Monday, April 3:
R. had a good night. He gets up early, and we feel pleased to be so favored by the weather. He writes to Feustel on account of the Batz affair (yesterday Herr Neumann wrote that the theaters were allowing him to give his guest performances on condition that they retain 10% of the performance rights) - now the question is whether Batz also has rights in Tristan und Isolde.
The beauty here could drive one out of one's mind; we visit Taormina and are rewarded with a unique view! Before leaving, R. took Fidi for a walk in the garden opposite and told him how lucky he was compared with other children, and this obliged him to be particularly good! In Taormina R. is particularly delighted by the columns. On the homeward journey he says how dreamlike is the sight of such things, one is not in fact moved by them at all. I understand this feeling only too well: when one's gaze is directed toward the depths, the surface no longer has much effect. Yet even in this lack of effect there is a peculiar feeling of well-being. We met S.'s Latin teacher, Herr Toussaint, in the Hôtel Timeo, concerning which R. says we should have fled there in 1858 and spared ourselves many, many torments. The children could have lived on prickly pears!
But the meeting with Herr T. and also a letter from Stein bring up the education problem again. R. is against high school and says that what might have been all right for the Grand Duke's heir is not suitable for Siegfried. He believes that at school he would lose his innocence; he feels that everything will turn out all right for him; having in our home become sensible while still remaining childlike, he requires no further education. We play whist and go to bed early. Saying good night to me, R. remarks, “How little pleasure the Will takes in itself we can see when we remember how silly loving couples always look in real life, how little sympathy is aroused by the exchange of yearning glances, whereas on the stage we find these things so interesting.”
On arrival in Taormina R. catches sight of a little island; he says that in earlier days he always longed for something like that, in order to cut himself off from the world. “If only Wesendonck were to give me such an island,” he had thought to himself, “and Minna had no great desire to go there with me!” And he adds, “It was the thought that there was much I could still do.” As the children are singing the “Shepherd's Song” from Tannhäuser, he tells me that he heard it sung by a shepherd in Schreckenstein, near Teplitz - though of course in a completely different form. The feeling of strangeness, even when contemplating something as sublimely expressive of a national culture as this theater, the sight of the many citadels piled one above the other, arousing our laughter at such a display of caution - all this causes R. to repeat his remark that all these civilizations were robber civilizations. We review other possibilities.
“Oh,” he says, “I am becoming more and more Gobinistic,” and this is why he is annoyed by Malwida's criticism of the book on race. He calls her views optimistic and justifies the grim veracity of his own by virtue of the serenity they induce in him.