Monday, May 29:
A piano teacher in Vienna offers R. a portion of his income for the art of the future; it is profoundly touching. Walk without R., but with the rest of the company, to the farm.
At lunch the conversation turns to Mommsen, and Fritz quotes him as dubbing Sulla a country squire, just as he dubs Cicero a writer of feuilletons. Fritz maintains that there are analogies between positions and persons, but R. denies it utterly. He says that is exactly where the difference lies: what we have is writers of feuilletons, what they had was Cicero.
We then come via the Roman patriciate to talk about the German aristocracy and the German “rights of the estates,” which R. tremendously praises. He says it represents the only type of freedom where one knows quite definitely what is being guaranteed, which is various defined freedoms; with the other, more general type of freedom one does not really know of what it consists.
After lunch discussion about Aeschylus and the misunderstood saying that “he was always drunk,” about actors, and also, in passing, about Sophocles; and that tragedy had certainly evolved out of improvisation. All this contributed by Prof. Nietzsche, together with Sophocles’s saying about Aeschylus, that “he does the right thing without knowing it,” which R. compares with Schopenhauer’s saying about musicians, that they speak the highest wisdom in a language which their reason does not understand.
Our friends leave; R. is very worn out, I on the other hand feel happy in the lovely sunshine. R. calls me a salamander and is glad when I tell him what feelings of gratitude a fine summer’s day arouses in me.
But his indisposition alarms me and destroys my happiness. He is also preoccupied. I ask him anxiously what is the matter, and learn that he has all sorts of worries on his mind: firstly, his obligations in Vienna, which have not been met; then the large wine bill, an old debt with Kahnt the publisher, and no income to cover it all.
Then Herr Fritzsch, to whom he had promised a composition and to whom he would like to give the funeral music for Weber’s reburial, if only he knew where to find it; then his collected works; and finally some songs of his which have suddenly been published without his consent! All this was now passing through his mind, when really he should be thinking only of his Nibelungen.
All the same I am glad he has told me all this; to feel with him unquestionably provides me with my only support.
Tuesday, May 30: The Louvre is saved. R. wraps himself in blankets, in order to get rid of an obstinate catarrh. It does him good. He remarks cheerfully at breakfast how well I look. He says: “You are lovelier than you used to be: previously your face looked earnest and severe, now you have in your eyes the gleam of joy I have seen in so few faces. Your father has good will, kindness, cordiality, but he does not have joy, and that is the divinest attribute of a human face. On the stage I saw it only once, in Wilhelmine Schroder-Devrient.”
He works, I teach the children; write sympathetically to my mother, amid the twittering dialogue of two blackbirds. Letter from Paris, Nuitter again, writing at the first possible opportunity. He feels the French have given the world a great lesson in wisdom. “Always,” says R., “seeing themselves as the Redeemer, suffering for the whole world! Always the godlike people who have to go through everything for the sake of others.”
Great delight in a speech by Bismarck in the Reichstag. R. says how inestimable it is that Bismarck can now say quite calmly that the Prussians are an object of hatred, the Germans on the other hand are loved.
Letter from Marie Schleinitz, who understands why I want to see my father only here, but she asks me to write to him, since he had authorized her to tell me that he wished for such a letter. I talk to R. about this; we think of Hans, what would his feelings be over a reconciliation of this kind? I fear, very bitter.
In the evening read Carlyle’s Frederick the Great with much enjoyment, the time following Kolin. How right Moltke is when he says that in misfortune the great reveal what they are!