Friday, November 25:
Night of mice, they frighten me from my bed.
R. always says he is being too well treated, is too happy with me and the children—oh, great Heavens! Wrote to Malwida M[eysenbug]. Once again discussed with R. the question of the children’s religion, I am above all for keeping their gaiety unclouded.
At lunch R. remembers how once, when he complained (of his physical condition), my father took up the Nibelungen, looked at him, and said, “He complains of abdominal troubles and writes things like this.” R. goes on to say that without a doubt my father is the greatest man of originality and genius he has ever met, and after him Hans, because he has fire. “Thus does one think and work, contained within a very close circle of friends, and now this circle has been more or less split up. ‘For when women come on the scene, they turn things upside down—things which had been going well up till then.’ That was Herwegh’s comment on my Nibelungen poem!”
After lunch I play the piano with Richter. In the evening the music produces from R. the following remark: “Repetition! In that one sees the utter difference between music and poetry. A motive can be repeated because it is a personality and not just a speech. In poetry, on the other hand, repetition is ridiculous, unless it is a refrain and is intended to have a musical effect.”
Read Ranke. I observed how curious it was that no Frenchman had ever chosen Coligny as a romantic hero. “That’s because they are all Jews,” R. replies. “They know nothing except the Old Testament, for them it would be like writing Sanskrit.”