Monday, April 12:
Woke up in a fever during the night, thought of Brange, oh, how to tell him, and how to bear it that I must tell him?
R. is delighted with Lusch’s return, much merriment between them. Rainy day, but we celebrate Loldi gaily with gun salutes as we drink her health. In the afternoon we go to our friend Joukowsky’s studio, where Prince Liechtenstein reads a short story to us. R. comes to fetch us, he planned it as a surprise; the surprise misfires and he is a trifle vexed, but we return home in great high spirits.
In the evening he reads The Merchant of Venice to us, leaving out the scenes with Portia, except for the first, and we are amazed, and R. gives expression to our amazement, that a poet living 300 years ago should have defined the type of person who so flagrantly confronts us today, and how, in addition to this type of person, he describes the debased world around him, the thoughtless spendthrifts! But the hero remains the melancholy Antonio. “Is that anything now?” With this question Shakespeare reveals to us both his hero and his hero’s world! And the court scene, how it is done, the Jew exactly as today, so cold, alien, unapproachable! These more or less R.’s words.
And when we part and he tells me of his delight in Lusch’s development, my overflowing feelings burst forth, and I have to tell him that all, all of it is his doing, that to each of us he is the salvation and the blessing (yesterday, at dictation, I was privileged to hear him giving expression to our feelings at a time of deep distress).