Thursday, August 7:
R. had a good night; in the morning reminiscences of earlier days; what would have become of him, he asks, if the King had not come into his life? “I had no friends in the sense that they took a truly genuine interest in my life. Just think of people like the Willes, who were really close to me yet meant nothing to me.”
A young man asks permission to call and R. receives him: “A very handsome Jew,” he tells me afterward, “or his [half-caste]” - fair-haired and sweet. R. observes that we ought to give Fidi a crooked nose.
Around lunchtime I find R. engaged on a once familiar task - he is ruling a score! He has “pinched” my copy of the Prelude, since I would not give it up; he also knows what alterations he made in it. He says he is now going to write the score and keep it in a safe until the world becomes worthy of a performance.
In the evening the mail brings us an appeal to women to demonstrate against vivisection, announcing a meeting of the animal-protection society in Gotha; R. resolves first to go, then to get someone to represent him there and to write an article. Many thoughts on religion; I tell him various things about the life of Cleomenes, which I have been reading to the children; among other things, his restoration of equality of possessions: “will take the lead.” In the evening he says he feels so ashamed before people like Schuré and even Herwegh, having expected so much from men such as these German princes, this Emperor: “Just look at him!” I observe that it was not by people but by the movement itself that one expected people to be drawn along. “Yes,” he says, “but that can be misconstrued.”