Tuesday, November 29:
A very restless night for R., a sort of crisis which he himself regards as not unsalutary, but which wears him out - and on top of that a battle with mosquitoes. At the first light of dawn he sees a young girl in the street, a baby on one arm and a basket on the other, picking over the garbage and having at the same time to reprimand a naughty little brother.
R. says he wishes he had had some money to give to this very lovely girl, and at the same time that he could have punished the little boy. He reads B. Bauer’s article again and is vexed by the passage on Christianity, which, coming from this author, did not surprise me, whereas I was pleased that he had understood Luther. R. is also annoyed that he criticizes Kant’s judgment, as if considering himself superior to him - that shows he had not understood or paid any attention either to Kant or to R.’s preceding quotation from Schiller.
When we tell R. of our morning walk through the streets, his curiosity is aroused, and we look at all sorts of things again. La Gancia, San Francesco d’Assisi, which pleases him. We also show him how, by passing through a narrow door and a wretched kitchen, one can reach a charming courtyard and a chapel.
R. is amused by Siegfried’s confident opinions, and he observes that what the theater world was to him, with its bearded ghosts and other things to which one made music, Italy would be to Siegfried, who saw it for the first time at the age of seven. In the evening R. talks about Helm’s analyses of the Beethoven quartets; he is pleased with them and only hopes that something similar will be done for his works. I observe that popularity must always precede analysis.
R. says no, things like the last quartets could never be popular; if one does not study them, one cannot even get the tempi right; B.’s notations are frequently misleading, and the quartet in Paris, however well and melodically it often played, made great mistakes. He does not believe me when I tell him I have the feeling that these things live for the Germans, despite bad performances.
He is much amused to see my father being cited as a Jew-baiter: a very drastic extract from Des Bohémiens is now being prominently featured in the newspapers. During our walk R. says he cannot understand all this eternal philosophizing, he finds it absurd: “Good heavens,” he exclaims, “I have also concerned myself with these things, but besides that I also live, I read my novel” (he is indeed reading Princess Narischkin’s Wig and telling us about it) “whereas this idea that one must get close to a subject by brooding over it is utterly stupid.”