Wednesday, March 10:
R. has received a letter from Hans, thanking him for the pamphlet on the Jews, sent to him directly by Weber, and announcing his journey to Vienna, where he is playing at Baron Sina’s for 500 florins. The King has commanded Tristan und Isolde for May and Rheingold for August. Hans is delighted with the pamphlet.
R. is pleased by various things I say and declares that, if being able to converse daily with me were all he had, he would count himself lucky; he would ignore God knows whom, even Shakespeare himself if he came, just to converse with me.
Winckelmann on the works of Bernini: “the common herd gone up in the world”; Poussin on Raphael: “An angel compared with the new, a donkey compared with the old.”
At lunch R. is very exhausted; his work excites him so terribly that I am almost afraid to encourage him in it! Afterward a drive in the coach with Loldi to Hergiswyl. Rich. climbs on the rocks. In the coach he says that the peculiarities of my father’s temperament could achieve harmonious expression only in a woman.
Back home, played with the children. In the evening finished Love’s Labour’s Lost. At ten o’clock to bed, and woke up suddenly in the night in concern about R. A deep awareness that I have but one task: to make his life easier. Whatever may come, whether I die or whether I live, nothing shall lead me astray. The children’s fate frightens me, since I shall one day leave them without provision, yet I hope for a friendly star for at least one of them, and this one will look after the others.