Friday, January 27:
"My dear good wife," R. exclaims to me early in the morning, "Nature wanted me to bring a son into the world, and you alone could bear me this son; anything else would have been nonsense and absurdity. This gave me the strength to accomplish and bear unimaginable things in order to get us united. That must be our comfort, for Nature's purpose goes far beyond all else."
R. has had a letter from the cathedral conductor in Eichstatt who wrote the pamphlet on the conducting of church music. He deplores the present state of things and says that, while Bulow was still in Munich, he could still hope, but now humdrum routine prevails everywhere. We think, in this connection, of our plan to make my father responsible for church music in Munich.
"Yes, we could have turned Bavaria into a musical paradise, but it was not to be! We should have sacrificed ourselves, in our exaltation we were willing to separate; and so, when the first blow fell, the banning of my articles on art and politics, I was in fact inwardly glad. If our cause had triumphed, we should have had to become saints, and Fidi would never have come into the world."
"But since you came to join me I have had unlimited faith in myself, and want to live another 100 years with you." I send off his fine poem to L. Bucher for Bismarck; what will the latter think of it?
Visit to Countess B., who calls Garibaldi the old hurdy-gurdy. It appears that the negotiations for peace are being taken seriously. At any rate Bismarck has put forward his conditions. While R. is passing a picture shop in which portraits of the Prussian generals hang on display, he hears a boy cursing and saying, "All these fellows ought to be impaled and hanged." All these Swiss are riddled with sympathy for the French.
In the evening we read Raimund's Menschenfeind und Alpenkonig, R. has just received his works; much, much enjoyment from this original play. With his writings the same thing happened to him as with his acting talents: best of all he would have liked to play great heroic roles, but Nature put them out of his reach; he would also have preferred to write that way in the main, like Shakespeare, but he was confined within the bounds of the Viennese popular theater. However, in that field he is an incomparable genius.