Monday, December 12:
Worked all day on a muff for Loldi. R. works, too; he says I should write to Countess Bismarck that a German emperor is predestined—he needs an emperor for the art of the future. I will do as he asks. In the evening Loulou dictates to me her letters to her grandmama and to Heinz’s mother.
In the morning R. says to me: “How I long to start studying the Indians! All of it is unqualified truth; their allegories express what cannot otherwise be expressed. With us everything is established in a sort of convention; for example, Goethe’s Tasso is based on the tragedy of royal birth, which calls for unmixed blood, and that accounts for the Princess’s noble renunciation; but along comes the great realist and says: ‘What does it matter, you princes? You are human beings like ourselves.’ With the Indians, on the other hand, even their caste doctrine is based on a profound knowledge of Nature.” I mention R.’s poems as being of a kind which also frees us from convention. “That is the music,” he says. I dispute this and maintain that even without music his poetry is unique. “Das Rheingold,” he says, “has this one advantage—that as in a peasant’s trial it does clearly show us Wotan’s guilt and fatal error and the urgent need for his renunciation.”