Tuesday, November 7:
R. had a very wild night, and at the end of it he again had a nasty dream about me: “Howling, I told you that I knew you wanted to get rid of me, you wanted to leave.” But he soon recovers, tells me of his sufferings, calls his character “ill-mannered,” and feels that imagination plays an undue part in all his sufferings. He reads on the calendar that today is the anniversary of the Battle of Rossbach; Frederick the Great’s poem following it reminds R. of Odysseus’s outburst against Polyphemus. Then we talk of the simple way in which the French of that time allowed themselves to be conquered in comparison to now, and in the course of this come to speak of Gobineau. R. reads Stein’s article in the B. Bi. with satisfaction. Toward 1 o’clock we go to the baths, and R.’s mood throughout is very cheerful; he delights in Venice, points out to me a church with a fine portal and window beside the bathhouse, glances gaily into the Calle [S. Moisè] and declares Venice to be the true Southern town, Palermo reminding him much more of our German towns; it is true that Naples has an African character, but Venice is Italian-Oriental.
In the afternoon he thinks of Bayreuth and says it would probably be a good thing if he were to stage all his works there, and they should also be staged there after his death, for they still survive, and the way in which they are done elsewhere is appalling. Over coffee we talked about the Renaissance, whether the excavation of classical art had been an unmixed blessing, or had it not perhaps restricted the imagination, put an end to naivete? The arguments for and against are mentioned, R. says, “It shows that this art was not meant to be the last word.” The Ibach grand piano arrives and pleases R. with its gentle tone; he writes to Herr I. that from now on he will write only soft music. One can see how bad the modern world is, says R., from the fact that promising people like Nietzsche so swiftly go to the bad in it.
In the evening he improvises, and Der Jüngling von Elvershöh slips in; we like to think of this ballade, which, with its pleasing ending, seems so truly German. As the evening ends, however, our conversation turns to Hans, R. taking the lead in very animated fashion! Each of us has the sickness he deserves, he says; “I, too, I have the sickness of my lack of breeding.”