Saturday, November 11:
[Added in margin: “I amuse R. with the information that Tintoretto had the Golden Calf borne by the 4 greatest painters, which fits in very well with R.’s conception of the Renaissance.”]
R. had a tolerable night and resolves to spend the day very quietly. At breakfast we talk about Stein’s dialogues, and R. criticizes them for a certain affectation and lack of clarity, “this may have told them that,” for example. He also finds those set in modern times, particularly Bruno and Shakespeare, less good. But Gobineau’s history of the Persians, that interests him greatly. We talk a lot about our friend, and he continues writing out my article in the morning and afternoon, also praising me for it! At 1 o’clock he goes for a little walk by himself and is very cheerful at lunch. We spend the afternoon at home; I finish Elective Affinities in tears, and R. says to me: “You must have read the meeting in the inn. That is wonderful, and it was for that he wrote the book; the life together came afterward, when he also made some boring additions.”
In the evening, seeing the volume on the table beside me, he glances into it, finds it also contains Wilhelm Meister’s Lehrjahre, and reads to me all the passages concerning Mignon, with unstinted admiration. He does not much care for the old harpist, maintains that G. made him Mignon’s father as an afterthought. He says it is curious to represent him as a German poet-singer, since Mignon is given only broken language to speak. During this discussion I show him the recollection of the tableau vivant of Belisar which comes to the architect as he is standing beside Ottilie’s coffin; this had puzzled me, too. He says it was attributable to the desire to make everything, even the tragic elements, appear beautiful, as it were, playing around with the material in a manner he himself cannot stand; in fact everything about the architect, along with the vault and the angels, he cannot stand. “And Schiller would surely never have let him get away with Belisar.” Before supper he called me from my reading with the children to listen to Fidi, who, accompanying himself on the piano, was whistling all kinds of themes and variations. After supper he has to repeat the performance to us. R. says this is just the way he himself treated music in his youth. Before the W. Meister reading R. gets me to read from the newspaper the report about the Mahdi, and the idea of the Prophet’s emerging from a black race seems to him just as unthinkable as a member of the Hohenzollern family’s doing so. According to this report things in Egypt are by no means settled yet.