Saturday, July 22:
R. tells me: “I dreamed the two little girls, Eva and Loldi, went on a tiny, unsteady boat, and my shock gave me enough strength to wake up and break the dream. Then of Schröder-Devrient; I had a relationship with her.” “Of what sort?” I ask. “As always, not of any sentimental kind. No, she could never have aroused love longings in me; there was no longer enough modesty in her, no mystery in which to probe.”
Without mentioning Kos’s name he says: “I believe that, since in a dog the mouth and its muscles have no expressive function, the whole power of expression lies in the eyes. How a dog’s eyes regard one! The eyes of most people do not have this intensity, usually because they have become too used to dissembling.”
Very fine weather; recently R. found very great pleasure in the crescent moon, he said he could understand why it had been adopted as a sacred symbol. Heimskringla, newly acquired, also gives R. great pleasure; less, on the other hand, Herr Rodenberg’s pageant, at the troop ceremonies in Dresden, in which he talks calmly of Rhine gold, of Siegfried’s ring, as if these were quite commonly accepted things. R. says, “I feel as if I had swallowed an emetic.” “Rodenberg and Redwitz are now the heroes of the day; after the wars of liberation it was Houwald and Müllner, but they were at least cleaner.”
A Count Amadei comes to visit R., a knowledgeable Wagnerian, but not one he finds very agreeable. By boat to town, to visit the Americans. Lovely homeward journey, despite my great fear, which R. says I should try to overcome.
In the evening Carlyle; the reunion between Wilhelmine and Frederick very moving. Frederick, through the execution of Katte, has suddenly become a man: “He has realized that life is no joke; he also wants to be a king, and he kisses the feet of his father, whose action arose from profound instinct.”