Friday, October 14:
R. had a good night; he receives a letter from the King, in which only one passage, in favor of tolerance toward the Jews, somewhat displeases him, though it seems to me that princes can hardly feel otherwise. He continues reading Der Urmensch and says jokingly that there is nothing in it but quotations from professors. But the pictures of the various human types interest him; he shows them to us and says of the Papuans that they could very well be in the Jockey Club, also that the Jews could be persuaded to dress their hair like that if one were to allow them “a few more locks and another little flag in it.” He is also interested in the hypothesis concerning the origins of human language. He then comes back to his favorite idea, that our little community might lead to the formation of a core to promote emigration. “To set an example” - and he comes back to Egmont, that true German greatness which Goethe characterizes by contrasting [Egmont’s] courageous refusal to put life first with Alba and his cautious clinging to this and that. In this connection I mention Schiller, whose correspondence with Humboldt is at the moment keeping me completely absorbed. (When we recently spoke of Alexander Humboldt and the apparently inexplicable world reputation of his Kosmos, R. said, “He traveled with a Herr von Hum-bug.”)
R. and I drive to the Fantaisie; the air feels like foehn, and at the same time the colors are completely autumnal. In the evening we are visited by Herr Marsillach from Barcelona, with whom we discuss a possible stay in Seville! R. is very friendly toward the foreigner, but in the middle of it he says to us, “Oh dear, what a bore this is!” The Spaniard takes his leave of R. with the words, “Les gens du Nord sont faits pour créer, ceux du Midi pour admirer” [“The Northern peoples are born to create, those of the South to admire”]. The Bayreuther Tagblatt reports that we are staying here; R. says I had that inserted in order to exert moral pressure on him - as with Starkadr (he tells me) I was trying to trump his Egill. We talk a lot about the Normans, their wild pride, yet feel that the Goths and the Vandals were more civilized people, and one can understand Charlemagne’s melancholy when he caught sight of the ships. But their pride, their intractability - that is what is interesting about these people, R. says, for all their heartlessness. He comes back to Gobineau’s book and says that so lofty an idea, so expert a hypothesis - that is what interests him, whereas all this cautious dependence on quotations he finds repellent. Regarding the German expression “It is all Spanish to me,” R. has the idea that it must have come from the Netherlanders, who did not understand their rulers.
Saturday, October 15:
Dreadful stormy night, and R. again had his chest spasms in the morning. But he works, and figures that he now has 50 pages of the score still to do. At lunch I ask him about Humboldt and Schiller; he observes that it was not until Schopenhauer that a certain precision in philosophical matters was achieved, before his time there had always been a tendency to drivel. When, in agreeing with him, I say that both he and Schopenhauer turned this whole world upside down, yet this did not seem to me to be what the preface is implying, R. does not allow me to continue, and this reveals a characteristic feature of him - namely, that when he has said something, he likes to regard the matter as settled, and he does not like people to take up an idea of his in order to raise another aspect of the subject. When we discuss this, he tells me it looked as if I were trying to say that this was not the standpoint from which to regard the book, and my remark did not at the moment interest him. We also talk about history, in which he can no longer take much interest, since he has come to the conclusion that there is no hope of any improvement; I ask him whether it is not always interesting as a natural phenomenon.
At lunch he again tells the nice story of Alfonso of Aragon, who was advised to choose 12 men who were just, brave, gentle, etc. “Give me one such, and I shall give him my kingdom,” the truthful man replied. We drive out in a gale: to friend Gross, then home via the Eremitage, and once again to our friend, since 20,000 marks have arrived from Herr Neumann. When the postman delivers them, R. says to him, “I expect you wouldn’t mind having these.” “Oh, if I only had a quarter of them!” the good man exclaims merrily! In the evening R. reads “Ignaz Denner,” to the enjoyment of us all. Before that there was much talk about the first human beings, their descent from one couple; R. had already observed yesterday that present-day theologians base themselves on Darwin: “He can still be made to look completely silly.”