Sunday, October 23:
Mathilde Schuré writes to me; she is inconsolable about Alsace and Lorraine! Read Herr Federlein’s essay on Das Rheingold, which I find very good, and I suggest to R. that he have it printed as articles.
Family lunch; afterward walk with R. along the highway to Hergeschwyl. Once again we come upon an old acquaintance, a barking dog. R. says, “I could imagine walking the earth again as a ghost, just to satisfy my thwarted longing to thrash that dog.”
Then he started to talk of the dramatic art of ancient Greece, of the cothurnus, which represents more or less the same as the doubling of the various wind instruments. “It is necessary when the room is too large, but it does not heighten the impression made by the single instrument playing the melody. The mask, the cothurnus, the megaphone, these brought forth a distinct art of their own, which could never have the variety of the Shakespearean drama. Instead, it is noble and monumental.”
In the evening The Peace by Aristophanes. I suspect that R. has to skip many things in order to be able to read these plays to me; all the same I get immense enjoyment from observing this incomparable fusing together of people and poet, from the bubbling inventive talent and the reckless mixture of earnestness and humor.