For sheer creativeness, no human artist, I take it, has a higher repute than Michael Angelo; none perhaps has a repute so high. But what if Michael Angelo had been a little more persevering? All those years he spent in the process of just a-going to begin Pope Julius’
tomb, and again, all those blank spaces for his pictures and bare pedestals for his statues in the Baptistery of San Lorenzo—ought we to regret them quite so passionately as we do? His patrons were apt to think him an impossible person to deal with. But I suspect that there may have been a certain high cunning in what appeared to be a mere lovable fault of temperament. When Michael Angelo actually did bring a thing off, the result was not always more than magnificent. His David is magnificent, but it isn’t David. One is duly awed, but, to see the master at his best, back one goes from the Accademia to that marvellous bleak Baptistery which he left that we should see, in the mind’s eye, just that very best.
It was there, some years ago, as I stood before the half-done marvel of the Night and Morning, that I first conceived the idea of a museum of incomplete masterpieces. And now I mean to organise the thing on my own account. The Baptistery itself, so full of unfulfilment, and with such a wealth, at present, of spare space, will be the ideal setting for my treasures. There be it that the public shall throng to steep itself in the splendour of possibilities, beholding, under glass, and perhaps in excellent preservation, Penelope’s web and the original designs for the Tower of Babel, the draft made by Mr. Asquith for a reformed House of Lords and the notes jotted down by the sometime German Emperor for a proclamation from Versailles to the citizens of Paris. There too shall be the MS. of that fragmentary `Iphige’nie’
which Racine laid aside so meekly at the behest of Mlle. de Tre`ves-`quoique cela fu^t de mon mieux’; and there an early score of that one unfinished Symphony of Beethoven’s—I forget the number of it, but anyhow it is my favourite. Among the pictures, Rossetti’s oil-painting of `Found’ must be ruled out, because we know by more than one drawing just what it would have been, and how much less good than those drawings. But Leonardo’s St. Sebastian (even if it isn’t Leonardo’s) shall be there, and Whistler’s Miss Connie Gilchrist, and numerous other pictures that I would mention if my mind were not so full of one picture to which, if I can find it and acquire it, a special place of honour shall be given: a certain huge picture in which a life-sized gentleman, draped in a white mantle, sits on a fallen obelisk and surveys the ruined temples of the Campagna Romana.
The reader knits his brow? Evidently he has not just been reading Goethe’s `Travels in Italy.’ I have. Or rather, I have just been reading a translation of it, published in 1885 by George Bell & Sons.
I daresay it isn’t a very good translation (for one has always understood that Goethe, despite a resistant medium, wrote well—an accomplishment which this translator hardly wins one to suspect). And I daresay the painting I so want to see and have isn’t a very good painting. Wilhelm Tischbein is hardly a name to conjure with, though in his day, as a practitioner in the `historical’ style, and as a rapturous resident in Rome, Tischbein did great things; big things, at any rate. He did crowds of heroes in helmets looked down at by gods on clouds; he did centaurs leaping ravines; Sabine women; sieges of Troy.
And he did this portrait of Goethe. At least he began it. Why didn’t he finish it? That is a problem as to which one can but hazard guesses, reading between the lines of Goethe’s letters. The great point is that it never was finished. By that point, as you read between those lines, you will be amused if you are unkind, and worried if you are humane.
Worried, yet also pleased. Goethe has more than once been described as `the perfect man.’ He was assuredly a personage on the great scale, in the grand manner, gloriously balanced, rounded. And it is a fact that he was not made of marble. He started with all the disadvantages of flesh and blood, and retained them to the last. Yet from no angle, as he went his long way, could it be plausibly hinted that he wasn’t sublime. Endearing though failure always is, we grudge no man a moderately successful career, and glory itself we 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.