Thursday, November 27:
Shortly before falling asleep R. exclaims, 'I know what it means to gaze upon Heaven; beside the pheasant house at Tribschen, where we had had some of our meals together, I remember how I gazed up at it in my loneliness, because for me the earth had become so dreary and empty!'
In the morning he laughs and says he has been dreaming of very fat hams, and now a very lean one turns up; one could write a whole book about it.
Over coffee much about Austria and Bismarck, after much has been said about the Teutonic Order of Knights, its achievements, and, on R.'s part, the absurdity of the present Order of Saint John of Jerusalem. The sun shining on Beethoven's portrait leads us to talk about his facial features, and R. feels that when Schopenhauer was talking of the large eyes of the man of genius, he was thinking primarily of Goethe - certainly not of a musician, who is a monster in excessum and in abcessum; with Goethe, he says, everything was directed toward seeing; for the musician there is no seeing, no outside world, he is a wild creature.
At lunch he told me he was curious whether I should manage in Naples to get him back to the biography; it would get shorter and shorter, he said, for it was only youthful memories one felt the urge to re-create for oneself. With Munich, for example, he would deal very briefly; he could not tell the whole truth, one never knew what would come out of such things, Fidi could buy puff pastry with it. He said he would work on the affinities between religion and art: 'They do exist, as long as the religion is not synthetic.'
Regarding the treatment of Aeschylus's chorus, R. says the Germans used to be so eminent in this field in monographs, fastening on a point and not letting go until it was thoroughly elucidated. R. has done a lot of work, and he remarks on how much music has lost through wind instruments ceasing to be natural instruments, but becoming equipped with valves. He reads a book by Karl Ritter on the theory of tragedy, says it is cleverly done, but so tortuous, so unseeing, never asking when great tragedies evolved, in what circumstances, never seeing Goethe and Schiller for what they always were - seekers.
In the evening he shows us a sample of Schlagintweit's work on India, which interests us greatly. R. then tells us (from E. v. Weber's book) about the Hindu maidens who were beautiful and so faithful that their lovers could not get rid of them, they swam after them, and one (an Englishman) had to hack off the hand of a maiden who clung to his boat. 'We live in a fine world!' R. exclaims. 'And how do we look, we Europeans, beside these Asiatic peoples? Like crude barbarians.'
That leads to other things: starvation everywhere, a weaver discovered starved to death in his room, unable to bring himself to go begging, another frozen to death! Spessart, Silesia, Upper Franconia, misery everywhere, in Ireland and England, too; Carlyle's prophecy! Much about England, where all live side by side and where the socialist movement will probably start. France, as long as it could export pomade and chignons to everyone down to the Kaffirs, would probably be spared. R. mentions Bakunin, who wanted to burn everything down, sparing nothing, and he says B. told him, 'Then you won't need so many instruments, and that will be a very good thing!'
For the suffering caused by all these reflections I know only one remedy, and I ask R. to play the Prelude to Parsifal, which he does; tears gush forth, and earth's children we are no longer!