In the evening I attended the theatre with Chancellor Mueller, where an unimportant play was being given, in which, however, Graff, Schiller’s first Wallenstein, had a role.  I saw nothing particularly remarkable in him, and when I was told that, after the first performance, Schiller had rushed upon the stage, embraced Graff, and exclaimed that now for the first time did he understand his Wallenstein, I thought to myself—­how much greater might the great poet have become had he ever known a public and real actors!  It is remarkable, by the way, that Schiller, who is not at bottom very objective, lends himself so perfectly to an objective representation.  He became figurative, while believing himself to be only eloquent—­one more proof of his incomparable genius.  In Goethe we find the exact opposite.  While he is ordinarily called objective and is so to a great extent, his characters lose in the actual representation.  His figurativeness is only for the imagination; in the representation the delicate, poetic tinge is necessarily lost.  However, these are reflections for another time; they do not belong here.

At last the momentous day with its dinner-hour arrived, and I went to Goethe.  The other guests, all of them men, were already assembled, the charming Talvj having departed with her father the morning after the tea-party and Goethe’s daughter-in-law being absent from Weimar at the time.  To the latter and to her daughter, who died when quite young, I later became very much attached.  As I advanced into the room Goethe came toward me, and was now as amiable and cordial as he had recently been formal and cold.  I was deeply moved.  When we went in to dinner, and Goethe, who had become for me the embodiment of German Poetry and, because of the immeasurable distance between us, almost a mythological being, took my hand to lead me into the dining-room, the boy in me manifested itself once again and I burst into tears.  Goethe took great pains to conceal my foolish emotion.  I sat next to him at dinner and he was more cheerful and talkative than he had been for a long time, as the guests asserted later.  The conversation, enlivened by him, became general, but Goethe frequently turned to me individually.  However, I cannot recall what he said, except a good joke regarding Muellner’s Midnight Journal.  Unfortunately I made no notes concerning this journey, or, rather, I did begin a diary, but as the accident I had in Berlin made it at first impossible for me to write and later difficult, a great gap ensued.  This deterred me from continuing it, and, besides, the difficulty of writing remained, even in Weimar.  I therefore determined to fill in what was lacking immediately after my return to Vienna, while the events were still fresh in my memory.  But when I arrived there some other work demanded immediate attention, and the matter soon escaped my mind; and therefore I retained in my memory nothing but general impressions of what I had almost called the most important moment of my life.  Only one occurrence at dinner stands out in my memory—­namely, in the ardor of the conversation I yielded to an old habit of breaking up the piece of bread beside me into unsightly crumbs.  Goethe lightly touched each individual crumb with his finger and arranged them in a little symmetrical heap.  Only after the lapse of some time did I notice this, and then I discontinued my handiwork.