Chapter 11

‘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. 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, nothing anywhere scamped in the workmanship of it. It looked as though it had been built for all time. But this was not so. For it was built on sand, and of sand; and the tide was coming in.

Here and there in its vicinity stood other buildings. None of these possessed any points of interest. They were just old-fashioned ‘castles,’ of the bald and hasty kind which I myself used to make in childhood and could make even now--conic affairs, with or without untidily-dug moats, the nullities of convention and of unskilled labour. When I was a child the charm of a castle was not in the building of it, but in jumping over it when it was built. Nor was this an enduring charm. After a few jumps one abandoned one’s castle and asked one’s nurse for a bun, or picked a quarrel with some child even smaller than oneself, or went paddling. As it was, so it is. My survey of the sands this morning showed me that forty years had made no difference. Here was plenty of animation, plenty of scurrying and gambolling, of laughter and tears. But the actual spadework was a mere empty form. For all but the builder of that cottage. For him, manifestly, a passion, a rite.

He stood, spade in hand, contemplating, from one angle and another, what he had done. He was perhaps nine years old; if so, small for his age. He had very thin legs in very short grey knickerbockers, a pale freckled face, and hair that matched the sand. He was not remarkable. But with a little good-will one can always find something impressive in anybody. When Mr. Mallaby-Deeley won a wide and very sudden fame in connexion with Covent Garden, an awe-stricken reporter wrote of him for The Daily Mail, ‘he has the eyes of a dreamer.’ I believe that Mr. Cecil Rhodes really had. So, it seemed to me, had this little boy. They were pale grey eyes, rather prominent, with an unwavering light in them. I guessed that they were regarding the cottage rather as what it should be than as what it had become. To me it appeared quite perfect. But I surmised that to him, artist that he was, it seemed a poor thing beside his first flushed conception.

He knelt down and, partly with the flat of his spade, partly with the palm of one hand, redressed some (to me obscure) fault in one of the gables. He rose, stood back, his eyes slowly endorsed the amendment. A few moments later, very suddenly, he scudded away to the adjacent breakwater and gave himself to the task of scraping off it some of the short green sea-weed wherewith he had made the cottage’s two gardens so pleasantly realistic, oases so refreshing in the sandy desert. Were the lawns somehow imperfect? Anon, when he darted back, I saw what it was that his taste had required: lichen, moss, for the roof. Sundry morsels and patches of green he deftly disposed in the angles of roof and gables. His stock exhausted, off to the breakwater he darted, and back again, to and fro with the lightning directness of a hermit-bee making its nest of pollen. The low walls that enclosed the two gardens were in need of creepers. Little by little, this grace was added to them. I stood silently watching.

I kept silent for fear of discommoding him. All artists--by which I mean, of course, all good artists--are shy. They are trustees of something not entrusted to us others; they bear fragile treasure, not safe in a jostling crowd; they must ever be wary. And especially shy are those artists whose work is apart from words. A man of letters can mitigate his embarrassment among us by a certain glibness. Not so can the man who works through the medium of visual form and colour. Not so, I was sure, could the young architect and landscape-gardener here creating. I would have moved away had I thought my mere presence was a bother to him; but I decided that it was not: being a grown-up person, I did not matter; he had no fear that I should offer violence to his work. It was his coevals that made him uneasy. Groups of these would pause in their wild career to stand over him and watch him in a fidgety manner that hinted mischief. Suppose one of them suddenly jumped--on to the cottage!

Fragile treasure, this, in a quite literal sense; and how awfully exposed! It was spared, however. There was even legible on the faces of the stolid little boys who viewed it a sort of reluctant approval. Some of the little girls seemed to be forming with their lips the word ‘pretty,’ but then they exchanged glances with one another, signifying ‘silly.’ No one of either sex uttered any word of praise. And so, because artists, be they never so agoraphobious, do want praise, I did at length break my silence to this one. ‘I think it splendid,’ I said to him.

He looked up at me, and down at the cottage. ‘Do you?’ he asked, looking up again. I assured him that I did; and to test my opinion of him I asked whether he didn’t think so too. He stood the test well. ‘I wanted it rather diff’rent,’ he answered.

‘In what way different?’

He searched his vocabulary. More comf’table,’ he found.

I knew now that he was not merely the architect and builder of the cottage, but also, by courtesy of imagination, its tenant; but I was tactful enough not to let him see that I had guessed this deep and delicate secret. I did but ask him, in a quite general way, how the cottage could be better. He said that it ought to have a porch--‘but porches tumble in.’ He was too young an artist to accept quite meekly the limits imposed by his material. He pointed along the lower edge of the roof: ‘It ought to stick out,’ he said, meaning that it wanted eaves. I told him not to worry about that: it was the sand’s fault, not his. ‘What really is a pity,’ I said, ‘is that your house can’t last for ever.’ He was tracing now on the roof, with the edge of his spade, a criss-cross pattern, to represent tiles, and he seemed to have forgotten my presence and my kindness. ‘Aren’t you sorry,’ I asked, raising my voice rather sharply, ‘that the sea is coming in?’