Saturday, May 8:
Harking back to our conversation yesterday about Fidi, I tell R. I am convinced that in his own childhood he was equally cheerful and gay, and that it was only his life which prevented this cheerfulness from finding expression, giving him this apparent frenetic quality which many people interpret as capriciousness. He admits it, but says that even in W.'s childhood the poverty of his home did not permit his gaiety to unfold to its full extent, as with Siegfried.
We discuss what we read yesterday, and R. says it is remarkable how rich in characters and situations he made his Merry Wives, for which he had no previously existing story; he says it is all done with great artistry, but it is precisely this absence of an existing story which gives it a slight air of artificiality.
Then my portrait. R. praises its sublimely childlike quality. But his favorite picture of me is the photograph with the veil; what he adds in telling me this shall, however, remain my secret, which I can hardly admit even to myself!
Letter from a clergyman in Hesse about vivisection, R. pleased by it. We talk about the subject, and R. says: “We are too stupid, like the dodo, which was condemned to extinction! If one disturbs an anthill with one’s foot, the ants come together again and rebuild what was destroyed.” Joukowsky: “But we have no instinct.” R.: “Knowledge should take its place and help the human race to restore what was brought into disorder by blind force, earthly convulsions. Moths fly into the lamp because Nature is imprudent, whereas for human beings the task is to extinguish this light, not the light of knowledge, but that of a false science, a science which the princes foster while at the same time they continue building up their armies.”
The socialist elections in Hamburg, Bismarck’s idea of taxing vaudeville, provoke R. into violent expressions of indignation: “We are governed by bulls and oxen.” [The last seven words obliterated in ink by an unknown hand.]