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 Treves--‘quoque cela fut 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, ever 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.
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.
He looked up at me, and down at the cottage. ‘Do you?’ he asked, looking
up again. I assured him that I did; and to test my opinion of him I
asked whether he didn’t think so too. He stood the test well. ‘I wanted
it rather diff’rent,’ he answered.
‘In what way different?’
He searched his vocabulary. More comf’table,’ he found.
I knew now that he was not merely the architect and builder of the
cottage, but also, by courtesy of imagination, its tenant; but I was
tactful enough not to let him see that I had guessed this deep and
delicate secret. I did but ask him, in a quite general way, how the
cottage could be better. He said that it ought to have a porch--‘but
porches tumble in.’ He was too young an artist to accept quite meekly
the limits imposed by his material. He pointed along the lower edge
of the roof: ‘It ought to stick out,’ he said, meaning that it wanted
eaves. I told him not to worry about that: it was the sand’s fault, not
his. ‘What really is a pity,’ I said, ‘is that your house can’t last
for ever.’ He was tracing now on the roof, with the edge of his spade, a
criss-cross pattern, to represent tiles, and he seemed to have forgotten
my presence and my kindness. ‘Aren’t you sorry,’ I asked, raising my
voice rather sharply, ‘that the sea is coming in?’
He glanced at the sea. ‘Yes.’ He said this with a lack of emphasis that
seemed to me noble though insincere.
The strain of talking in words of not more than three syllables had
begun to tell on me. I bade the artist good-bye, wandered away up the
half-dozen steps to the Parade, sat down on a bench, and opened the
morning paper that I had brought out unread. During the War one felt it
a duty to know the worst before breakfast; now that the English polity
is threatened merely from within, one is apt to dally.... Merely from
within? Is that a right phrase when the nerves of unrestful Labour
in any one land are interplicated with its nerves in any other, so
vibrantly? News of the dismissal of an erring workman in Timbuctoo is
enough nowadays to make us apprehensive of vast and dreadful effects on
our own immediate future. How pleasant if we had lived our lives in
the nineteenth century and no other, with the ground all firm under our
feet! True, the people who flourished then had recurring alarms. But
their alarms were quite needless; whereas ours--! Ours, as I glanced
at this morning’ s news from Timbuctoo and elsewhere, seemed odiously
needful. Withal, our Old Nobility in its pleasaunces was treading
once more the old graceful measure which the War arrested; Bohemia
had resumed its motley; even the middle class was capering, very
noticeably... To gad about smiling as though he were quite well, thank
you, or to sit down, pull a long face, and make his soul,--which, I
wondered, is the better procedure for a man knowing that very soon
he will have to undergo a vital operation at the hands of a wholly
unqualified surgeon who dislikes him personally? I inclined to think the
gloomier way the less ghastly. But then, I asked myself, was my analogy
a sound one? We are at the mercy of Labour, certainly; and Labour does
not love us; and Labour is not deeply versed in statecraft. But would
an unskilled surgeon, however ill-wishing, care to perform a drastic
operation on a patient by whose death he himself would forthwith perish?
Labour is wise enough--surely?--not to will us destruction. Russia has
been an awful example. Surely! And yet, Labour does not seem to think
the example so awful as I do. Queer, this; queer and disquieting. I rose
from my bench, strolled to the railing, and gazed forth.
The unrestful, the well-organised and minatory sea had been advancing
quickly. It was not very far now from the cottage. I thought of all the
civilisations that had been, that were not, that were as though they had
never been. Must it always be thus?--always the same old tale of growth
and greatness and overthrow, nothingness? I gazed at the cottage, all
so solid and seemly, so full of endearing character, so like to the
‘comf’table’ polity of England as we have known it. I gazed away from
it to a large-ish castle that the sea was just reaching. A little, then
quickly much, the waters swirled into the moat. Many children stood by,
all a-dance with excitement. The castle was shedding its sides, lapsing,
dwindling, landslipping--gone. O Nineveh! And now another--O Memphis?
