And Even Now
This evening he hastily painted some heads of the size of life, and
about these they disported themselves as strangely as the New Zealanders
at the sight of a ship of war.’ One feels that but for Goethe’s presence
Tischbein would have cut New Zealand capers too. A week later he did
an utterly astounding thing. He told Goethe that he would not be
accompanying him to Sicily.
He did not, of course, say ‘The novelty of your greatness has worn off.
Your solemnity oppresses me. Be off, and leave me to enjoy myself in
Naples-on-Sea--Naples, the Queen of Watering Places!’ He spoke of work
which he had undertaken, and recommended as travelling companion for
Goethe a young man of the name of Kniep.
Goethe, we may be sure, was restrained by pride from any show of wrath.
Pride compelled him to make light of the matter in his epistles to the
Weimarians. Even Kniep he accepted with a good grace, though not without
misgivings. He needed a man who would execute for him sketches and
paintings of all that in the districts passed through was worthy
of record. He had already ‘heard Kniep highly spoken of as a clever
draughtsman--only his industry was not much commended.’ Our hearts sink.
‘I have tolerably studied his character, and think the ground of this
censure arises rather from a want of decision, which may certainly be
overcome, if we are long together.’ Our hearts sink lower. Kniep will
never do. Kniep will play the deuce, we are sure of it. And yet (such
is life) Kniep turns out very well. Throughout the Sicilian tour Goethe
gives the rosiest reports of the young man’s cheerful ways and strict
attention to the business of sketching. It may be that these reports
were coloured partly by a desire to set Tischbein down. But there seems
to be no doubt that Goethe liked Kniep greatly and rejoiced in the
quantity and quality of his work. At Palermo, one evening, Goethe sat
reading Homer and ‘making an impromptu translation for the benefit of
Kniep, who had well deserved by his diligent exertions this day some
agreeable refreshment over a glass of wine.’ This is a pleasing little
scene, and is typical of the whole tour.
In the middle of May, Goethe returned Naples. And lo!--Tischbein was
not there to receive him. Tischbein, if you please, had skipped back to
Rome, bidding his Neapolitan friends look to his great compatriot. Pride
again forbade Goethe to show displeasure, and again our reading has to
be done between the lines. In the first week of June he was once more
in Rome. I can imagine with what high courtesy, as though there were
nothing to rebuke, he treated Tischbein. But it is possible that
his manner would have been less perfect had the portrait not been
unfinished.
His sittings were resumed. It seems that Signora Zucchi, better known to
the world as Angelica Kauffmann, had also begun to paint him. But, great
as was Goethe’s esteem for the mind of that nice woman, he set no store
on this fluttering attempt of hers: ‘her picture is a pretty fellow, to
be sure, but not a trace of me.’ It was by the large and firm ‘historic’
mode of Tischbein that he, not exactly in his habit as he lived, but in
the white mantle that so well became him, and on the worthy throne of
that fallen obelisk, was to be handed down to the gaze of future ages.
Was to be, yes. On June 27th he reports that Tischbein’s work ‘is
succeeding happily; the likeness is striking, and the conception pleases
everybody.’ Three days later: ‘Tischbein goes to Naples.’
Incredible! We stare aghast, as in the presence of some great dignitary
from behind whom, by a ribald hand, a chair is withdrawn when he is
in the act of sitting down. Tischbein had, as it were, withdrawn the
obelisk. What was Goethe to do? What can a dignitary, in such case, do?
He cannot turn and recriminate. That would but lower him the more. Can
he behave as though nothing has happened? Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
tried to do so. And it must have been in support of this attempt that he
consented to leave his own quarters and reside awhile in the studio of
the outgoing Tischbein. That slippery man does, it is true, seem to have
given out that he would not be away very long; and the prospect of his
return may well have been reckoned in mitigation of his going. Goethe
had leave from the Duke of Weimar to prolong his Italian holiday till
the spring of next year. It is possible that Tischbein really did mean
to come back and finish the picture. Goethe had, at any rate, no reason
for not hoping.
‘When you think of me, think of me as happy,’ he directs. And had he
not indeed reasons for happiness? He had the most perfect health, he was
writing masterpieces, he was in Rome--Rome which no pilgrim had loved
with a rapture deeper than his; the wonderful old Rome that lingered
on almost to our own day, under the conserving shadow of the Temporal
Power; a Rome in which the Emperors kept unquestionably their fallen day
about them. No pilgrim had wandered with a richer enthusiasm along those
highways and those great storied spaces. It is pleasing to watch in what
deep draughts Goethe drank Rome in. But--but--I fancy that now in his
second year of sojourn he tended to remain within the city walls, caring
less than of yore for the Campagna; and I suspect that if ever he did
stray out there he averted his eyes from anything in the nature of a
ruined temple. Of one thing I am sure. The huge canvas in the studio had
its face to the wall. There is never a reference to it by Goethe in
any letter after that of June 27th. But I surmise that its nearness
continually worked on him, and that sometimes, when no one was by, he
all unwillingly approached it, he moved it out into a good light and,
stepping back, gazed at it for a long time. And I wonder that Tischbein
was not shamed, telepathically, to return.
