Saturday, August 16:
R. slept well. As usual, he visits Evchen in the early morning. Mode Illustrée causes us to remark that with the French Revolution the naive imaginative interest in costume disappeared; people are no longer able to dress themselves.
Over our after-lunch coffee it is again Beethoven's ancestry which occupies us; R. says one cannot sufficiently disregard time and space - an electric spark can still strike after skipping several generations. B. got nothing from Frederick the Great, R. says with a laugh, but he did from Frederick's father!
R. walks to the Riedelsberg with the children and returns on a zigzag course after countless adventures, as Marke does not wish to leave Loldi, and wrong turnings. He walked for two whole hours.
In the evening the two of us cozily alone together; R. says, “I shall always keep a child with scarlet fever on hand, so people will stay away from our house.” It is only the children he wants - he misses Loldi and Fidi in the poultry yard. I read aloud a little from Nohl's Beethoven, R. objecting to the bringing together of Fidelio and the real-life love episode: “I shall have to write something one day about the manner in which the life of the spirit goes its own way and has nothing to do with actual experiences - indeed it is, rather, the things one does not find which provide the images.”
He reads to me two scenes from Angelo, which he finds well constructed, one between Katharina, Angelo, and Tisbe, the other between Kath. and Tisbe, the latter indeed touching. We laugh heartily about “avec votre manie de tout dire” [“with your craze for putting everything into words”].
Afterward conversation, reflections on the present world. Catholic services and seneschals and other uniforms, costume, comparison with the Antonine empire. I: “They had no music.” He: “And so were spared a Schumann or a Brahms.”
Actually a picture of the destruction of all existing things, the ravages of power of the most brutal kind, at last the emergence of a new preacher of Christianity, from whom one could get the feeling that it is all in its very earliest stages! It is precisely because the Gospels have come down to us from such a narrow circle, R. says, that they are so divine; just like the Chaldean shepherd in the wilderness, who saw and observed nothing except the stars above him, they cannot be compared to anything that was said before or after them.
A book by Claude Bernard about vivisection, sent to us by the society, gives us a deeper insight into this horrible practice, which has now become the usual thing.