Friday, January 16:
R. had a disturbed night, but the sun is shining again; I stroll into the town with our friend Gersdorff, from whom we take our leave sadly, for in his present position he cannot be helped. R. tries to overcome his feelings in his own way, by saying jokingly to Dr. Schr. that Gers. has “a divorced bride.”
I order a carriage and we go for a drive at about 1:30, R. bursting into ecstatic exclamations: “Naples is the city for me, the D------ take all ruins, here everything is alive! I know only two cities which reflect their countries, London and Naples; Paris belongs to the cosmopolitan rabble.” First of all we visit a barber and have many amusing difficulties, then to Prof. Schron’s, Corso Vittorio Emanuele. I fear the open carriage is too much for R. and notice his difficulty in climbing stairs, but he wants the carriage to be kept open and takes delight in everything; all of it interests him, the man adjusting his cap, the ugliest of people, all these tell him something, he says. He is also pleased with Prof. Schron’s accounts of the Camorra: “The way such people get by!” He buys cheese from a merchant he got to know 3 years ago; when he gives his name, the man exclaims, “Mais vous êtes mort!”
Start on Sismondi in the evening, but R. does not care for its fluent French; he looks for the passage which gave him his conviction about the present decadence that is leading us into barbarism, after which the founder of a new religion may perhaps emerge. But this new outlook would not be confined to the Old World, though it would probably start from there; like the Jews, it would be scattered everywhere, and we should probably fight our battles somewhere in the South. Everything belonging to our civilization, down to the very names, would be wiped out, he says, for it is all too evil and mendacious. Putting his finances in order, he says all this arranging and calculating arouses a sort of gambling urge in him.
In the evening he exclaims to me with tender passion that things between us have been different from Goethe and Frau v. Stein. But he finds the choice of Christiane Vulpius horrible; he had imagined her to be a brunette, but no, she was fair with blue eyes, and he shows me her portrait. He is particularly pleased with, and remarks on, Goethe’s explosion over “humor is nothing different” in Chancellor Müller, saying it is splendid and so apt; today the whole world expresses itself in that fashion. He comes to the subject of Nietzsche, who, out of sheer malice toward him, distorts the passage he wrote in his Beethoven about the way B. listened to folk melodies, and he did it just in order to denigrate R., “ignoring the fact that Beethoven was the greatest melodist who ever lived. The way he took a folk tune and gave it back to the people, transfigured, it was like the condescension of a god, like the unknown maiden appearing to the shepherd. And to rank him on that account somewhere below Schubert! What Schubert was, B. had long known all about. Disgraceful, and so stupid!”