be better to spare R. such things. Since we are alone together in the evening, our proximity soon dispels all lingering discords. We look through the notebook containing his very first sketches for Tristan. Then we become immersed in a discussion on art, remarking that the Germans have not discovered their own true form. I: “In your works.” The cosmopolitan significance of these works: if the French, the Italians, the English were to learn German, they would recognize the fully developed form in them. Coming to his article, R. says, “If I now give everything up - my writing, the Society of Patrons - as I so often have a mind to - then that is the end of us, the theater will molder, and our idea will have departed forever.”
I observe that we must be patient and just go on firmly reiterating our point of view, however difficult to keep persisting and however much we should prefer to lapse into complete silence - and this even when we expect nothing from our persistence. Before that he read me something from Aristotle on perception, and he also began on Polybius; I, for my part, show him the passage on fear in Plutarch’s life of Cleomenes; I ask him whether with this he does not mean “awe” in Goethe’s sense of the word, and he agrees in part; in connection with this we discuss the great men whom the ancient worlds of Greece and Rome brought forth in such vast numbers; we, on the other hand, tremble at the thought that Bismarck might hand in his resignation! . . .