Wednesday, December 1:
R. did not have a good night; he got up, went into the children’s salon, and read the article on New Zealand in Orbis Pictus. Thoughts of emigration still occupy him very much, and he feels that, if one were young, it would be the only thing to do. In this ability to colonize he sees the main quality of the Anglo-Saxon race and a sign of the productivity of the Reformation, whereas Catholicism has been completely sterile in this direction since the Reformation.
In the morning he tells me that Bismarck and Bucher sat down together and considered the problem of the socialists; help is now to come from a compulsory savings bank. He works out an advertisement for the Blätter.
At lunch he talks about the past, says, thinking of former times, that the eternal feminine drags one downward. “It took a rather long time for things to change,” he adds.
We go for a walk in the palace gardens: “Brooms, oh, brooms, be as you were,” he says, looking at the trees reflected in the water, and talks with the same humor as yesterday about the earth and sky, which are wet, cold, and gray. Friends in the evening.
R. talks once more about Schelling and C. Frantz, and when somebody mentions the former’s philosophy of mythology and recalls Creuzer, R. says: “All these people like Creuzer saw something, they made mistakes but they saw something. Their successors see nothing, just think they ought to say something, too.”
Letters from Herr Neumann to R. and me, very friendly in tone. R. is insisting on the Viktoria Theater.
When our friends depart, I remain chatting with R. in the salon, and the subject of outward appearances, an outward image of some kind, crops up between us. Over coffee R. had made me responsible for our having settled in Germany; he said he had wanted to stay in Genoa in 1868; once a decision had been made, it should be put into effect at once, but I had had too rigid a sense of duty, and all the gods had been against my decision; we probably would have come to Bayreuth, but only for a short time, for the festival, to the Fantaisie.
I tell him that Lenbach said to me that, since I had not become an empress, I had dedicated myself to a great cause; whereas he as a person has always meant everything to me, and the cause is something entirely for him. R. says nobody can understand this, and that is why nobody has been able to paint my portrait, the assurance of my manner leads them astray. “They are too stupid,” he says with laughing earnestness.