Thursday, July 22:
R. had a good night. He is cheerful at breakfast, to which he summons me with a chorus from Euryanthe and at which, as he says, he appears like Aurora on the snow-capped mountains.
We talk about Das Rheingold, and that soon leads him to the melancholy theme of the uselessness of great men. At around 12 noon he dictates to me, and when the possibility of a league for peace is mentioned, he says, “The French should show us how, the rascals!” He then gazes happily around his little room, in which he has the pink color which one can no longer find, and he says that is the reason he rails against our whole modern civilization, because it does not know how to produce this shade of pink.
At lunch we again talk about W. Meister, Therese’s attitude toward Lothario (at first not to marry, since possibly his daughter, then to marry after all, since her mother, etc.). He says, “Those are chemical assumptions; they remind me of the Jew who thought it so nice that birds hatch their young. I should just say: Wife, hatch me a boy, or a girl, or a pancake.” Then he suddenly exclaims, “It is quite scandalous, such a relationship!”
When friend Joukowsky says he now wants to paint his portrait, R. is glad that the full-face photograph is to be used for it, saying that this is a good one; the Lenbach portrait is striking, he feels, but exaggerated, one-sided, lacking in contrast.
After his afternoon siesta he corrects the manuscript, but says he is altering next to nothing in the style: “I am not a writer.”
In the evening he brings up the subject of the uselessness of great men, asking of what avail Beethoven had been: “They have learned nothing from him, all they do is try to imitate him. And Aeschylus, could his wisdom stop his people from heading for downfall? And Shakespeare!” He recalls the impression the Adagio of the E-flat Major Quartet made on him in Paris, how he wept and felt exalted.
Glorious moonlit evening, mild and tranquil atmosphere; when we talk about wishing on shooting stars, R. says: “I have everything the world could not supply to the remotest degree! All I now wish for is good health, and then enough money to give us freedom of movement.”