And Even Now
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Max Beerbohm >> And Even Now
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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?'
He glanced at the sea. `Yes.' He said this with a lack of emphasis
that seemed to me noble though insincere.
The strain of talking in words of not more than three syllables had
begun to tell on me. I bade the artist good-bye, wandered away up the
half-dozen steps to the Parade, sat down on a bench, and opened the
morning paper that I had brought out unread. During the War one felt
it a duty to know the worst before breakfast; now that the English
polity is threatened merely from within, one is apt to dally....
Merely from within? Is that a right phrase when the nerves of
unrestful Labour in any one land are interplicated with its nerves in
any other, so vibrantly? News of the dismissal of an erring workman in
Timbuctoo is enough nowadays to make us apprehensive of vast and
dreadful effects on our own immediate future. How pleasant if we had
lived our lives in the nineteenth century and no other, with the
ground all firm under our feet! True, the people who flourished then
had recurring alarms. But their alarms were quite needless; whereas
ours--! Ours, as I glanced at this morning' s news from Timbuctoo and
elsewhere, seemed odiously needful. Withal, our Old Nobility in its
pleasaunces was treading once more the old graceful measure which the
War arrested; Bohemia had resumed its motley; even the middle class
was capering, very noticeably... To gad about smiling as though he
were quite well, thank you, or to sit down, pull a long face, and make
his soul,--which, I wondered, is the better procedure for a man
knowing that very soon he will have to undergo a vital operation at
the hands of a wholly unqualified surgeon who dislikes him personally?
I inclined to think the gloomier way the less ghastly. But then, I
asked myself, was my analogy a sound one? We are at the mercy of
Labour, certainly; and Labour does not love us; and Labour is not
deeply versed in statecraft. But would an unskilled surgeon, however
ill-wishing, care to perform a drastic operation on a patient by whose
death he himself would forthwith perish? Labour is wise enough--
surely?--not to will us destruction. Russia has been an awful example.
Surely! And yet, Labour does not seem to think the example so awful as
I do. Queer, this; queer and disquieting. I rose from my bench,
strolled to the railing, and gazed forth.
The unrestful, the well-organised and minatory sea had been advancing
quickly. It was not very far now from the cottage. I thought of all
the civilisations that had been, that were not, that were as though
they had never been. Must it always be thus?--always the same old tale
of growth and greatness and overthrow, nothingness? I gazed at the
cottage, all so solid and seemly, so full of endearing character, so
like to the `comf'table' polity of England as we have known it. I
gazed away from it to a large-ish castle that the sea was just
reaching. A little, then quickly much, the waters swirled into the
moat. Many children stood by, all a-dance with excitement. The castle
was shedding its sides, lapsing, dwindling, landslipping--gone. O
Nineveh! And now another--O Memphis? Rome?--yielded to the cataclysm.
I listened to the jubilant screams of the children. What rapture, what
wantoning! Motionless beside his work stood the builder of the
cottage, gazing seaward, a pathetic little figure. I hoped the other
children would have the decency not to exult over the unmaking of what
he had made so well. This hope was not fulfilled. I had not supposed
it would be. What did surprise me, when anon the sea rolled close up
to the cottage, was the comportment of the young artist himself. His
sobriety gave place to an intense animation. He leapt, he waved his
spade, he invited the waves with wild gestures and gleeful cries. His
face had flushed bright, and now, as the garden walls crumbled, and
the paths and lawns were mingled by the waters' influence and
confluence, and the walls of the cottage itself began to totter, and
the gables sank, and all, all was swallowed, his leaps were so high in
air that they recalled to my memory those of a strange religious sect
which once visited London; and the glare of his eyes was less
indicative of a dreamer than of a triumphant fiend.
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