Friday, February 18:
A good night, but his fingers are still painful. At lunch, and also yesterday, he tells me how revolting he finds the German scholar in this book of Pott's; there is no need for him to have a single idea, it is all nothing but quotations; W. v. Humboldt seems to R. very shallow. Then R., with much enjoyment, quotes several things from today's Fliegende Blatter. After lunch a portrait of George Eliot gives us quite a shock on account of its ugliness.
We go for a walk; the weather is not particularly good. We watch a blackbird busily bathing in a little puddle beside the fence and then flying into our garden. In the evening we receive a visit from Herr Irwine, the donor who wishes to remain anonymous, a quiet and serious Scotsman. Rub. plays Bach organ fugues. R. says to me, "This is something rather like Cervantes's stories, but nobody would understand what I mean." I think I do - he means all the life, the apparent confusion, which in fact represent the variegated and ordered life of Nature, in which one can discern accents of supreme passion, of a deeply sorrowing sensibility. Then R. gets Rub. to play Mendelssohn's Hebrides Overture and delights in this beautiful work, though he feels it requires a program; for when he heard it for the first time, in Leipzig, under the title of Hebrides Overture - which meant nothing to him - he did not understand it at all. My feeling is that in this work the heroic saga has been turned into a fairy tale, Brünnhilde into the Sleeping Beauty.
When our friends have gone, we remain together for a while. The Scotsman made a good impression on him, but he remarks that Nature is now no longer producing beautiful mouths! And then he exclaims: "How nice to be alone! We must keep inviting people to our house, so that we can always enjoy this happiness again" - and he sends for a half-bottle of champagne, so that we can drink to that. And memories return, and tender reproaches are made to me, and when I take them to heart, we laugh together. [Yesterday, when I spoke of the doubts I previously had whether my way of doing things was right for my children, R. said, "Well, your eldest daughter is now a real enchantress."]