Sunday, January 23:
R. had a good night.
In our morning conversation he talks profoundly and at length about the mother's womb, the life within it, the sacredness of it, and he ends with praise of Goethe, who recognized the divinity in these manifestations of Nature. But how could one ever have visualized a personal God who created all these things? He also says he can well understand why Goethe, out of his sense of the sacredness of Nature, felt the urge to examine things individually, for one can never pay too much attention to the individual element; to pursue Nature as a whole, to see it as a cosmos, is foolishness.
While we are immersed in these reflections, Isolde and Eva come in to thank us for their new paletots. R. is pleased with the girls; things are no longer going on en cachette [by stealth], here they are, grown up.
He comes to me before lunch, announcing himself as “the old clog-maker” — he has just noticed the great likeness between them. I tell him of my feelings of boundless emotion when I recently glanced through Lohengrin again and read the “Bridal Song,” then the finale of the 2nd act; I say I cannot understand why everybody in Germany did not burst out cheering over its “chaste fire.” “The German brain can only be reached through a sort of stuffy head cold,” he says.
His royalties from Vienna seem very good; now that Die Msinger is beginning to make an impact, he says, he hopes things will get better and better. Some friends at lunch; we drink retrospectively to friend Feustel's birthday. Then we go for a walk in the palace gardens, a lot of people, our children not among them. Memories of Tribschen, its solitariness.
In the evening a great deal about the anti-Semitic agitation, then the Comtesse's story Les Amants de Kandahar, read with great and genuine delight. R. is still much taken with it on second reading; he finds the first love scene wonderful.