When he smiled—says Burney—"his heavy, stern countenance was radiant with a flash of intelligence and wit; like the sun emerging from a cloud."
He was full of humour. He had a "sly pseudo-simplicity" which made the most solemn individuals laugh though he himself showed an unsmiling face. No one ever told a story better. "His happy way of saying the simplest things differently from anyone else gave them an amusing complexion. If his English had been as good as Swift's, his bons mots would have been equally abundant and of the same kind." But "really to enjoy what he said one had almost to know four languages: English, French, Italian and German, all of which he mixed up together."[1]
This medley of tongues was as much due to the fashion in which his vagabond youth was moulded, while he wandered through the countries of Western Europe, as to his natural impetuosity, which, when he sought a rejoinder, seized upon all the words at his disposal. He was like Berlioz: musical notation was too slow for him; he would have needed a shorthand to follow his thought; at the beginning of his great choral compositions he wrote the motifs in full for all the parts; as he proceeded he would drop first one part, then another; finally he would retain only one voice, or he would even end up with the bass alone; he would pass at a stroke to the end of the composition which he had begun, postponing until later the completion of the whole, and on the morrow of finishing one piece he
- ↑ This portrait is drawn from the paintings by Thornhill, Hudson, Denner and Kyte, Roubillac's monument at Westminster, and the descriptions of contemporaries, such as Mattheson, Burney, Hawkins and Coxe. See also the biographies of Händel by Schoelcher and Chrysander.
