Tuesday, January 3:
R. had a good night, though his sleep was interrupted once. We have breakfast in bed, talking about Henry IV, Part I. At lunch R. raises the subject again and observes that Jouk. cannot get the same pleasure that we do from the comic scenes, since Russian education, which is cosmopolitan, encourages other tastes: “We Germans have no taste at all, but that means we are at any rate now and again more susceptible to works of genius.” When Jouk. protests against the assertion that he is closer in spirit to French literature than to German, R. replies, “When I say German, I am thinking only of Faust and possibly Götz, for with Iphigenie, with Tasso, etc., Goethe came nearer to what I call Renaissance culture.” Late in the evening he returns to this idea that a painter cannot possibly appreciate popular things. One could not imagine Raphael, Michelangelo, taking pleasure in such folk scenes, he says, but certainly Dürer, and also Leonardo, a man of breeding who could play around with things. In the course of this conversation he calls Shakespeare “a nonexistent mirage of reality.” But it torments him to see Jouk. disconcerted by his remark. He deplores the fact that, when he feels ill at ease, he has this urge to be abrasive, indeed to hurt others. And all through lunch he is on edge, also with Rub., whom he makes fun of for not having appreciated Lohengrin at first hearing. In connection with this we come to talk about Schopenhauer, whom I jestingly call a bad man, since he saw Tannhäuser and, “never mind how bad the performance was,” could see nothing in it, even in the text. A telegram from Leipzig reports the success there of Tristan; R. says he hears the message but still lacks belief, unless many cuts have been made. We stroll down to the sea, R. and I; he is not feeling completely well, and when, in the evening, he and Jouk. complain about life, I say my contentment makes me feel quite vulgar, whereupon R. praises me for having retained this great strength. After that his mood changes completely, he is gay, accepts the newspaper description of Linderhof with good grace, and returns happily to the reading of Henry IV, Part I. Unfortunately Count Tasca interrupts us, and that provokes R., after his departure, to an outburst against society. He then reads Henry IV, Part I to the end, regretting the farce played by Falstaff with the body of Percy, though he admits that here, too, Shakespeare was being truthful.