Monday, February 7:
Will the King of Bavaria lose his throne? This is being threatened in Rome, and the Clericals are saying in the Lower Chamber: We have the peasants. In any case we are glad that he is behaving well and supporting Prince H[ohenlohe].
Today is Saint Richard’s Day according to the Protestant calendar; I keep my celebrations to myself, however, since the framing has not been completed.
With the children; when I go to R., he plays me the Gibichungs’ theme, which came to him in such a clear-cut form that he wrote it down in ink immediately. Great delight in it; conversation about these characters Gunther and Hagen, the latter repulsively mysterious, impassive, curt. On long-lost naïveté: “All these heroes appeared to me like a gathering of animals, lions, tigers, etc.; they also devour one another, but there is no disgusting convention, court etiquette, etc., mixed up in it—everything is naïve.”
We drive into town, there I ask R. to call for me at the photographer’s—when he arrives he looks utterly distraught. In the evening, when I ask the reason, he tells me that he had come across a pitiable, badly injured dog; the sight of it, and above all his inability to do anything to help it, had distressed him; and suddenly he realized the sublime greatness of Goethe’s decision to make his W[ilhelm] Meister a surgeon. “Everyone must have a calling as well as a philosophical outlook, and there can be no finer or more humanitarian calling than that of a surgeon.” He speaks with such excitement that the children think he is cross.
In the town met Count B., who paid me a long visit; during it the student’s lesson, and it vexed me a little not to be able to attend it, because my mistrust of him is unfortunately growing. Possible that I am now very unfavorably disposed toward Catholic religious education.
The newspaper reports that the Patriarch of Jerusalem spoke in favor of the neutralization of the church, whereupon he was summoned before the Pope unaccompanied; there Bishop Valerga gave him two documents to sign, either a withdrawal, or a renunciation of all the privileges of his church. The old man requested permission to go home to reflect, but there was no question of it, he was under arrest; after a delay of two hours this 70-year-old Patriarch at last signed the renunciation! Is this true?
In the evening R. brings Fidi into the children’s salon, then takes him into the study. “I am so happy,” he says when I join him there, “Fidi is the seal on our love.” He writes to Prof. N., who wrote us two very nice letters about his lecture.
After tea finished The Acharnians; and at the conclusion of the evening, talking about a funeral cantata by Bach, R. says: “Bach and Dürer, they are two of a kind, both possess in the same degree a quality of inner sadness and also the same taste for mysteriously imaginative ornamentation. Only in Bach there is unfortunately still too much of what was then fashionable, the marks of a bad period.”
When R. was already in his bedroom I heard him cry out, “Now I absolutely forbid a visit to the Wesendoncks—” (the previous night he had dreamed he had been there and had had to listen to “bottled-up” and long-stored-up notices of a pamphlet of his, while he was constantly seeking his hat and unable to find it!).