Thursday, May 20:
Merry early breakfast; continued pleasure in the thought of the children. R. remarks on Loldi's sense of humor and how well she understands his witticisms. Yesterday, he says, he greeted Herr v. St. with the words, "Pardon me for not getting up, but I just sat down," and Loldi, sitting in the corner, laughed. Then he reads Schopenhauer to me on the subject of professors of philosophy, and we laugh heartily over the words, "who cannot live without theism, that is to say, eat and drink."
After lunch yesterday he spoke about the festival, the fine spirit shown by his singers, and how disappointed they must have felt when, after such an unheard-of expenditure of all their powers, nothing happened. At lunch he addressed Siegfried as "obstinate innocence".
Over coffee he told us how curious childhood impressions are: when he was ten years old, he and his sister Klara saw a play in which Mme Hartwig had to speak the line, "You can do it if you will." She said "whatever you will," the audience laughed, and R. asked Klara why, whereupon she explained, "It should be 'if you will.'" This made an indelible impression on him.
Discussion about spiritualists, occasioned by an exposure in Munich. R. says: "How foolish to object to a person for that! It is like forbidding a poet to call his play King Lear." Speaking for himself, he would be delighted to see a person flying, whether in the dark or by daylight. "But the stupid public wants to achieve religion through hocus-pocus." To have a showman like that arrested, he adds, is too absurd, for his powers, like those of an actor, lie in some kind of deception.
R. wants to go into town, creeps off, I catch up with him, and we drive in together; at Detken's we separate, and he says with a laugh, "So the bookbinder is making the triumphal arch?" Yesterday, when he saw the decorator taking away a carpet, he crept in to find out what was going to happen on the 22nd, to catch a glimpse of the triumphal arch.
Toward evening a visit from Mme Stella Bonheur, the Ortrud in Rome; she tells us very pleasant things about the performances and our good, energetic Frau Lucca. R. says, when she has gone, "A complete lack of false modesty," always in this connection with a disapproving side glance at the Germans.
Timon [of Athens] in the evening, the scene with the painter, the poet, and the cynic. R. says the play seems to him "very personal": "The material allows no chance of a reconciliation, the characters are observed in all their wickedness." Before Timon R. told the story of our journey through the floods in Ticino.