Thursday, December 5:
R. got up once, but otherwise, he says, the night was tolerable. During the night he started Turgenev’s Virgin Soil. I tell him that I had heard him sighing deeply, had he been having sorrowful thoughts? “Probably just my general situation,” he says, “or some particular grievance!”
Speaking last night about the “Classical Walpurgis Night” he said that it always seems to him to grow shorter, he had imagined Nereus and the Nereids to be much longer; the humor in it becomes ever more apparent. On the other hand, the quotation from “Ideals” (in Chopin), activity which never tires, struck him as curious; why this in verse, when it is prose? Schiller could at times be terribly didactic.
In the afternoon he is unable to sleep, which worries me a lot; he goes for a walk in the palace gardens. At supper he has only tea with some eggs. I read to him from Busch’s book, and much of it interests him; his [Bismarck’s] sturdy, energetic, fearless, and naive character, untrammeled by any sort of prejudice, comes through everywhere, and R. says he must completely dominate his surroundings with his freedom of outlook, but there is never any sign of an idea, and also no idealism in his attitude toward things; his opinion of Wilhelm Tell deplorable.
I say good night to R. with a heart full of apprehension.