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.