Friday, July 15:
R. and I meet in the palace gardens, where he is walking with the children and dogs. We then have breakfast in the summer house. The Tagblatt prints a description of the storming of the Bastille: “Not a heroic deed, but an event,” says R. When we then talk of the meeting with Jager, and I express my regret that he turned down engagements which were offered him, including some not very long ago, R. says: “He views himself as the Sibylline books, the more he shrinks, the more valuable he becomes.”
He asks me how many Sibyls there were, and, reflecting on Michelangelo’s work, he says the Christian idea of this prophecy seems to him very fine, particularly in comparison with the products of Brahmanism. Everyone is yearning for the Last Judgment. We talk about yesterday’s Sappho, the images, such as the full breast and the empty breast, and we wish we could find for the Blätter a critic who could denounce all this idol worship. There is probably no prospect of that, and yet R. observes, “I am now sometimes being quoted in political papers, and I like to think that something might yet come of our little periodical. I shall be glad when Parsifal is finished and I can write symphonies and articles.”
He works and reads. At lunch still more about Sappho and his father Geyer’s parody. In the evening we have supper in the summerhouse and stay out in the garden till 10 o’clock. R. is somewhat despondent and irritable; he finds the abstentions imposed on him by his cure hard to bear. However, he again thinks of the Sistine Chapel and tells me he wants to be present when I next describe it to the children. He says that Brahmanism is heartless, even in its doctrine of compassion, just understanding without feeling.
When we talk of Count G.’s companion and her painting, R. says: “There is something awful about a woman who owns a studio. A woman who writes is bad enough, but people do talk, people do write letters, and the rest follows from that, even if a woman with her own study, library, and reference books is awful, too. But painting, so specific a profession, I find that dreadful.”