Tuesday, February 28:
R. had a good night and is looking very well. But his mood is soon clouded by the vexations which never fail to arrive - the fact, for instance, that the glazier from the town comes in the morning and keeps him from finishing his letter to the King: “It’s always like that,” he declares. Various things in the Carlyle biography occupy his mind, and he tells me what he says about the nobility and about Friedrich Schlegel’s conversion.
We visit, with an eye toward perhaps renting it later, a deserted Palazzo S. Elia, where we are confronted with a most curious set of people! All races seem to be represented in these deserted accommodations - bawling Negroid creatures, as well as genteel, quiet, handsome ones, everywhere children, life, and idleness, an extensive view, terraces and neglect - so remote from all civilization that it makes us laugh. From there we go to Camastra, where every day there is something new in bloom.
We recently talked about the way in which nature poetry seems to be a peculiarly German phenomenon - the Italians, for instance, usually bring it in only in a realistic sense, and then mainly in the form of animals; trees budding, blossoming, and fading, deep shadows, dew - all this seems to affect them hardly at all. R. tells me with some annoyance that the first sight of the Parsifal music the general public has had is in the correspondence columns of a newspaper (concluding bars of the first act). The impatience with which the piano score is being awaited reminds him of his own impatience for the piano score after Weber’s death. General Skobeleff’s statements amuse R., who has no sympathy with the Austrian monarchy, and Turgenev’s story gives us a further lively insight into the Russian character.
But unfortunately the day ends in a regrettable outburst, since the supplement to the B. Flatter - an advertisement for books on vegetarianism, the description of the Flatter itself (“monthly periodical for the propagation of a German culture”) - upsets him extremely. He reflects on how he might put an end to this relationship but cannot make up his mind, since, as he says, it is connected to some extent with the problem of Wolz’s living. I hope I have managed to ensure that he will not write harshly to W. but will effect the dissolution in a friendly spirit, and with his consent.
[Added in margin: “At supper R. expresses his delight in Kietz’s bust of me and says it is the best portrait ever done of me, an excellent likeness, and he is glad it exists.”]