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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.
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?
Read his explanations of Tischbein's engravings from Homer, his last preface to Virgil, and especially his oration on the death of Müller, and you will understand what I mean. I speak not of his political instinct, made evident in his survey of the public and private life of the ancients.
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.
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 We stare aghast, as in the presence of some great dignitary from behind whom, by a ribald hand, a chair is withdrawn when he is in the act of sitting down.
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.
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