I have twice seen people so unmistakably like Beethoven (just as Madame
Patey is unmistakably like Handel and only wants dressing in costume to
be the image of him not in features only but in figure and air and
manner) that I always think of them as Beethoven.
Once, at Faido in the Val Leventina, in 1876 or 1877, when the engineers
were there surveying for the tunnel, there was among them a rather
fine-looking young German with wild, ginger hair that rang out to the
wild sky like the bells in _In Memoriam_, and a strong Edmund Gurney cut,
{263} who played Wagner and was great upon the overture to _Lohengrin_;
as for Handel—he was not worth consideration, etc. Well, this young man
rather took a fancy to me and I did not dislike him, but one day, to
tease him, I told him that a little insignificant-looking engineer, the
most commonplace mortal imaginable, who was sitting at the head of the
table, was like Beethoven. He was very like him indeed, and Müller saw
it, smiled and flushed at the same time. He was short, getting on in
years and was a little thick, though not fat. A few days afterwards he
went away and Müller and I happened to meet his box—an enormous cube of a
trunk—coming down the stairs.
“That’s Beethoven’s box,” said Müller to me.
“Oh,” I said, and, looking at it curiously for a moment, asked gravely,
“And is he inside it?” It seemed to fit him and to correspond so
perfectly with him in every way that one felt as though if he were not
inside it he ought to be.
The second time was at Boulogne this spring. There were three Germans at
the Hôtel de Paris who sat together, went in and out together, smoked
together and did everything as though they were a unity in trinity and a
trinity in unity. We settled that they must be the Heckmann Quartet,
minus Heckmann: we had not the smallest reason for thinking this but we
settled it at once. The middle one of these was like Beethoven also. On
Easter Sunday, after dinner, when he was a little—well, it was after
dinner and his hair went rather mad—Jones said to me:
“Do you see that Beethoven has got into the posthumous quartet stage?”
[1885.]