And Even Now
intermission, decade after decade, does sorely try our patience. He, we
know, cannot have been a thoroughly good fellow. Of Goethe we are shy
for such reasons as that he was never injudicious, never lazy, always in
his best form--and always in love with some lady or another just so much
as was good for the development of his soul and his art, but never more
than that by a tittle. Fate decreed that Sir Willoughby Patterne should
cut a ridiculous figure and so earn our forgiveness. Fate may have had a
similar plan for Goethe; if so, it went all agley. Yet, in the course
of that pageant, his career, there did happen just one humiliation--one
thing that needed to be hushed up. There Tischbein’s defalcation was; a
chip in the marble, a flaw in the crystal, just one thread loose in the
great grand tapestry.
Men of genius are not quick judges of character. Deep thinking and high
imagining blunt that trivial instinct by which you and I size people up.
Had you and I been at Goethe’s elbow when, in the October of 1786, he
entered Rome and was received by the excited Tischbein, no doubt we
should have whispered in his ear, ‘Beware of that man! He will one day
fail you.’ Unassisted Goethe had no misgivings. For some years he had
been receiving letters from this Herr Tischbein. They were the letters
of a man steeped in the Sorrows of Werther and in all else that Goethe
had written. This was a matter of course. But also they were the
letters of a man familiar with all the treasures of Rome. All Italy was
desirable; but it was especially towards great Rome that the soul of the
illustrious poet, the confined State Councillor of Weimar, had been ever
yearning. So that when came the longed-for day, and the Duke gave leave
of absence, and Goethe, closing his official portfolio with a snap and
imprinting a fervent but hasty kiss on the hand of Frau von Stein, fared
forth on his pilgrimage, Tischbein was a prospect inseparably bound
up for him with that of the Seven Hills. Baedeker had not been born.
Tischbein would be a great saviour of time and trouble. Nor was this
hope unfulfilled. Tischbein was assiduous, enthusiastic, indefatigable.
In the early letters to Frau von Stein, to Herder and others, his name
is always cropping up for commendation. ‘Of Tischbein I have much to
say and much to boast’--‘A thorough and original German’--‘He has always
been thinking of me, ever providing for my wants’--‘In his society all
my enjoyments are more than doubled.’ He was thirty-five years old (two
years younger than Goethe), and one guesses him to have been a stocky
little man, with those short thick legs which denote indefatigability.
One guesses him blond and rosy, very voluble, very guttural, with a
wealth of forceful but not graceful gesture.
One is on safer ground in guessing him vastly proud of trotting Goethe
round. Such fame throughout Europe had Goethe won by his works that it
was necessary for him to travel incognito. Not that his identity wasn’t
an open secret, nor that he himself would have wished it hid. Great
artists are always vain. To say that a man is vain means merely that he
is pleased with the effect he produces on other people. A conceited man
is satisfied with the effect he produces on himself. Any great artist is
far too perceptive and too exigent to be satisfied with that effect, and
hence in vanity he seeks solace. Goethe, you may be sure, enjoyed the
hero-worshipful gaze focussed on him from all the tables of the Caffe’
Greco. But not for adulation had he come to Rome. Rome was what he had
come for; and the fussers of the coteries must not pester him in his
golden preoccupation with the antique world. Tischbein was very useful
in warding off the profane throng--fanning away the flies. Let us hope
he was actuated solely by zeal in Goethe’s interest, not by the desire
to swagger as a monopolist.
Clear it is, though, that he scented fine opportunities in Goethe’s
relation to him. Suppose he could rope his illustrious friend in as
a collaborator! He had begun a series of paintings on the theme of
primaeval man. Goethe was much impressed by these. Tischbein suggested
a great poem on the theme of primaeval man--a volume of engravings
after Tischbein, with running poetic commentary by Goethe. ‘Indeed,
the frontispiece for such a joint work,’ writes Goethe in one of his
letters, ‘is already designed.’ Pushful Tischbein! But Goethe, though
he was the most courteous of men, was not of the stuff of which
collaborators are made. ‘During our walks together’--and can you not see
those two together, pacing up and down the groves of the Villa Pamphili,
or around the ruins of the Temple of Jupiter?--little Tischbein
gesticulating and peering up into Goethe’s face, and Goethe with his
hands clasped behind him, ever nodding in a non-committal manner--‘he
has talked with me in the hope of gaining me over to his views, and
getting me to enter upon the plan.’ Goethe admits in another letter that
‘the idea is beautiful; only,’ he adds, ‘the artist and the poet must be
many years together, in order to carry out and execute such a work’; and
one conceives that he felt a certain lack of beauty in the idea of being
with Tischbein for many years. ‘Did I not fear to enter upon any new
tasks at present, I might perhaps be tempted.’ This I take to be but the
repetition of a formula often used in the course of those walks. In
no letter later than November is the scheme mentioned. Tischbein
had evidently ceased to press it. Anon he fell back on a scheme less
glorious but likelier to bear fruit.
