Thursday, July 20:
Terrible, stormy night; I do not sleep a wink. In the morning a letter from Elisabeth Krockow brings news that Tausig is dead; he died in the night between Sunday and Monday; when we received the news of his illness he was already dead. Complete stupefaction, then reminiscence: how many friends already gone, Uhlig, Schnorr, Serov, how many. In T. we have certainly lost a great pillar of our enterprise, but that leaves us indifferent. R. says: “I look upon it as upon a cloud; the vapors rise, will they be dispersed or will they form themselves into a life-bringing cloud? God knows. I just look on; my life seems to me godlike, for even its worries are now beautiful; they are about the children.”
Contemplation of Tausig’s sad life: so precocious, Schopenhauer already worked through at the age of sixteen; conscious of the curse of his Jewishness; no pleasure in his tremendous virtuosity, my father’s even greater, and he too remarkable to see himself just as a pupil; the marriage with a Jewess, ended almost at once; completely finished at twenty-nine, yet still not a man. “What must the sleepless nights of such a person be like? What occupied his thoughts?” asks R., who shrugs his shoulders over the stupidity of Fate, snatching Tausig away at the moment when a great new activity would have brought him inner joy and satisfaction.
This was to be a sad day in every respect. At midday Vreneli came in and declared that Kos could no longer be saved; he no longer had a moment’s peace, neither day nor night, and Jakob would take him today to the apothecary. I said he should be shown to me before he was taken away, so that I could say goodbye to him, but they did not do so, and it pained me very much. The poor little creature shared with me the worst days of my life; Hans brought him to Zurich in 1866 to give me “at least a little joy” in difficult, oppressive days. He was ill for the past three years; now he is gone and is buried here in Tribschen.
R. could not work this morning; he wrote to Dr. Gille explaining why he was not joining the society of authors, then to Herr Tappert in Berlin for Dr. Fuchs, whose pamphlet he thinks good. Dr. Fuchs had asked him to request the support of the King of Bavaria, and R. writes to say that the King protects only his person, not his ideas, and the fact that he will now have to produce his Nibelungen himself should show people clearly enough how things stand.
Alarmed that R. should write like this to two entirely unknown people, I ask him to find another way; he is very angry, says he has no intention of writing banalities to a man whose book he admires, he cannot write more phrases, he is a truthful person. He tears up his letter. I am unutterably sad to have wounded him in what is surely one of the finest parts of his character; but it irks me to have the King spoken of to all and sundry.
R. then regrets having been so violent and bursts into tears over the King, who knew everything, felt it all with him, and then abandoned him thus. He says he has taught himself to be honest in all directions, he stands in all simplicity, and now with this one lie he would have to go to the grave; he sobs violently. I stay with him, then leave him in order to supervise Kos’s grave. When I return to him, he is reading Faust, Part One; he reads it aloud to me, the fifth act. This noblest of works calms, softens, grips, and cheers us; every word a jewel. R. says he would like to have Faust splendidly printed for himself on fine vellum paper, as a symbolic, holy book. The German monument, the German masterpiece.
In Munich the Jewish actor Possart recently welcomed King and Crown Prince in the theater, and after he had praised the alliance of the two men, they shook hands and thanked him. Talked a lot more about Tausig. I received a visit from Mr. Lang, an American whom I met fourteen years ago in Berlin and who, amicably remembering every detail, comes here to seek me out.