will wink at if it befall some thoroughly good fellow. But a man whose career was glorious without 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 sightseer though he was, and hard at work on various MSS. in the intervals of sightseeing, 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, e~ver 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
