mpagna 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