Quia Imperfectum (1918)
I have often wondered that no one has set himself to collect
unfinished works of art. There is a peculiar charm for all of us in
that which was still in the making when its maker died, or in that
which he laid aside because he was tired of it, or didn't see his way
to the end of it, or wanted to go on to something else. Mr. Pickwick
and the Ancient Mariner are valued friends of ours, but they do not
preoccupy us like Edwin Drood or Kubla Khan. Had that revolving chair
at Gad's Hill become empty but a few weeks later than it actually did,
or had Samuel Taylor Coleridge in the act of setting down his dream
about the Eastern potentate not been interrupted by `a person on
business from Porlock' and so lost the thread of the thing for ever,
from two what delightful glades for roaming in would our fancy be
excluded! The very globe we live on is a far more fascinating sphere
than it can have been when men supposed that men like themselves would
be on it to the end of time. It is only since we heard what Darwin had
to say, only since we have had to accept as improvisible what lies far
ahead, that the Book of Life has taken so strong a hold on us and
`once taken up, cannot,' as the reviewers say, `readily be laid down.'
The work doesn't strike us as a masterpiece yet, certainly; but who
knows that it isn't--that it won't be, judged as a whole?
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.
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 sight-seer though
he was, and hard at work on various MSS. in the intervals of sight-
seeing, 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 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.
-THE END-
Max Beerbohm's essay: Quia Imperfectum (1918)
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