without the slightest sign of applause.”
Staël: What the French apparently take for wit in foreigners is often only ignorance of French. Goethe called an idea of Schiller’s neuve et courageuse [new and
corageous], that was wonderful, but it turned out that he had intended to say hardie [bold].
Was lockst Du meine Brut . . . herauf in Todesglut [What you lure my brood. . . up in death glow]. Staël translated air brûlant [firey air]. Goethe said he
meant the glow of coals. She found that extremely maussade [gloomy] and tasteless and said that the fine sense for the seemly is lacking in German poets.
1804. Love for Heinrich Voss—Goethe reads Luise together with the Sunday company.
To Goethe fell the passage about the marriage, which he read with the deepest emotion. But his voice grew dejected, he wept and gave the book to his neighbor. A
holy passage, he cried out with a degree of fervor which shook us all to the depths.
We were sitting at lunch and had just consumed the last bit of food when Goethe ordered a bone “because Voss still looks so hungry.”
But never is he pleasanter and more lovable than in the evening in his room when he is undressed or is sitting on the sofa.
When I came to him I found everything quite comfortable there. He had lit a fire, had undressed down to a short woollen jacket, in which the man looks really splendid.
Books: Stilling, Goethe Yearbook, Briefwechsel zwischen Rahel und David Veit [Letters between Rahel and David Viet].
12 March. In the tram car rapidly passing by there sat in a corner, his cheek against the window, his left arm stretched along the back of the seat, a young man with an
unbuttoned overcoat billowing around him, looking down the long, empty bench. Today he had become engaged and he could think of nothing else. His being engaged
made him feel comfortable and with this feeling he sometimes looked casually up at the ceiling of the tram. When the conductor came to sell him his ticket, after some
jingling, he easily found the right coin, with a single motion put it into the conductor’s hand, and seized the ticket between two fingers held open like a pair of scissors.
There was no real connection between him and the tram car and it would not have been surprising if, without using the platform or steps, he had appeared on the street
and gone his way on foot with the same look.
Only the billowing overcoat remains, everything else is made up.
16 March. Saturday. Again encouragement. Again I catch hold of myself, as one catches hold of a ball in its fall. Tomorrow, today, I’ll begin an extensive work
which, without being forced, will shape itself according to my abilities. I will not give it up as long as I can hold out at all. Rather be sleepless than live on in this way.
Cabaret Lucerna. Several young people each sing a song. Such a performance, if we are fresh and listen closely, more strongly impresses upon us the conclusions
which the text offers for our own life than is possible by the performance of experienced artistes. For the singer cannot increase the force of the poetry, it always
retains an independent forcefulness which tyrannizes us through the singer, who doesn’t even wear patent-leather shoes, whose hand sometimes will not leave his knee,
and, if it must, still shows its reluctance, who throws himself quickly down on the bench in order to conceal as much as possible how many small, awkward movements
he had needed.
Love scene in spring, the sort one finds on picture postcards. Devotion, a portrayal which touches and shames the public—Fatinitza. Viennese singer. Sweet,
significant laugh. Reminds me of Hansi [one of his college girlfriends]. A face with meaningless details, mostly too sharp, held together and smoothed down by
laughter. Ineffective superiority over the audience which one must grant her when she stands on the stage and laughs out into the indifferent audience—The Degen’s
stupid dance, with dying will-o’-the-wisps, twigs, butterflies, death’s head.
Four “Rocking Girls.” One very pretty. The program does not give her name. She was on the audience’s extreme right. How busily she threw her arms about, in what