A Georgian Pageant

by Frank Frankfort Moore

But how would it be if Mr. Linley had become apprised of his daughter's intention to fly from Bath? He knew very well that Mr. Linley had the best of reasons for objecting to his daughter's leaving Bath. Mr. Linley's income was increased by several hundred pounds by reason of the payments made to him on account of his daughter's singing in public, and he was—very properly, considering his large family—fond of money. Before he had to provide for his family, he took good care that his family—his eldest daughter particularly—helped to provide for him.

Doubtless these eventualities were suggested to him—for young Mr. Sheridan was not without imagination—while on his way through the dark outskirts of the beautiful city to the London Road. The Bear Inn was just beyond the last of the houses. It stood at the junction of the London Road and a narrower one leading past a couple of farms. It was here that he had given instructions for the chaise to wait for him, and here he meant to wait for the young lady who had promised to accompany him to London—and further.

He found the chaise without trouble. It was under the trees not more than a hundred yards down the lane, but the chair, with Miss Linley, had not yet arrived, so he returned to the road and began to retrace his steps, hoping to meet it, yet with some doubts in his mind. Of course, he was impatient. Young gentlemen under twenty-one are usually impatient when awaiting the arrival of the ladies who have promised to run away with them. He was not, however, kept in suspense for an unconscionably long time. He met the chair which he was expecting just when he had reached the last of the lamps of Bath, and out of it stepped the muffled form of Miss Linley. The chairmen were paid with a lavish hand, and Dick Sheridan and Betsy Linley walked on to the chaise without exchanging any but a friendly greeting—there was nothing lover-like in their meeting or their greeting. The elopement was not that of a young woman with her lover; it was, we are assured, that of a young woman anxious to escape from the intolerable position of being the most popular person in the most fashionable city in England, to the peaceful retreat of a convent; and the young man who was to take charge of her was one whom she had chosen for her guardian, not for her lover. Dick Sheridan seems to have been the only young man in Bath who had never made love to Elizabeth Linley. His elder brother, Charles by name, had discharged this duty on behalf of the Sheridan family, and he was now trying to live down his disappointment at being refused, at a farmhouse a mile or two away. The burden was greater than he could bear when surrounded by his sisters in their father's house in King's Mead Street.

Elizabeth Linley was certainly the most popular young woman in Bath; she certainly was the most beautiful. The greatest painters of her day made masterpieces of her portrait, and for once, posterity acknowledges that the fame of her beauty was well founded. So spiritual a face as hers is to be seen in no eighteenth-century picture except that of Miss Linley; one has need to go back to the early Italian painters to find such spirituality in a human face, and then one finds it combined with absolute inanity, and the face is called Divine. Reynolds painted her as Saint Cecilia drawing down angels, and blessedly unconscious of her own powers, thinking only of raising herself among angels on the wings of song. His genius was never better employed and surely never more apparent than in the achievement of this picture. Gainsborough painted her by the side of her younger brother, and one feels that if Reynolds painted a saint, Gainsborough painted a girl. It was Bishop O'Beirne, an old friend of her family and acquainted with her since her childhood, who said: “She is a link between an angel and a woman.”

And this exquisite creature had a voice of so sympathetic a quality that no one could hear it unmoved. Her father had made her technique perfect. He was a musician who was something more than painstaking. He had taste of the highest order, and it is possible to believe that in the training of his eldest daughter he was wise enough to limit his instruction to the technicalities of his art, leaving her to the inspiration of her own genius in regard to the treatment of any theme which he brought before her.

At any rate her success in the sublimest of all oratorios was far beyond anything that could be achieved by an exhibition of the finest technical qualities; and Mr. Linley soon became aware of the fact that he was the father of the most beautiful and the most highly gifted creature that ever made a father miserable.

Incidentally she made a great many other men miserable, but that was only because each of them wanted her to make him happy at the expense of the others, and this she was too kind-hearted to do. But the cause of her father's grief was something different. It was due to the fact that the girl was so sensitive that she shrank from every exhibition of herself and her ability on a public platform. It was an agony to her to hear the tumultuous applause that greeted her singing at a concert or in an oratorio. She seemed to feel—let any one look at the face which is to be seen in her portrait, and one will understand how this could be—that music was something too spiritual to be made the medium only for the entertainment of the multitude. Taking the highest imaginable view of the scope and value and meaning of music, it can be understood that this girl should shrink from such an ordeal as the concert platform offered to her every time she was announced to sing. No more frivolous and fashionable a population than that of Bath in the second half of the eighteenth century was to be found in any city in the world; and Elizabeth Linley felt that she was regarded by the concert-goers as no more than one of the numerous agents they employed to lessen the ennui of an empty day. The music which she worshipped—the spirit with which her soul communed in secret—was, she felt, degraded by being sold to the crowd and subjected to the patronage of their applause.