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.