Tuesday, February 9:
During the night I again took up Proteus by Dr. Marbach, Richard’s brother-in-law, which we had read the evening before last. It is a remarkable production and testifies, like everything by Marbach, to a profound understanding of the subject; only the style, in spite of the very skillful construction, is much too flat.
I told Richard that Marbach has the skeleton of a poet, but he lacks the flesh, whereas in people like Halm, Geibel, etc., etc., it is on the contrary precisely the bone structure which is lacking, for all their other talents. His, Marbach’s, contemplation of the subject is profound, but the thoughts which arise from it are paltry. How strange! Richard agrees, and says that is the remarkable thing about the Germans, that they have so many qualities which are all aimed in the direction of real significance, but emerge incomplete and unconnected and therefore remain barren.
In the course of the morning we discuss our situation, which cannot go on much longer as it now is. I tell R. I should like to write Hans that I could come to the children in Munich for two months and return from there to Tribschen at the beginning of May with all four of them, going on from there to Paris. What I am trying to do is avoid making a commotion, for the sake of the children and the King, that is to say, Richard. Richard, however, can see only one thing, the two-month separation, and will not hear of it. Deep worry in my soul; I really do believe that this way out, in this temporary stage, would be the best.
After lunch R. shows me Daumer’s Book of Ghosts. I read some of the stories in it: the dumb child whom his sisters one day forget to feed, to whom the ghost of his mother appears and gives him food, an event of which he tells his suddenly concerned sisters himself, the miracle having freed his tongue, and then he dies. We are quite shattered by it. “It would all depend on whether one has contact with friendly ghosts,” says Richard, who has a great tendency in this direction and has perhaps a deep, unconscious connection with these regions.
Since it is Shrove Tuesday, R. goes into town to get me some doughnuts, but there are none left. A little disappointment and a great joy, a deep absorption in love. I always in tears, not knowing whether of joy or sorrow.
In the evening I put to R. the question whether our love never appears to him to be wrong. He does not quite understand me and thinks I mean by this what the world considers wrong, the betrayal of a friend; then he says that he knows only one thing, that since the world came into existence no man of his age had loved a woman as much as he loved me. The wrong I meant was not, however, concerned with what other people condemn, but with what it would perhaps be right for us to do according to our own conceptions of life and virtue of the highest kind. I would like to receive my directions from him.
We conclude the evening with Calderón’s Great Zenobia. A wonderful first act, an incomparable scene in the second, Zenobia and Decius on the battlefield, and an utterly absurd, puppetlike third act give us a great deal to think about and consider. I wish Richard could decide to write something about Calderón, for nothing exhaustive has yet been said about this remarkable poet, so difficult to grasp.
In deep contemplation of my “plan” I fall asleep: “all crowns are dreams.”