Sunday, June 27:
Still thinking of that meeting with Fidi! And the difference between then and now: “I believe it is this that makes me appear so unchanged and still so full of good spirits.” R. works on his article. The news that a man went into the Chamber, threw stones at the deputies, and reproached them for being useless leads our conversation over afternoon coffee to the parliamentary system, brought into being in England through King John’s demands for money, quite understandable there, but here so absurd.
Then: “Since among animals the fox came to dominate the bear, why should not the Jew (the fox) dominate everything here?” “The fact that war has now become nothing but a mathematical exercise, that a soldier no longer sees the man he kills, that is what Hegel calls progress. What things people think up, it is extraordinary!” R. takes a rest, and afterward we stroll to the palm tree. Watching Palumbello, he remarks, “Since human beings were responsible for breeding dogs out of wolves, why should they not produce the right sort of creatures from human beings?” I: “But who is going to make humans out of humans?” R.: “Ah! The founder of a new religion.” He says he feels his new work will not be unwelcome to a limited number of well-wishers.
In the evening we look through some folios; an engraving by Marcantonio [Raimondi] after Raphael (Pietà), which pleases me greatly, R. rejects entirely; classical beauty applied to this subject he considers reprehensible, and the reason for our decline. The head by Leonardo (sketch for the Cena) he finds too effeminate. On the other hand, he says what a different impression the Christ in the Cena made on him (he mentions the fine positioning of the hands), but he regrets the wealth of detail and the too great activity among the other figures in the picture. He then plays the first theme of Parsifal to himself and, returning, says that he gave the words to a chorus so that the effect would be neither masculine nor feminine; Christ must be entirely sexless, neither man nor woman. Leonardo, too, in the Cena, attempted that, depicting an almost feminine face adorned with a beard. He must appear neither young nor old, he says, the god within the human being.
The engravings by Nanteuil, which interest me, arouse no sympathy in him; he asks me whether I have not seen enough wigs by now! ... On the other hand, he listens willingly to all I have to say to him following my becoming more closely acquainted with Aeschylus, and he speaks highly of Droysen and the influence he had on him when, self-taught, he set about building a library and was obliged to acquire these things in translation. He also recalls Otfried Müller, who showed him the Doric style in a different light from the familiar Apollo Belvedere, and Hermann (not the famous one).
Monday, June 28:
R. did not have a good night; he reads Goethe and Schiller on “Pygmalion” and is pleased with Schiller’s assured and independent judgment, which he imparts to me. The unveiling of Goethe’s monument, raised for reasons of self-esteem “with other people’s money,” as R. adds, gives rise to many remarks, both merry and sad! “How ridiculous one feels when one thinks of anything in the German Reich with any sort of emotion!” In connection with this statue, still not paid for, we come to talk of the Schiller monument and the Gendarmen-Markt, and R. tells a very funny story about a gendarme who came upon an urchin behaving improperly outside the theater and directed his attention to the church with the words “What are our churches for?”
The monument of Goethe in his 40s leads him to himself at that age: “Where was I then?” “Recollection of the concerts in Zurich?” Then his 50s: “I was very much alone then.” In the afternoon he writes to Herr Schön and reads his letter to me: “There, now I’ve knocked off his head,” he says in a voice like Punch.
He relates that the house of Rothschild has more or less given notice to quit Russia, if these measures against the Jews continue; the newspaper adds the comment that it is just as well that things are out in the open. R. says, “I am now on the side of the Kreuz-Zeitung, am becoming completely orthodox.” We walk to the belvedere; passing the flowering aloe, R. says, “That is what I call a panaritium, a tumor!” As we are sitting on the wall of the belvedere, R. says, “I should imagine that in relation to Indian culture the Persians stand more or less as the Latin races do to the Greeks.” He reflects, and is interrupted by the singing of a boy in the vineyards, a cry which dies away in the depths and keeps returning to surprise us. Palumbello also listens; recently he amused us greatly by joining in a fugue being played by Rub., and on the right note, too. In the evening R. reads to us the introduction to his article, but then regrets having done so, saying that one should read such things for oneself in print.