Saturday, September 30:
R. realizes that he has again made an error of diet with his beer! At breakfast we discuss the appearance of the Russian painter and naturalist (Wolkoff), who certainly has no inkling of our world but made a pleasant impression because of the liveliness with which he looks at things. R. feels that Riemer and Falk must surely have been lively people, too, also the art expert Meyer, otherwise Goethe would not have put up with them; he says of our two North German friends, “One brings out everything with a crack, the other with a snap.” He does not go out this morning, but he is cheerful at lunch. Since Rub. has seen Schiller’s Die Räuber here, and yesterday witnessed the audience’s utter lack of sympathy for it, R. recalls having seen the same play in the Strand in London, followed by Des Deux Frères Corses, in which the duel made everyone hold their breath, and R. was also as fascinated by it as if it had been a real experience. R. was reading Faust in the morning, and he tells us about it over coffee; he even jumps up to fetch the book, and he reads to us Faust’s conversation with Meph. before the battle. The stage direction “Martial music behind the audience” R. singles out as proof of how right he was concerning the stage he had thought out for Faust. He says Faust is the finest book ever written in the German language. And at the conclusion of the scene, closing the book, he says, “Uniquely divine.” Through the doggerel verse it gains something undefinable. Wit, of quite a different kind from Shakespeare’s, and the times in which he lived, “nearer in spirit to certain aims,” offered completely new motives. “And how he did enjoy it!” Such features delight him. A basilica designed by Siegf. astonishes R.
We go out together, Stein, Siegf., R., and I, and R. leads us to S. Zaccaria; the church itself, the exterior, which he finds too effeminate, as well as the interior, which does not appeal to him, leave him indifferent, but Bellini’s painting fascinates him. After looking at it for a while, he remarks how good work immediately stands out amid all the daubing (by this he means the other pictures in the church). And a little later: “It stands there like a dream image!” He is sorry to see a saint holding the Book in it; he finds that too Jewish. “When the saint is present, what need for the Book?” But “It is good to live close to something like this,” he says. We sit down between the pillars of the portal on Saint Mark’s Square, R.’s favorite place. We return home in a glorious sunset. In the evening he tells us, from the book he is now reading, that Buddha did not accept the sick and the crippled: “It sounds very harsh at first, and yet there is deep meaning, great wisdom in it; since the stifling of desire is all that matters, there can be no acceptance for people whose illness makes desire impossible.” He advises Stein to write a novel about the new life in emigration, and he praises Heinse for writing at the end of his Ardinghello, when the blessed isles are founded, that the colonists decided not to allow property to intervene between them. He reads to us further passages in Faust describing the battle; the Emperor’s hollow pathos, the images Faust employs to help him over all the horrors, the essence of battle, the brutal might of blood lust, and the craze for booty, all this, with much more besides, arouses our delighted admiration anew. The verse in which the Emperor desires to meet the daemonic powers to whom he is indebted, in order to decorate them, arouses in R. a laugh of appreciative understanding.