Wednesday, April 28:
R. tells me the comical dream he had, which made him laugh very heartily in the morning. He wanted to greet the Khedive and his escort; these gentlemen were already solemnly engaged in exchanging greetings, and he could not take off his hat, a sort of straw cap which kept falling farther and farther over his eyes.
He then looks at me and says he cannot rightly remember what I looked like when I came with Hans to visit him, but he feels that what he calls my beauty came to me later, through suffering. I: “Probably through love.” He: “I did not really know whom you loved!”
The enclosed leaflet on how to improve our agriculture, the continuing mass emigrations, Rothschild’s purchase of the Jamnitzer centerpiece (for 600,000 marks) produce bitter remarks from him. On the other hand, a letter from the conductor Levi evokes the remark: “I cannot allow him to conduct Parsifal unbaptized, but I shall baptize them both, and we shall all take Communion together.” He says he will find a way around the difficulty.
We go for a walk in the garden, and when I tell him that I was deeply upset by a passage in L.’s letter about Lenbach, who was painting a still life of a freshly slaughtered chicken, he says: “Painters are like that; to them all things are there to be looked at, to feast their eyes on; poets, too, are cruel, Homer, for example; they depict heroism in all its cruelty and heartlessness, and then someone comes along like Jesus, who is all heart. He is at his greatest when he is bitter, when all his fury breaks out; he will separate the father from the son, everything will wither; then he shows his divinity. Of all the arts, music alone is entirely detached from all that, pure and redeeming.”
In the evening Herr Rubinstein plays to us the sonata, Op. 111; several times during the piece R. came to me and said, “It is heavenly,” and at the end he exclaims: “There lies my whole doctrine: the first movement is Will in its suffering and heroic desire, the other one is the gentler Will which human beings will possess once they become reasonable. Vegetarians!”