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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.
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.
'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.
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.
Between the summit, however, and the cone the space is narrow enough; moreover, several stones fell around us, and made the circuit anything but agreeable. Tischbein now felt more disgusted than ever with Vesuvius, as the monster, not content with being hateful, showed an inclination to become mischievous also.
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.
Subsequently he chose his own profession, studying under Tischbein the elder, then under Vanloo and Francesco Casanova; the latter, a painter of battle pieces after the style of Bourgognone.
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.
The first pulled me up the path, the other Tischbein pulled I say, for these guides are girded round the waist with a leathern belt, which the traveler takes hold of, and being drawn up by his guide, makes his way the easier with foot and staff. In this manner we reached the flat from which the cone rises; toward the north lay the ruins of the summit.
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