‘Latterly,’ writes Goethe, ‘I have observed Tischbein regarding me; and
now’--note the demure pride!--‘it appears that he has long cherished
the idea of painting my portrait.’ Earnest sight-seer though he was, and
hard at work on various MSS. in the intervals of sight-seeing, it is
evident that to sit for his portrait was a new task which he did not
‘fear to enter upon at present.’ Nor need we be surprised. It seems
to be a law of nature that no man, unless he has some obvious physical
deformity, ever is loth to sit for his portrait. A man may be old,
he may be ugly, he may be burdened with grave responsibilities to the
nation, and that nation be at a crisis of its history; but none of these
considerations, nor all of them together, will deter him from sitting
for his portrait. Depend on him to arrive at the studio punctually, to
surrender himself and sit as still as a mouse, trying to look his best
in whatever posture the painter shall have selected as characteristic,
and talking (if he have leave to talk) with a touching humility and with
a keen sense of his privilege in being allowed to pick up a few ideas
about art. To a dentist or a hairdresser he surrenders himself without
enthusiasm, even with resentment. But in the atmosphere of a studio
there is something that entrances him. Perhaps it is the smell of
turpentine that goes to his head. Or more likely it is the idea of
immortality. Goethe was one of the handsomest men of his day, and
(remember) vain, and now in the prime of life; so that he was specially
susceptible to the notion of being immortalised. ‘The design is already
settled, and the canvas stretched’; and I have no doubt that in the
original German these words ring like the opening of a ballad. ‘The
anchor’s up and the sail is spread,’ as I (and you, belike) recited in
childhood. The ship in that poem foundered, if I remember rightly; so
that the analogy to Goethe’s words is all the more striking.
It is in this same letter that the poet mentions those three great
points which I have already laid before you: the fallen obelisk for him
to sit on, the white mantle to drape him, and the ruined temples for him
to look at. ‘It will form a beautiful piece, but,’ he sadly calculates,
‘it will be rather too big for our northern habitations.’ Courage! There
will be plenty of room for it in the Baptistery of San Lorenzo.
Meanwhile, the work progressed. A brief visit to Naples and Sicily was
part of Goethe’s well-pondered campaign, and he was to set forth from
Rome (taking Tischbein with him) immediately after the close of the
Carnival--but not a moment before. Needless to say, he had no idea of
flinging himself into the Carnival, after the fashion of lesser and
lighter tourists. But the Carnival was a great phenomenon to be studied.
All-embracing Goethe, remember, was nearly as keen on science as on art.
He had ever been patient in poring over plants botanically, and fishes
ichthyologically, and minerals mineralogically. And now, day by day, he
studied the Carnival from a strictly carnivalogical standpoint, taking
notes on which he founded later a classic treatise. His presence was
not needed in the studio during these days, for the life-sized portrait
‘begins already to stand out from the canvas,’ and Tischbein was now
painting the folds of the mantle, which were swathed around a clay
figure. ‘He is working away diligently, for the work must, he says,
be brought to a certain point before we start for Naples.’ Besides the
mantle, Tischbein was doing the Campagna. I remember that some years
ago an acquaintance of mine, a painter who was neither successful nor
talented, but always buoyant, told me he was starting for Italy next
day. ‘I am going,’ he said, ‘to paint the Campagna. The Campagna WANTS
painting.’ Tischbein was evidently giving it a good dose of what it
wanted. ‘It takes no little time,’ writes Goethe to Frau von Stein,
‘merely to cover so large a field of canvas with colours.
Ash Wednesday ushered itself in, and ushered the Carnival out. The
curtain falls, rising a few days later on the Bay of Naples. Re-enter
Goethe and Tischbein. Bright blue back-cloth. Incidental music of
barcaroles, etc. For a while, all goes splendidly well. Sane Quixote and
aesthetic Sancho visit the churches, the museums; visit Pompeii; visit
our Ambassador, Sir William Hamilton, that accomplished man. Vesuvius is
visited too; thrice by Goethe, but (here, for the first time, we feel
a vague uneasiness) only once by Tischbein. To Goethe, as you may well
imagine, Vesuvius was strongly attractive. At his every ascent he was
very brave, going as near as possible to the crater, which he approached
very much as he had approached the Carnival, not with any wish to fling
himself into it, but as a resolute scientific inquirer. Tischbein, on
the other hand, merely disliked and feared Vesuvius. He said it had no
aesthetic value, and at his one ascent did not accompany Goethe to the
crater’s edge. He seems to have regarded Goethe’s bravery as rashness.
Here, you see, is a rift, ever so slight, but of evil omen; what
seismologists call ‘a fault.’
Goethe was unconscious of its warning. Throughout his sojourn in Naples
he seems to have thought that Tischbein in Naples was the same as
Tischbein in Rome. Of some persons it is true that change of sky works
no change of soul. Oddly enough, Goethe reckoned himself among the
changeable. In one of his letters he calls himself ‘quite an altered
man,’ and asserts that he is given over to ‘a sort of intoxicated
self-forgetfulness’--a condition to which his letters testify not at
all. In a later bulletin he is nearer the mark: ‘Were I not impelled by
the German spirit, and desire to learn and do rather than to enjoy, I
should tarry a little longer in this school of a light-hearted and happy
life, and try to profit by it still more.’ A truly priceless passage,
this, with a solemnity transcending logic--as who should say, ‘Were I
not so thoroughly German, I should be thoroughly German.’ Tischbein
was of less stern stuff, and it is clear that Naples fostered in him a
lightness which Rome had repressed. Goethe says that he himself puzzled
the people in Neapolitan society: ‘Tischbein pleases them far better.