Friday, June 25:
R. slept well, he walks in the garden with the children, again sees a lizard catching a glowworm, but the children rescue it. “If it were not for the assumption that the world was made by a good God, one would find it all easy to understand. But none of them, not even my good Gleizes, can free himself of the idea that once all was Paradise, and then they relapse into sophisms.” Glorious days, still not too hot, the loveliest summer we have ever experienced. When I say this to R., he replies, “To know what our northern climate is like, all one needs is to glance through the correspondence between Goethe and Schiller, those eternal complaints about the cold, catarrhal conditions and so on.” Recently (yesterday) he spoke of the wretchedness of life in Jena for a person like Schiller, “all beer and cheese,” and nothing as a model for the diver and the maelstrom except a mill wheel! I say something (I forget what) about Schiller; R. agrees and says earnestly, “He was an ardent soul.” The task of seeking and laying down rules for literary composition seems utterly childish to him. “We are plagued with a nice civilization,” he said yesterday as he put down Aeschylus.
Over coffee he said, “What I find typical, and it says everything, is the story of the petition to the Reichstag on vivisection.” [In margin: “On the terrace at coffeetime we hear a donkey braying. ‘That is supposed to express joy,’ R. exclaims. ‘How terrible that the degenerate human being finds something ridiculous in this doleful sound!’”]
In the evening he relates with mock solemnity, “The Emperor wants the bishops back: ‘Look here, Bismarck, you are quite right of course, but the bishops must return, I have Catholic subjects, and we must be methodical.’” R. works and is still somewhat immersed in serious thought around lunchtime, but he then becomes more lively. Speaking of the first scene in [Aeschylus’s] Choephoroi with its surgings and its constantly returning flow, he says, “I know something else like this: Trist. and Isolde in the 2nd act.”
At lunch conversation about animals, Darwin’s absent-minded ape, and the possibility of measuring the talents of a human being by his ability to concentrate his thoughts. A curiously characteristic feature of R.: turning to Jouk. he says, “It is typical of the Russians that they have the knout kissed before they apply it.” When our friend says he knows nothing of this, R. becomes very angry and says he is prepared to admit everything about the Germans, but he also intends to say all he knows about other nations. But then, noticing that he has hurt our friend, he mentions it in the friendliest and kindest of ways, as always utterly truthful and infinitely kind.
A new sketch of the forest has been made: “One must not see the wood for the trees,” says R. Dr. Schlemm has sent some terrible opera librettos in doggerel verse: “And that is my school!” R. exclaims sadly. After he has had a rest we go for a walk in splendid weather to the belvedere. In the evening the Eumenides; a glorious conclusion to the day, arousing wide-ranging thoughts and comparisons. I exclaim to R., “Do you know in which work I see a link between the ideal and the real world, reminding me of the institution of the Areopagus? In Die Meistersinger, Sachs’s address at the end.” “I was just about to say the same thing,” R. replies, and, tired but exalted, we go off to bed.