Cosima's Diaries

Diary Entry of December 19, 1881

Overview

A bad night, another spasm, and Wolfegen's article on Kleist set Richard in a mixed mood of annoyance and talkative brilliance. He mocked Faust's shallow satisfactions, reflected on Homer and the Dorians, endured a servant's mistake, and still found room for cheerful stories for the children and a merry whist game. Even the memory of Vienna's extinguished gaslights became for him a symbolic image, as if modern disaster always reached backward into his own past.

Content

Monday, December 19:

A bad, restless night. He finishes reading Wolz.’s article, returns to bed, but in the morning has a chest spasm. Yet in spite of this, after we are together a few moments, he is gaily talkative. He takes up Faust and finds the things in which Faust finds satisfaction pitiful - ditch digging, he says, the loading and unloading of goods, and one cannot imagine what the angels and Gretchen are doing in this roadside digging affair, without any mention of brotherly love or of the idea of renunciation. “They are all magnificently contrived things poetically - from a poetic point of view the ‘Walpurgis Night’ is unique - but the concept is pitiful, and it is only in the conversations with Mephisto that Faust comes alive somewhat.”

Then he tells me he thought of Homer, who was an Ionian and thus represents the feminine principle; now Gobineau will only allow the Dorians, who had to borrow from Athens a singer to inspire them - that is a bad thing. [Added in margin: “Writing is a wretched business,” he says, “and Schiller chose the right course when he decided to write plays, well-constructed plays.”] And with a joke about how quickly he can become merry again, he goes off to his reading (Kant) and his work.

Unfortunately a misunderstanding by a servant vexes him. However, he recovers his spirits at lunch and tells the children about the custom in England - only recently abolished - of leading a wife to market on a rope in order to sell her. Certainly not a Germanic custom; it probably came from the original inhabitants. R. observes that the number of Anglo-Saxons had in any case been small. We drive to the Piazza Croce dei Vespri to visit the banker; R. enjoys the handsome palaces.

In the evening he works, we have a merry game of whist, and after that he once more tells us about Kant’s theories of races and seeds. The extinguishing of the gas during the frightful event in Vienna brings him to the lamp at the approach to the bridge, which went out during the floods (1868).