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 heroworship 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.