Thursday, July 31:
R. did not sleep well; the consequence of some vexation he experienced yesterday - or the cure? He takes a bath, which refreshes him, and in our breakfast conversation we come via C. Frantz and his Schellingianism to Schopenhauer and his Will. Yesterday R. said that everything manifests itself as a hunger, a splendid name Schopenhauer gave to “something hollow and ungraspable.” Sad that so few are capable of accepting this doctrine; because it makes no concessions to politics, ignorant people believe that it inhibits activity. The fact that human beings fashion laws in accordance with their understanding of things, that does not prove the validity of these laws, nor does it explain the things themselves; “Will” is an explanation.
R. has received a letter from a woman in Wiesbaden who sends him a book about vivisection and in well-turned phrases asks him to join in taking steps against such cruelty; she believes that its rapid growth is due to the great numbers of Jewish doctors. R. deeply moved and incensed by it; he says if he were a younger man he would not rest until he had brought about a demonstration against such barbarism. He says religion should be linked with compassion for animals; human beings’ treatment of one another is already bad enough, for they are so vindictive they put up a resistance to one another, and the noble teachings of Christianity are scarcely applicable. One should begin with quiet and patient creatures, and people who felt compassion for animals would certainly not be harsh toward human beings. “We must preach a new religion, you and I.”
This conversation, which he resumes in the evening, leads quite naturally to his deeply moving “Es ist bestimmt” - It resounds within me like a terrible exhortation - and how many partings have I already experienced! R. himself describes it as “sounds like those outside the portals of a monastery, and even more - complete renunciation, mortification.” “You can imagine my dismay,” he says to Rub., “when I saw Mendelssohn’s song - ah, that is something quite different, quite different, I thought to myself.”
In the morning he read Calderon’s burlesque to the end, and he finds it horrible, a precursor of Offenbach; after the first act I did not wish to continue reading it, and now I am reminded of this cold, hairsplitting author, his humor, and the Catholic Renaissance rears up before me; against it the Protestantism of Luther, Goethe, Schiller, Dürer, Bach, Parsifal - and Catholicism itself, when hidden within it were the seeds of Protestantism, pre-Jesuitical! Dante, Palestrina, perhaps Shakespeare. R. also reads some pieces in a little book by Daudet which I recommended to him and which made a very good impression on him (Contes choisis: “Le Décor,” “Les Deux Auberges,” “Les Douaniers”).
In the afternoon R. continues with the revision of his article. He is not well - is his cure perhaps doing him harm? In the evening Herr Rub. plays Beethoven’s Waldstein Sonata to us; for all its mastery it appeals to R. less than the sonatas of the first period; he calls the theme cold and stiff and exclaims, “I cannot bear cold music.” Then he remarks how incomparably less significant B.’s first symphony is than the first compositions for piano: B. went through a period of relapse into pedantry, he says. In connection with the repulsive wit of the Calderon farce we were reminded of the two shepherds in A Winter’s Tale, the carriers in Henry IV, and in addition the sturdily dignified language of the kings and nobles: “One sees a whole nation before one’s eyes.”