Rome?--yielded to the cataclysm. I listened to the jubilant screams of
the children. What rapture, what wantoning! Motionless beside his work
stood the builder of the cottage, gazing seaward, a pathetic little
figure. I hoped the other children would have the decency not to
exult over the unmaking of what he had made so well. This hope was not
fulfilled. I had not supposed it would be. What did surprise me, when
anon the sea rolled close up to the cottage, was the comportment of the
young artist himself. His sobriety gave place to an intense animation.
He leapt, he waved his spade, he invited the waves with wild gestures
and gleeful cries. His face had flushed bright, and now, as the garden
walls crumbled, and the paths and lawns were mingled by the waters’
influence and confluence, and the walls of the cottage itself began to
totter, and the gables sank, and all, all was swallowed, his leaps
were so high in air that they recalled to my memory those of a strange
religious sect which once visited London; and the glare of his eyes was
less indicative of a dreamer than of a triumphant fiend.
I myself was conscious of a certain wild enthusiasm within me. But this
was less surprising for that I had not built the cottage, and my fancy
had not enabled me to dwell in it. It was the boy’s own enthusiasm that
made me feel, as never before, how deep-rooted in the human breast the
love of destruction, of mere destruction, is. And I began to ask myself:
‘Even if England as we know it, the English polity of which that cottage
was a symbol to me, were the work of (say) Mr. Robert Smillie’s own
unaided hands’--but I waived the question coming from that hypothesis,
and other questions that would have followed; for I wished to be happy
while I might.
‘A CLERGYMAN’ 1918.
Fragmentary, pale, momentary; almost nothing; glimpsed and gone; as it
were, a faint human hand thrust up, never to reappear, from beneath the
rolling waters of Time, he forever haunts my memory and solicits my weak
imagination. Nothing is told of him but that once, abruptly, he asked a
question, and received an answer.
This was on the afternoon of April 7th, 1778, at Streatham, in the
well-appointed house of Mr. Thrale. Johnson, on the morning of that day,
had entertained Boswell at breakfast in Bolt Court, and invited him to
dine at Thrale Hall. The two took coach and arrived early. It seems that
Sir John Pringle had asked Boswell to ask Johnson ‘what were the best
English sermons for style.’ In the interval before dinner, accordingly,
Boswell reeled off the names of several divines whose prose might or
might not win commendation. ‘Atterbury?’ he suggested. ‘JOHNSON: Yes,
Sir, one of the best. BOSWELL: Tillotson? JOHNSON: Why, not now. I
should not advise any one to imitate Tillotson’s style; though I don’t
know; I should be cautious of censuring anything that has been applauded
by so many suffrages.--South is one of the best, if you except
his peculiarities, and his violence, and sometimes coarseness of
language.--Seed has a very fine style; but he is not very theological.
Jortin’s sermons are very elegant. Sherlock’s style, too, is very
elegant, though he has not made it his principal study.--And you may add
Smalridge. BOSWELL: I like Ogden’s Sermons on Prayer very much, both for
neatness of style and subtility of reasoning. JOHNSON: I should like to
read all that Ogden has written. BOSWELL: What I want to know is, what
sermons afford the best specimen of English pulpit eloquence. JOHNSON:
We have no sermons addressed to the passions, that are good for
anything; if you mean that kind of eloquence. A CLERGYMAN, whose name
I do not recollect: Were not Dodd’s sermons addressed to the passions?
JOHNSON: They were nothing, Sir, be they addressed to what they may.’
The suddenness of it! Bang!--and the rabbit that had popped from its
burrow was no more.
I know not which is the more startling--the de’but of the unfortunate
clergyman, or the instantaneousness of his end. Why hadn’t Boswell told
us there was a clergyman present? Well, we may be sure that so careful
and acute an artist had some good reason. And I suppose the clergyman
was left to take us unawares because just so did he take the company.
