Friday, June 2:
R. had a restless night, but he is not aware of it in the morning. Around lunchtime he receives a letter from Herr Vogl, who declares himself unwilling to sing without his wife. R. sends the letter via Levi to Herr v. Bülow. Meanwhile I have a consultation with the doctor about our friend - it is not at all encouraging! I resolve to do all I can to keep our friend here with us.
Still having lunch in the hall; today is Saint Blandine’s Day, R. gives Bohi a lovely fan - the first Catholic feast day we have ever celebrated!
Over coffee there is talk about the part that life plays in fiction; the Count says he has invented nothing, and the motives which lead to a book’s being written are more interesting than the book itself. R. says, half in German, half in French: “That reminds me of the King of Prussia, who once, in connection with Tristan und Isolde, said Wagner must have been very much in love when he wrote it. Yet anyone familiar with my life well knows how insipid and trivial it was, and it is quite impossible to write a work like that in a state of infatuation. Yet probably it was due to my longing to escape from my wretched existence into a sea of love. It is this kind of unfulfilled longing which inspires a work, not experience!”
We drive up to the theater; the Temple of the Grail, Flower Garden, wilderness, all highly delight us. [Enclosed in the Diaries, a telegram from the “Bruckner brothers in Coburg”: “Greatly pleased to have worked to your satisfaction, and many thanks for your telegram.”]
R., too, is still feeling much joy over our return home, and he calls out to me from the garden how happy he is: “You and I, just think what we are, and so we want others to share in our happiness!” I go to him; the Count then joins us, and we talk about our friend Gross, his absolute loyalty. Also about the attitude of the superior to the inferior races, the Negroes, for instance. R. says the greatest triumph for the intellectually superior person is to win the love and devotion of those beneath him, whereupon the Count says such love can be found among Negroes, but not mulattoes.
At lunch R. said that W. v. Humboldt was driving him to despair with all his drivel about his ideas, excellent as these may be in themselves. He also expresses his antipathy toward the English language; the fact that in it a Shakesp. has emerged does not disturb him - that is an anomaly; but imaginative writing is possible only in a language in which one feels every word to be alive. The German language is still half alive. He cites the verb “sprechen” [“to speak”] as a living word, whereas “reden” [“to talk”] is a constructed, dead word. I think I understand correctly what he then added: that English was a created language (under H. VII), since before that time French was spoken, and that Shakespeare was able to work creatively with a language in the process of creation, rather like Dante; however, by the time the mixtum compositum was finally established, poetry was already dead.
In the evening R. plays to us the lovely Andante from Mozart’s D Minor Symphony, then something from the E-flat Major, later from Euryanthe and “Der Freischütz’s wilde Jagd.” He speaks pityingly of the way Weber was forced to throw all his splendid inspirations into the operatic form. I had the feeling that the evening had been spent very harmoniously, but afterward I hear R. complaining of being “obliged to entertain all these donkeys.” I beg him to do only what gives him pleasure.