Wednesday, January 3:
R. asks me not to give any thought to yesterday - he had been drinking too much beer! Arrival of Prof. Nietzsche's book. A very nice letter to me from M. Meysenbug. R. reads it while I am with the doctor, and when I come downstairs I find him regarding Fidi with tears in his eyes. 'You and the family are my sunshine,' he says. 'Now I understand Lenbach's portrait - a person who is as happy as I am dares to face life and he accepts the world's challenge; he neither makes melancholy eyes nor lets his head hang. The only trouble is that I do not want to die.'
Lenbach's portrait pleases me more and more, although I know that R. can also look quite different, as, for example, when I saw him at the railroad station in Mannheim, beaming, transfigured, and with such a sweet expression on his face that his features looked small and delicate; here everything is sharp and energetic, unyielding. R. is humorously vexed that he is so ugly. I spent the morning with Lulu; at midday I find R. very excited and stimulated by Prof. Nietzsche's book. He is happy to have lived to read it; he says after me comes N. and then Lenbach, who painted his picture, and he observes how dreary his life would have been if he had died ten years ago; in what universal chaos, 'a region to which I now gladly consign many things,' would his memory remain! He calls me his priestess of Apollo - he says I am the Apollonian element, he the Dionysian, but we made an alliance, a pact, and from it came Fidi.
Silly letter from Prof. Werder to Alw. Frommann, correcting the account of the meeting in Berlin after Der fliegende Holländer, as if anything mattered except the impression which R. received! R. has today begun his third act; thrice-blessed day! But my Lulu is still ill, and I stay beside her, hardly seeing the other children. Letter from Marie Schl. I myself attend to all sorts of business affairs in the morning, among them Herr v. Rothschild, who has again sent me no money. On the subject of my father's Christus, which he is now having performed in Vienna and about which Marie Much is concerned on account of the bad conductor, Rubinstein, R. says: 'How curious your father is! He allows the most horrible performances to take place, smiling when I talk of model performances, yet he wants his things to be performed before an audience for which he thinks anything is good enough. It is all just a matter of appearances; that is how the world judges things, and people like us are regarded as peasants when they prefer to produce nothing rather than something false.'
In the evening we read Nietzsche's book, which is really splendid; R. thinks of the people who at the moment set the tone in Germany and wonders what the fate of this book will be. He hopes in Bayreuth to start a periodical, which Prof. Nietzsche would edit.
Thursday, January 4:
Lusch much better, a quiet night. While with her in the morning I write to Mama and to Lenbach, thanking him for the splendid pictures. R. works and sings me the ravishing song of the Rhinemaidens. The joy of creativity has now returned to this house - may God preserve it!
We drive into town and return home with R. through fog, darkness, and snow. I think of the times when I lived here against all the rules, like a dream figure, and when this landscape seemed so appropriate. Letter yesterday from Marie Schl., but otherwise no positive news of the material situation. We read in the newspaper that Baron Perfall has been promoted to the title of Excellency; every time it begins to look as if the King were showing favor to R., he hastens to restore the balance in this manner. Strange, unaccountable being!
In the evening we read more of Nietzsche's book, which gives R. ever-increasing satisfaction, but we wonder where the public for it is to be found. R. ends the day by saying, 'My love for you is both Dionysian and Apollonian.' Yesterday he told me of a ceremony he had attended in Heiligenstadt near Vienna, when a plaque was fixed to the house in which Beethoven had lived, stating that there Beethoven had composed the Pastoral. 'Well,' says R., 'you have only to see that place, its barren nature, to see what the relationship is between the work of genius and its creator's life.'