Had we been told he was there, we might have expected that sooner or
later he would join in the conversation. He would have had a place in
our minds. We may assume that in the minds of the company around
Johnson he had no place. He sat forgotten, overlooked; so that his
self-assertion startled every one just as on Boswell’s page it startles
us. In Johnson’s massive and magnetic presence only some very remarkable
man, such as Mr. Burke, was sharply distinguishable from the rest.
Others might, if they had something in them, stand out slightly. This
unfortunate clergyman may have had something in him, but I judge that he
lacked the gift of seeming as if he had. That deficiency, however,
does not account for the horrid fate that befell him. One of Johnson’s
strongest and most inveterate feelings was his veneration for the
Cloth. To any one in Holy Orders he habitually listened with a grave and
charming deference. To-day moreover, he was in excellent good humour. He
was at the Thrales’, where he so loved to be; the day was fine; a fine
dinner was in close prospect; and he had had what he always declared to
be the sum of human felicity--a ride in a coach. Nor was there in the
question put by the clergyman anything likely to enrage him. Dodd was
one whom Johnson had befriended in adversity; and it had always been
agreed that Dodd in his pulpit was very emotional. What drew the
blasting flash must have been not the question itself, but the manner in
which it was asked. And I think we can guess what that manner was.
Say the words aloud: ‘Were not Dodd’s sermons addressed to the
passions?’ They are words which, if you have any dramatic and histrionic
sense, cannot be said except in a high, thin voice.
You may, from sheer perversity, utter them in a rich and sonorous
baritone or bass. But if you do so, they sound utterly unnatural. To
make them carry the conviction of human utterance, you have no choice:
you must pipe them.
Remember, now, Johnson was very deaf. Even the people whom he knew well,
the people to whose voices he was accustomed, had to address him very
loudly. It is probable that this unregarded, young, shy clergyman, when
at length he suddenly mustered courage to ‘cut in,’ let his high, thin
voice soar too high, insomuch that it was a kind of scream. On no other
hypothesis can we account for the ferocity with which Johnson turned and
rended him. Johnson didn’t, we may be sure, mean to be cruel. The old
lion, startled, just struck out blindly. But the force of paw and claws
was not the less lethal. We have endless testimony to the strength
of Johnson’s voice; and the very cadence of those words, ‘They were
nothing, Sir, be they addressed to what they may,’ convinces me that the
old lion’s jaws never gave forth a louder roar. Boswell does not record
that there was any further conversation before the announcement of
dinner. Perhaps the whole company had been temporarily deafened. But
I am not bothering about them. My heart goes out to the poor dear
clergyman exclusively.
I said a moment ago that he was young and shy; and I admit that I
slipped those epithets in without having justified them to you by due
process of induction. Your quick mind will have already supplied what I
omitted. A man with a high, thin voice, and without power to impress any
one with a sense of his importance, a man so null in effect that even
the retentive mind of Boswell did not retain his very name, would
assuredly not be a self-confident man. Even if he were not naturally
shy, social courage would soon have been sapped in him, and would in
time have been destroyed, by experience. That he had not yet given
himself up as a bad job, that he still had faint wild hopes, is proved
by the fact that he did snatch the opportunity for asking that question.
He must, accordingly, have been young. Was he the curate of the
neighbouring church? I think so. It would account for his having been
invited. I see him as he sits there listening to the great Doctor’s
pronouncement on Atterbury and those others. He sits on the edge of a
chair in the background. He has colourless eyes, fixed earnestly, and a
face almost as pale as the clerical bands beneath his somewhat receding
chin. His forehead is high and narrow, his hair mouse-coloured. His
hands are clasped tight before him, the knuckles standing out sharply.
This constriction does not mean that he is steeling himself to speak.
He has no positive intention of speaking. Very much, nevertheless, is he
wishing in the back of his mind that he could say something--something
whereat the great Doctor would turn on him and say, after a pause for
thought, ‘Why yes, Sir. That is most justly observed’ or ‘Sir, this has
never occurred to me. I thank you’--thereby fixing the observer for
ever high in the esteem of all. And now in a flash the chance presents
itself. ‘We have,’ shouts Johnson, ‘no sermons addressed to the
passions, that are good for anything.’ I see the curate’s frame quiver
with sudden impulse, and his mouth fly open, and--no, I can’t bear it,
I shut my eyes and ears. But audible, even so, is something shrill,
followed by something thunderous.
