Tuesday, April 13:
Each day finer than the last. Nature is rejoicing and the children regaining their health. Worked with them in the morning, all four gathered around me; if I only knew Hans to be content, how happy I would be now! But we see the cloudless sky only in the world outside, not in our own souls, and we may not complain.
When today I reflected with a sigh on my life, I told myself that I would erase none of it, except for my mistakes.
Teaching the children all day, telling them the life of Saint Elizabeth, among other things. R. working. In the evening Protagoras; I by myself, while resting, read Goethe’s sonnets and his life. The absence of a reply to Beethoven’s letter hurts me as if Goethe were a brother or a close friend of mine.
From Paris a newspaper clipping: Beckmann defends Wagner against the reproach of ingratitude toward the King of Saxony, which Charnacé (!!) made. In talking about this bit of grotesqueness R. soon becomes very bitter.
Lovely, wonderful feeling between R. and me. I am reminded in connection with it of many a camellia flower I have seen unfold splendidly in spite of the evil worm, a black-and-yellow dot, lying in its heart. This black-and-yellow dot, my concern for Hans, is simply there, as much a part of Nature’s intention as the flowering of the plant itself!
The things have arrived from Munich.
In all my worries about the children I am upheld by the thought that, though their external life might perhaps be made more difficult on account of me, my union with R. allows me to help their inner development in a way I could not otherwise do; and since we can find happiness only within ourselves, this thought is a great consolation to me.
Wednesday, April 14:
Sun, buds, blossoms, for the first time the sound of cowbells. Rose at six, wrote letters for R. to Champfleury, then took a bath.
Immediately after breakfast with the children in the garden, where I heard the cuckoo both yesterday and today. Spent the whole day with the good little ones; in the evening played with them at hoop bowling and skipping.
Loulou and Boni are thoroughly good, willing, industrious, and gifted, too. In arithmetic today Lusch was more sure-footed than I!
The mail brings an abusive article from Petersburg and an abusive pamphlet from Leipzig. All Jews.
In the evening I am very languid and worn out, my head full of troublesome thoughts. How shall I ever achieve what my heart bids me? How easy it is to die for what one loves, how hard to live for it!
A lovely moment of the day was that in which, after he had had the children dancing around, R. played them the “Freude, schöner Götterfunken” theme. What we poor mortals do not possess the genius gives us by lauding it in song: joy. “All wisdom, all art is forgotten,” says R., “in the divine nature of this naive theme, to which, through his noble bass voice, he imparts the whole force of human feeling. Here the naive and the emotional are combined.”
We finish Protagoras, but I am preoccupied with my maternal cares. I went once more to look at the four sleeping little ones.
In Mannheim Die Meistersinger has been hissed on account of the pamphlet.