Sunday, September 25:
“I had an unusually fine dream about you,” R. calls out to me. Later he tells it to me: “We had arrived in Hanover with the Ritters and were living together with them. Imagining that you had treated me harshly, I went out in a bad mood, had an encounter in the street with a man on a horse, but was everywhere greeted and treated with marks of the deepest respect. That, however, was your doing; I went back and saw the house you had furnished for me; it was simple, but in every way sensible, everything had been thought of, the wallpaper in my room red with little white stripes, curtains the same, the piano was in your room, and I was to work there. Then I noticed that the room was a great hall, and I thought: Here Cosima will receive her guests, and how well she will do that! When I recognized your love and your care in everything, I wanted to go to you, full of the tenderest gratitude, and throw myself at your feet. Then I woke up.”
Yesterday he told me he had dreamed of Minna, that she had been vindictive toward me. I told him that this test, if it had ever come about, would have left me very indifferent, since my heart would not have been touched. “Oh,” says R., “it would have been bad enough, not to have been allowed to belong to each other, and that before the whole world. Secret relationships, even if they hold firm, always suggest that in essence it was all only a sort of game.”
R. talks about our approaching journey; I should prefer to put it off, if not give it up entirely, but R. says it will do him good, and that decides the matter. He talks about his publisher Schott, who behaved well, paid him for the MS. in advance. “That pleases me, if only because it proves how one stands in the world and shows that people do not after all want to get on the wrong side of me. That is also why Fritzsch’s eagerness for the Beethoven pleased me.”
Lovely day, the children play in the garden. Walk with R. after family lunch. Letter from Marie Muchanoff, she will come, but she announces her intention in a very off-putting way; I almost despair of my whole enterprise when I have to assume that a person basically so alien to us is to play a significant part in it. I keep reminding myself of the impressiveness of her character and the unconditional nature of her enthusiasm, and believe that it is only her French manner which is so distasteful to R. as she discusses these things which lie so close to his heart.
In the evening we are summoned by the children; on their own initiative they are presenting tableaux vivants in the gallery; they have arranged chairs in the dining room and now they summon the whole household, which duly assembles to form a lively demos. Everything is then, to our great surprise, performed under Loulou’s direction, outstandingly well, by the children. I am deeply touched, with tears in my eyes. The play acting is forgotten, all I see is the gravity of life hanging over these four heads. Oh, children, my children, if only I could help you! Loulou distinguishes herself through much hard work and dexterity, Boni through her confident manner, Eva with amiability and wit, Loldi, however, through a rare earnestness, which does not desert her even in the curtsy with which she and her three sisters acknowledge our applause at the end. They had dressed themselves up with great dexterity as peasant children and depicted groups from their picture books.
Later in the evening talk about the war brought us back once more to the misery of life. “And yet,” says R., “I enter this room and look at the Goethe portrait in its fine frame, presented to me in love, and I feel happy and believe in happiness here on earth.” As I smile, he just continues: “I assure you that such feelings make me a complete skeptic toward pessimism, since I tell myself that such delight would not have been possible without great suffering. Genuine love is as rare in this life as genius. The best way is to regard life as a task, a piece of work; anything in it that delights us comes from somewhere else.”