Presently I re-open my eyes. The crimson has not yet faded from that
young face yonder, and slowly down either cheek falls a glistening tear.
Shades of Atterbury and Tillotson! Such weakness shames the Established
Church. What would Jortin and Smalridge have said?--what Seed and South?
And, by the way, who were they, these worthies? It is a solemn thought
that so little is conveyed to us by names which to the palaeo-Georgians
conveyed so much. We discern a dim, composite picture of a big man in a
big wig and a billowing black gown, with a big congregation beneath him.
But we are not anxious to hear what he is saying. We know it is all very
elegant. We know it will be printed and be bound in finely-tooled
full calf, and no palaeo-Georgian gentleman’s library will be complete
without it. Literate people in those days were comparatively few; but,
bating that, one may say that sermons were as much in request as novels
are to-day. I wonder, will mankind continue to be capricious? It is a
very solemn thought indeed that no more than a hundred-and-fifty years
hence the novelists of our time, with all their moral and political and
sociological outlook and influence, will perhaps shine as indistinctly
as do those old preachers, with all their elegance, now. ‘Yes, Sir,’
some great pundit may be telling a disciple at this moment, ‘Wells
is one of the best. Galsworthy is one of the best, if you except his
concern for delicacy of style. Mrs. Ward has a very firm grasp of
problems, but is not very creational.--Caine’s books are very edifying.
I should like to read all that Caine has written. Miss Corelli, too, is
very edifying.--And you may add Upton Sinclair.’ ‘What I want to know,’
says the disciple, ‘is, what English novels may be selected as specially
enthralling.’ The pundit answers: ‘We have no novels addressed to
the passions that are good for anything, if you mean that kind of
enthralment.’ And here some poor wretch (whose name the disciple will
not remember) inquires: ‘Are not Mrs. Glyn’s novels addressed to the
passions?’ and is in due form annihilated. Can it be that a time will
come when readers of this passage in our pundit’s Life will take more
interest in the poor nameless wretch than in all the bearers of those
great names put together, being no more able or anxious to discriminate
between (say) Mrs. Ward and Mr. Sinclair than we are to set Ogden above
Sherlock, or Sherlock above Ogden? It seems impossible. But we must
remember that things are not always what they seem.
Every man illustrious in his day, however much he may be gratified by
his fame, looks with an eager eye to posterity for a continuance of past
favours, and would even live the remainder of his life in obscurity if
by so doing he could insure that future generations would preserve a
correct attitude towards him forever. This is very natural and human,
but, like so many very natural and human things, very silly. Tillotson
and the rest need not, after all, be pitied for our neglect of them.
They either know nothing about it, or are above such terrene trifles.
Let us keep our pity for the seething mass of divines who were not
elegantly verbose, and had no fun or glory while they lasted. And let us
keep a specially large portion for one whose lot was so much worse than
merely undistinguished. If that nameless curate had not been at the
Thrales’ that day, or, being there, had kept the silence that so well
became him, his life would have been drab enough, in all conscience. But
at any rate an unpromising career would not have been nipped in the bud.
And that is what in fact happened, I’m sure of it. A robust man might
have rallied under the blow. Not so our friend. Those who knew him in
infancy had not expected that he would be reared. Better for him had
they been right. It is well to grow up and be ordained, but not if you
are delicate and very sensitive, and shall happen to annoy the greatest,
the most stentorian and roughest of contemporary personages. ‘A
Clergyman’ never held up his head or smiled again after the brief
encounter recorded for us by Boswell. He sank into a rapid decline.
Before the next blossoming of Thrale Hall’s almond trees he was no more.
I like to think that he died forgiving Dr. Johnson.