Wednesday, January 26:
“Dear wife, we shan't be returning to Bayreuth — Cicero has invited me to stay here.” Thus I hear R. speaking. But in the morning he has entirely forgotten it.
This leads us to talk of the Romans, and though R. does not care for the cold and wise ones, he says, “With the ancients there is always the possibility of linking onto something, but the further one progresses in time, the more this diminishes, and that is why I regard decadence as a wholly incontrovertible fact.”
Fidi has told us how badly an apprentice is treated in the workshop, and that gives rise to reflections on human brutality, the pleasure a person finds in torturing someone weaker than himself. If it is not a human being, it is an animal. Around lunchtime R. calls me and shows me the landscape gardener's letter and his reply to it (see corner bureau).
In the evening he relates in a humorous way his experiences with the Order of Maximilian and the final confusion between owl and lyre. Then we read Cervantes's “Vidriera” with great delight. In this we once more see him whole, the writer with his melancholy smile, his knowledge of the world, his sense of absurdity and the part it plays in all significant things; the cruelty of human beings, the goodness of convents, etc. R. is frequently struck by the popular use of the word “will” in its Schopenhauerian sense. And all so personal, always pulsing with life, speaking to us with a smile.
Before the reading R. once more touched on the first movement of the Eroica, expressing his unbounded admiration for it. Beethoven must have felt downright alarmed, he says, when he wrote that. And everything in music so direct, whereas in literature everything must always be explained.
I tell R. about the French history I have been reading with the children, the episode of Duplessis-Mornay and H[enri] IV, and R. comments, “Acceptance of monarchy is an expression of pessimism.”