"None of which were like him," said Maximilian. "They all make him too ugly, or else flatter him, and do not give his true character. I think that only one man ever succeeded in putting the true physiognomy of Paganini on paper. He who did it is a deaf painter named Leyser, who, in his inspired frolicking, hit off with a few pencil strokes the head of Paganini so well that one laughs and is frightened at the truth of the portrait. 'The devil guided my hand,' said the artist to me, mysteriously laughing low, and nodding his head with good-natured irony as he was wont to do in his Owlglass reflections. This painter was always a queer owl. In spite of his deafness he loved music enthusiastically, and he really understood it when he was near enough to the orchestra to read the music in the faces of the musicians, and judge of the more or less successful execution by the fingering; and, in fact, he wrote criticisms of the operas for a distinguished journal in Hamburg. What is there wonderful in that? The deaf painter could, in the visible signature of the playing, see the tones. Are there not men to whom tones themselves are only invisible signatures in which they hear colours and forms?"[1]
- ↑ Heine was the first to make known in French this style of using æsthetic correspondences or signatures—to borrow a term from Swedenborg. It was carried to a ridiculous excess by his imitators, one of whom, in speaking of a ballet-girl, said: "The colour of her dancing is pyramidal." But Heine himself is occasionally extravagant in its use.
