Monday, November 14:
R. cried out in the night and told me in the morning that I had once again left him with some accursed painter, not a well-known one, after a picture had been taken from his room and a hole made in the wallpaper, about which he had had nothing to say. All the time he had had a feeling of great lack of breeding on his part, and he had indeed succeeded in making me return to have it out with him! He says he knows what was intended: that he should wake up - and, to ensure this, the dream produced the worst horror of which it was capable.
Added two pages later: “He then reproaches himself for his lack of breeding and talks of his ‘vulgar habit of guzzling’ - he says he cannot help eating huge amounts of bread and butter with his coffee; nothing else tastes half as good, though it is always bad for him.”
However, he is very cheerful at breakfast, and he says to me, “You will be amazed what I shall make in my next article of the fact that the sun is feminine.” Then he comes to the subject of the firmament, how curious our understanding of its nature. “Though indeed,” he adds, “even when the law is discovered, it still has to be applied,” and suddenly, “What a stiff beggar a human being is, when he can think of nothing better than straight lines to get at the secrets of Nature, whereas Nature itself has none, until the artist comes along and takes his wavy lines from Nature.”
Late last night he thought of Marie Hohenlohe and said that just how bad a creature like her is inside is shown by her spiteful behavior toward M. Donhoff in connection with the certificates of patronage - that condemns her.
At lunch R. tells the children about his dream; Boni asks, “What happens to us?” “Exactly,” says R. “I thought to myself, ‘The children will stay with me, and then she will surely come back.’ ” The children laugh. Then he talks to them about Italian history, the significance of Venice. Finally about Henry VI, and he points out that Warwick simply represents the Norman character of the conquerors and the urge to set up a different economy.
Before lunch R. and I went out [added in margin: “along the Via Maqueda, which R. calls V. Macbetha, as he calls our Stabile Via Staberl”] to buy him a hat, and after lunch we go for a walk in the English Gardens; in the evening the second act of Faust II, deeply moved by it. Before that R. spoke of the 2 pages he has written and mentions how much he dislikes harsh effects, how he always tries to anticipate them, to make them understandable, prevent their sounding abrupt; and he points to the Gurnemanz passage, “kalt und starr,” pleased that today he has given it an accompaniment of muted horns. He says this is what pleased him when he heard the Nibelungen - that even the very boldest of the sounds to which he had had to resort did not come in unanticipated. With subjects such as his, he says, it is necessary to make use of eccentric colors, “notte e giorno faticar” would not be enough, but the art lies in not allowing them to sound like eccentricities. He points out how effective in Henry VI mild and resigned words are in their wild environment - the two lines about the miracle I had found quite particularly striking.
At lunch we heard a shot, and I asked whether birds were being hunted. “Yes,” said the waiter from Ancona, and he observed that the people here are so backward that only gradually can they be brought to behave with more propriety; otherwise there would be immediate revolutions. We reflect on this statement and wonder what examples have been set these wretched people by the nobility and the church.
Before supper, just after R. has completed the second page of his score, our reading of Sismondi, which I am now studying with the girls, leads our conversation to heretics and their views, so deep and so similar to ours. “I believe,” says R., “that it is conscious suffering which has brought us so close to the heart of things.” A letter from Count Gobineau gives him the idea of summoning him here with a telegram: “Nous comprenons que vous ne comprenez rien” [“We understand that you understand nothing”]. I prefer to write, urgently inviting our friend to join us here.