Monday, January 2:
After a good night R. wakes up feeling well, and in our first conversation he talks of Schiller’s ballad “The Glove”; he laughingly calls it a curious subject for poetry, says he much prefers the episode of Don Quixote and the lion, and gaily recalls it. He works; at half past twelve we go for a walk in the garden and take delight in the plants, with their blossoms and fruits. He says he has written only a quarter of a page, and altogether he has now decided to work only when everything else bores him. At lunch he is very cheerful and full of fun, and quotes at random lines from various Schiller ballads; afterward talks of Maria Stuart, the scene between the two queens, and remarks how fine it is that the wide-ranging and apparently entirely political play builds up to this one scene which expresses its whole meaning. He says that this play, which he now finds so good, made little impression on him in his youth; he was not able to follow its emotional subtleties, and it seemed that the mourning at the beginning belonged more to the end of the play. His talk alternates between jest and earnest; he suddenly stops; we ask him what is the matter: “Well, when all I see after my jokes is puzzled faces ...” (Apparently some joke he made had not been understood.) I: “But who is making puzzled faces?” Whereupon from the far end of the table, quite calmly, Fidi: “I am,” which amuses us indescribably. Among other things, R. also mentions the Englishman who, out of boredom at having to put on his clothes every day, hanged himself, and he goes off into the most comical descriptions of the vexation every routine task—cleaning his teeth, for instance—causes him. And when Jouk. agrees with him, and I remark how disgraceful it is when a person can find nothing in life to absorb him and raise him above such petty annoyances, R. says, “Yes, there is a world of ethics and a world of morals, but when one belongs to neither, yet all the same keeps going, one is trivial compared to that Englishman.” A well-phrased letter to me from Richter pleases us greatly. We go for a drive, R. recalls Fidi’s reply, expresses delight in the boy and his character, so harmonious in his development, quiet, but in no way afraid of adversity, not at all soft. From the English Gardens we go on to the sea, which, bathed in a wonderful light, always has such a liberating effect on me! In the evening R. reads the first two acts of Henry IV, Part I. “It is terrible,” he exclaims in the middle of it, “for after this nothing else seems worth bothering about; even ironic dialogues, as in Faust—what are they in comparison with these authentic characters, of whom, but for Shakespeare, we should know nothing, yet who now come before our eyes like living beings?” Before this he enlarged upon what he means by the Renaissance, and how the influence of Latinity spelled the death of everything. He talks of his great admiration for the popular element in Cervantes, and after the scene with the two carriers, he says, “Anyone who does not know people in this way is no poet.” The life of the common people here always gives him pleasure; today he addresses a beggar as “Paganini!” and recently, when we were returning from the Martorana in dull weather and in somewhat downcast spirits, he was cheered by the sight of a bagpiper, standing alone in the rain, playing in front of the lighted altar of the Madonna; and not long ago, when we were returning from the Villa Belmonte, two children riding on a donkey which bore the exuberant youngsters off at a gallop. At supper he suddenly jumps up, leaves the room, comes back after a while, and says, “How trivial are your lives compared with mine!” He wants to be asked but at the same time not to tell, and he interpellates the girls. I say I know he went to his score. “Yes, but what for?”—and he will not say. But at last, “I have found the bass clarinet!”, and is teasingly brusque with us.