Friday, June 16:
R. slept well, but with a lot of dreams: twice about the German Emperor, who paid him a very friendly visit, and R. kissed his hand; the Empress was also very gracious, but when they left, they stepped not onto the staircase, but onto a sort of chicken ladder; while he was wondering at their choosing that way, R. woke up! For me much searching among papers, still in connection with Herr Batz. In contrast, R. praises Herr Neumann, who, before giving up his directorship in Leipzig, is staging all of R.’s works there. R. recently wrote to him, “I admire you.”
[A sentence based on untranslatable wordplay omitted.]
Talking about some married couple and caresses, R. says, “Caresses should always be accompanied by tears.” But today’s great joy was you, my Siegfried! You were very good in the way you answered me today, and your father, to whom I sent you, was also pleased with you! Yesterday evening your father said one felt like despairing when one thought of the offspring of great men, Goethe, Schiller, Weber (him in particular, says R., having bad memories of Max V. Weber); he said he realizes more and more how important it is to keep character and the need to strengthen it well in mind. Well, today we are hopeful, my son, and if one day you should discover these lines-perhaps when you are already straying onto wrong paths-may your mother’s blessing, your mother’s joy point the way!
Mocking at the weather, R. says how very necessary it is to keep 1,200,000 men on their toes in order to stop the French from taking over this country, but if he had his way, he would sell it to the French and go off to Taormina with the money!
[From “but if he had” to the end iterated in ink by an unknown hand.]
However, we snatch a favorable moment and go for a walk in the palace gardens, R. and I. The blackbirds delight us, and the swans are a poem in themselves. In the evening R. reads Stein’s “Solon” to us, and we are astonished at the profundity of its thought and its intelligent construction; also by the characterization-R. finds Croesus, for example, a mixture of decency and excitability. Yesterday R. was emphatically in agreement with Jean Paul’s statement that the artistic temperament is rooted in intelligence; he says it is true that intelligence does not provide inspiration-all our present-day gentlemen compose intelligently-but it is necessary in recapturing the inspiration.
Over coffee he particularly singled out Hans’s Nirwana for mention, and regretted that it would be impossible for him to say that he finds it much more significant than any other modern composition: “Hans would take that as mockery.”