Friday, December 3:
R. dreamed so vividly of a large black wart that he got up in the morning and looked at himself in the mirror. We laughed. Shortly afterward, however, he says, “You were sad yesterday evening, and I am sad now.” But our conversation soon becomes lively again, and he says that in the Middle Ages the idea of honor took the place held by beauty among the Greeks, for the Greeks had no morality, everything seemly and everything heroic was for them a part of beauty. With the Romans it was honestas. In more modern times this absurd conception of honor had been worked out to take its place.
We discuss Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre, and R. says I should write about this as well as about La Renaissance for the Blätter; I reiterate my inability to address myself to the outside world, however glad I may be to tell him everything that comes into my mind.
The weather is very fine. R. invites me to go for a walk with him in the palace gardens at 10 o’clock; when the military band strikes up, the mere sound of it coming from the distance has a tremendous and startling effect on us. “What a divine thing music is, how a brass instrument like that stirs one’s blood!” Then he laughs and says, “It must throw a poor soldier into ecstasies.”
I mention a passage in Joukowsky’s letter and observe that, because the Sistine Madonna and the Tribute Money have become so much a part of him, he can no longer really appreciate them when he sees them. This cannot happen with music, I feel: however much one thinks of it, a melody, when one hears it, always has the power to surprise. R. agrees with me.
In the afternoon we go for another walk and are very grateful for a lovely sunset. R. then makes a cozy nest for himself in his little study and says that even in his younger years he had spoken to Uhlig of his longing for comfort. “At that time, though, because you had no love.” “So much the better if it is combined with love.”
Over coffee he recalled his remark to Uhlig about the Ring: “Things like that I used to say just in fun, but I always had a high opinion of what I was doing and felt that nobody else could do it.” In the evening he reads the paragraph on “song” in J. Grimm, and we are pleased by the words, “It is always Nature one comes to recognize, the spiritual nature of the human being.”
We discuss the reorganization of the Blätter, whether viable; it would depend on finding people with much wit and intelligence. Taking its lead from Schopenhauer’s Parerga, it must devote itself entirely to criticism, of history, literature, education. R. remarks again and again how splendidly Schopenhauer, while showing the fullest and freest awareness of things, stresses the moral aspects, always showing compassion, the need to recognize oneself in one’s neighbor, and to sacrifice oneself instead of him.
We were alone, R. and I, and glad to be so, oh, if only there were no outside world, were it but possible to live like this, exchanging thoughts, peacefully watching the children growing up! But this is asking too much, even if R. says that he would stage the festivals for the children.
Such ideal happiness brings to R.’s mind the quotation “But nothing compared with their contentment,” and we conclude the day with memories of this second part of the lovely work. “In Wilhelm Meister they are just phantoms.” An illustration for Hermann und Dorothea with some of Goethe’s lines beneath provokes him to exclaim, “How badly they are done!”