What was it that had made Tischbein--not once, but thrice--abandon
Goethe? We have no right to suppose he had plotted to avenge himself
for the poet’s refusal to collaborate with him on the theme of primaeval
man. A likelier explanation is merely that Goethe, as I have suggested,
irked him. Forty years elapsed before Goethe collected his letters
from Italy and made a book of them; and in this book he included--how
magnanimous old men are!--several letters written to him from Naples by
his deserter. These are shallow but vivid documents--the effusions of
one for whom the visible world suffices. I take it that Tischbein was an
‘historic’ painter because no ambitious painter in those days wasn’t.
In Goethe the historic sense was as innate as the aesthetic; so was
the ethical sense; so was the scientific sense; and the three of them,
forever cropping up in his discourse, may well be understood to have
been too much for the simple Tischbein. But, you ask, can mere boredom
make a man act so cruelly as this man acted? Well, there may have been
another cause, and a more interesting one. I have mentioned that Goethe
and Tischbein visited our Ambassador in Naples. His Excellency was at
that time a widower, but his establishment was already graced by his
future wife, Miss Emma Harte, whose beauty is so well known to us all.
‘Tischbein,’ wrote Goethe a few days afterwards, ‘is engaged in painting
her.’ Later in the year, Tischbein, soon after his return to Naples,
sent to Goethe a sketch for a painting he had now done of Miss Harte
as Iphigenia at the Sacrificial Altar. Perhaps he had wondered that she
should sacrifice herself to Sir William Hamilton.... ‘I like Hamilton
uncommonly’ is a phrase culled from one of his letters; and when a man
is very hearty about the protector of a very beautiful woman one begins
to be suspicious. I do not mean to suggest that Miss Harte--though it
is true she had not yet met Nelson--was fascinated by Tischbein. But
we have no reason to suppose that Tischbein was less susceptible than
Romney.
Altogether, it seems likely enough that the future Lady Hamilton’s
fine eyes were Tischbein’s main reason for not going to Sicily, and
afterwards for his sudden exodus from Rome. But why, in this case, did
he leave Naples, why go back to Rome, when Goethe was in Sicily? I hope
he went for the purpose of shaking off his infatuation for Miss Harte.
I am loth to think he went merely to wind up his affairs in Rome. I will
assume that only after a sharp conflict, in which he fought hard on the
side of duty against love, did he relapse to Naples. But I won’t pretend
to wish he had finished that portrait.
If you know where that portrait is, tell me. I want it. I have tried to
trace it--vainly. What became of it? I thought I might find this out in
George Henry Lewes’ ‘Life of Goethe.’ But Lewes had a hero-worship for
Goethe: he thought him greater than George Eliot, and in the whole book
there is but one cold mention of Tischbein’s name. Mr. Oscar Browning,
in the ‘Encyclopaedia Britannica,’ names Tischbein as Goethe’s ‘constant
companion’ in the early days at Rome--and says nothing else about him!
In fact, the hero-worshippers have evidently conspired to hush up
the affront to their hero. Even the ‘Penny Cyclopaedia’ (1842), which
devotes a column to little Tischbein himself, and goes into various
details of his career, is silent about the portrait of Goethe. I learn
from that column that Tischbein became director of the Neapolitan
Academy, at a salary of 600 ducats, and resided in Naples until the
Revolution of ‘99, when he returned in haste to Germany. Suppose he
passed through Rome on his way. A homing fugitive would not pause to
burden himself with a vast unfinished canvas. We may be sure the canvas
remained in that Roman studio--an object of mild interest to successive
occupants. Is it there still? Does the studio itself still exist?
Belike it has been demolished, with so much else. What became of
the expropriated canvas? It wouldn’t have been buried in the new
foundations. Some one must have staggered away with it. Whither?
Somewhere, I am sure, in some dark vault or cellar, it languishes.
Seek it, fetch it out, bring it to me in triumph. You will always find
me in the Baptistery of San Lorenzo. But I have formed so clear
and sharp a preconception of the portrait that I am likely to be
disappointed at sight of what you bring me. I see in my mind’s eye every
falling fold of the white mantle; the nobly-rounded calf of the leg on
which rests the forearm; the high-light on the black silk stocking. The
shoes, the hands, are rather sketchy, the sky is a mere slab; the ruined
temples are no more than adumbrated. But the expression of the face is
perfectly, epitomically, that of a great man surveying a great alien
scene and gauging its import not without a keen sense of its dramatic
conjunction with himself--Marius in Carthage and Napoleon before the
Sphinx, Wordsworth on London Bridge and Cortes on the peak in Darien,
but most of all, certainly, Goethe in the Campagna. So, you see,
I cannot promise not to be horribly let down by Tischbein’s actual
handiwork. I may even have to take back my promise that it shall have a
place of honour. But I shall not utterly reject it--unless on the plea
that a collection of unfinished works should itself have some great
touch of incompletion.
SOMETHING DEFEASIBLE July, 1919.
The cottage had a good trim garden in front of it, and another behind
it. I might not have noticed it at all but for them and their emerald
greenness. Yet itself (I saw when I studied it) was worthy of them.
Sussex is rich in fine Jacobean cottages; and their example, clearly,
had not been lost on the builder of this one. Its proportions had a
homely grandeur. It was long and wide and low. It was quite a yard
long. It had three admirable gables. It had a substantial and shapely
chimney-stack. I liked the look that it had of honest solidity all over,