Thursday, July 7:
I am still unwell and have not been able to eat a thing for the last four days; but my pains are gradually growing less. Family lunch; the Illustrirte Zeitung with its fashion pictures provokes from R. the remark that the Parisian world does at any rate show itself in its costumes as it really is: the gross indolence of the men, the provocative impudence of the women. It is a true portrait of a world with which we certainly have nothing to do. But the Germans who copy these fashions! The Parisian woman knows to a hair what she is, how she looks, and dresses herself accordingly; the German woman, however, looks at her neighbor, envies her, and tries to copy her, never mind how ill it suits her. Beauty has surely vanished forever from this world of ours; we may still have our thoughts and the religious world of music, but the type of beauty which manifests itself in costumes and in buildings, that can come only from a generously inclined aristocracy which feels at one with the people, and that has gone. The right moment to give the whole nation its impetus would have been after the wars of liberation, but that was when they all feared the word German like the red republic.
Letter from an enthusiastic sculptor (Natter) who has only just read the Ring des Nibelungen and is utterly absorbed by it; he is sending a statuette of Brünnhilde. Visit from the conductor Herbeck; R. is vexed at having to tell him things which he described in detail in his pamphlet on the reform of the German operatic stage. R. goes through the Norns’ scene with Richter. In the evening a walk in the garden by moonlight until eleven o’clock.