Saturday, November 18:
R. slept well. I dreamed about our friend Gobineau, that he had our children (Fidi still very small) shown to Countess La Tour in her home, then asked me please to see to it that if his right leg became stiff he was not dragged any farther, whereupon I told him there was nobody we cared for as much as him. At breakfast R. exclaims, “Muse des Parnass! - how foolish, how very un-German!” I observe that nobody had ever made such a criticism, and he says, “Oh, yes - Weissheimer, who was upset by the agenda.” We talk of W., and through him come to the many relationships in which one squandered one’s emotions by ignoring one’s instincts and natural feelings, which advised one to hold aloof, and by laboriously manufacturing a thousand reasons to the contrary in order to set everything right. I do not remember how this led us to Stein’s dialogues, but when I express regret that he has not included Ludwig Sand, R. says I should write to him about it and also mention Bernh[ard] v. W[eimar] with Richelieu, and Lessing with Fr. the Gr. at Tauentzien’s (Breslau).
A violent clap of thunder startles us, followed by hail! R. finishes his letter to the King and tells me that in it he has spoken about the necessity of staging nothing but Parsifal during the next two years, in order to keep down expenses. [Two sentences based on untranslatable word play omitted.] When we quote A[dolf] Wagner’s little poem Irren und Leiden [“Straying and Suffering”], R. jokes, “My mother thought him a bad fellow.” Over coffee he speaks of past times: “dreamily sad”; Munich, where I visited him every day at noon! Nobody had any sympathy with me, he says. He returns to his idea that we should have been united in 1858: “But you were too young, and I too upset.” “The native hue of resolution was sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought.” The quotation brings us to Shakespeare, and he says one can actually see the green and red, fruits of resolution. I say how much the scene between Malcolm and Macduff pleased me this time, though my memories of it had not been favorable; R. does not much care for the little comedy enacted in it, but he agrees with me that in this scene, taken from the legend, Shakespeare shows what a dramatic artist he is. He reads to me a sentence from Gobineau’s history of the Persians, “Il vaut mieux se méprendre que ne pas voir” [“It is better to misunderstand than not to see”]. R. is worried about Boni, because she has not written for a long time. In the afternoon we go to Saint Mark’s Square; to the Merceria, which he calls Peking. He delights in the tower, the view of Saint Mark’s, the horses, and that brings us to the capture of Constantinople. Then we go into Lavena’s, with whose proprietor R. enjoys conversing. An eclipse of the sun is being talked about. In the evening I read aloud my letters from Rub. and Humperdinck; R. remarks on how extraordinarily cultured the former is; the latter, which pleases him greatly, makes him reflective. What Bayreuth could be if we were there! How gladly he would stay there if the town itself, and not only the weather, had somewhat more to offer! Then he concludes, “I can already see myself strolling under the arcades” - “We could be happy there even without the arcades.” At this he says I have a look in my eyes like Ed. Devrient; since I make no reply, he thinks he has offended me, and at whist and in our room is unremitting with his tenderness! He goes through Siegfried and says he is glad some people have noticed that there is music in the first act.