Thursday, June 16:
Corpus Christi, people busy shooting, tinkling bells, etc.; but splendid weather. “Good morning, my little pride,” says R. to me. The children with us, the two elder ones go to the procession. Letter from Dr. Herrig, very remarkable. We have received news from the Maderaner valley; since the reply was delayed I had already made up my mind that the guesthouse did not wish to accept us on account of our situation, and had resigned myself to it. Now things are different, and we shall probably be there within a fortnight. Very bad news of the old Prince, who is sinking. Family lunch. The newspapers report that the dogma of infallibility is to be promulgated, coupled with an anathema, and that the behavior of the bishops on the opposite side has throughout been full of character.
After lunch R. starts on the subject of Heine’s remark about Schiller’s poetry—“they are drunken ideas.” “If one were chemically to analyze this witticism, which seems like a stroke of genius, one would discover at its base the Jewish outsider, who speaks about the conditions of our life as an Iroquois would speak of our railroads. Behind this ‘drunken idea’ lie experiences in student life, when someone is abused as a scholar, and out of this insult comes a drunken duel; here, too, the Jew is an outsider, he notices what is raw and flat, but he has no feeling for the ideals of our nature. The fact that in Schiller the very exact perception of our ideality sometimes shows itself too strongly—this is what he calls ‘drunken ideas,’ to which one can really only reply, ‘You don’t understand.’”
Little pleasure in the analysis of Hamlet in W. Meister—our interpretation, or, rather, our feeling about it, is deep in a different way.
Recently R. said to me, “In the style of declaiming the ‘Ode to Joy,’ which is only correct and worthy of the poem if it is maestoso, one can recognize the whole problem of words in relation to music.” Regarding the analysis of Hamlet he said, “Goethe showed great genius in the observation of life, but his judgment concerning poets was unsound.”
R. suddenly writes to the King, asking him to stage Die Walküre for himself alone. Continued reading of W. Meister restores his high spirits, then, as he seals his letter, he says, “One stands between the good spirit and the demon; you belong to the good spirits, the King to the demons.” Gradually we become quite gay, a violent thunderstorm develops, R. is glad, for he cannot go out, “only love and create, and create because I love, you are the central sun around which everything revolves.” “Are you cheerful again?” I asked. “In everything you set in motion I am cheerful and happy, but you cannot work wonders, the outside world remains the same, and yet—you have worked wonders.” He corrects the proof sheets of the biography: “Will Fidi have to go through all this, too—could he not be spared it?”