Sunday, October 15:
R. had a good night, but the wet weather is worse than ever before. We say goodbye to our poor friend Stein, who takes his departure so sadly. But R. feels oppressed all day long, and he is thinking of moving permanently to warmer climes, “so as to live to see Siegfried’s maturity!”
At breakfast we talked again about the droll Coriolanus anecdote, and when I say I can understand S.’s sympathy for Caius Marcius [Coriolanus], R. replies that in his youth he was put off by his conceit. Yesterday, when we were discussing Sicily with Dr. Thode, he was led to the subject of the Romans and their terrible treatment of this country, in the interior of which no tree was permitted to grow.
This evening we play whist; R., continually restless and oppressed by the weather, cannot work, though he would much like to start writing his “To All of You” (the artists), since his recollections of the performances always give him pleasure, unlike anything else in the outside world. And indeed he has come to loathe the world of fine arts and the world which is content with the fine arts. W. Scott’s novel The Pirate bores him with its longwindedness, but he quoted to me a passage from it which made an impression on him - in which a crank who drinks only water decides, with the help of brandy, to go to the rescue of his son. I jokingly tell him that, if he wants to know why this novel bores him, he should read the definition of a novel in Opera and Drama.