Thursday, January 15:
R. did not have a very good night; he got up and read in Goethe’s life the episode of his departure. He often talks now about this life, and recently, referring to the mark of eternity in Goethe, he said, “He was like an outstanding pupil, and the conditions in Germany, which constitute complete anarchy, are to blame for that.” He also discussed the present rules of orthography, finding them absurd. “Who are the people responsible for that?” He feels one could very well take the Middle High German style of accentuation as a starting point; the new measures will lead to endless confusions.
Sirocco all day, rain and storms; it is really very sad that R. should be prevented from going out, when he is so much longing for it. At breakfast he tells us about his childhood, how in the house beside the old Dresden gallery he was afraid to go upstairs alone, because in the corridor where Herr Mattei, the director of the gallery, lived, there was a huge picture: “Nobody on earth could ever have got me to pass by that naked old figure.” So he used to ring the bell downstairs, and the maid, or in her absence one of his sisters, would come down with a light. “Wretched boy, did you ring the bell?” “Did it ring? I was just sort of playing with the bell.”
After that he was always asked teasingly. The cries of the people remind him of the alpenhorn, which he heard in the market place in Lucerne and which sounds like the cry of a wild goose. “I listened very intently, that is to say, in an abstract way, but then I wanted to write it down. I wanted the man to come down to me, but he was too shy, and some years later, when I wanted to hear it again, he was dead. So I had to do as best I could in Tristan.” In G.’s life he has reached the friendship with Schiller, and he says it is the only heartening aspect, for despite the “distinguished” people with whom he had to do, one is conscious that Goethe always felt himself a stranger among them. “They shook their heads over Egmont, they scarcely understood Tasso, but then he is rewarded with complete understanding from a man who is his equal; indeed, Schiller, with his ideality, was much surer of himself, whereas Goethe remained an experimenter all his life, always curious, like a child with his testing and trying out, but with a tremendous love of Nature.”
When I express my amazement that Empress Eugénie, even though she has the corpse of her son, can still visit the land of the Zulus instead of entering a convent, R. says: “It just shows that there are no longer any wholehearted and genuine people left. Someone like Cromwell would be unthinkable, they are all hollow; look at Bismarck.” Then he tells me the anecdote about Cr., how he asked whether it was possible to fall from grace.
Regarding poets, he says a poet is a visionary, and he tells me how Herwegh always needed a framework for his thoughts: “He grew lazy and, like all idle people, sought refuge in science, dissecting frogs. I wanted to get him producing again and suggested the subject of reincarnation, 9 cantos, three figures with 3 cantos for each, the same type recurring at different times, what I mean by God, who runs parallel with Nature up to the point where the parallels meet. But he didn’t do it. The same with Freytag, to whom I suggested Julian, a tragic and interesting figure in whom one sees the whole ancient world rising up in protest against the abominable church, and himself a restless man of action. But Fr. thought that the person who had such ideas should express them himself, and it is true we lack a form for treating such subjects.” The newspaper prints an article about the kindergarten schools here, which do not seem to be flourishing, and R. says: “What can Neapolitan children learn there? They know without being told how to pick a pocket!” Then, more seriously: “The idea of teaching children through play is a splendid one, and Fröbel was undoubtedly an excellent man, but we lack the power, and let us not think we can carry our cause by such means, any more than by vegetarianism!” He relates humorously how he came upon Fidi in the kindergarten.