It is all to be seen in her face as we can see it on the canvases of Gainsborough and Reynolds—two of the greatest pictures ever painted by the hand of man. If the face of Miss Linley in Gainsborough’s picture is divine, the face of Sir Joshua’s “Saint Cecilia” is sublime. In both one may perceive the shrinking of a sensitive soul from anything less divine than itself.
And her father, an excellent man, who had made himself a musician in spite of many difficulties, insisted on her singing in public as frequently as he thought consistent with the preservation of her voice. He was incapable of understanding such a nature as hers, and she had this fact impressed upon her every day. He would tell her what Handel meant to accomplish in certain of his numbers, and she would listen as in a dream, and then sing the number in her own way, going to the very soul of its mystery, and achieving an effect of which her father had never dreamed. She used to wonder how any one could be content, as her father was, to touch merely upon the surface of the matter and make no attempt to reach the soul underlying it.
Every day she startled him by her revelation of the depths of Handel’s music—the blue profundity of his ocean, the immeasurable azure of his heaven; and sometimes he could not avoid receiving the impression that this daughter, whom he had taught the rudiments of his art, knew a great deal more about it than he did; and he only recovered his position as her master by pointing out her technical mistakes to her: she had dwelt too long on a certain note; the crescendo in the treatment of a certain phrase had not been gradual enough; her finish had been staccato. She must go over the air again.
So it was that he worried her. He was trying to teach a nightingale to sing by playing the flute to it. But the nightingale sang, in spite of his instruction; the nightingale sang, sang, and longed all the time for the wings of a dove, so that she might fly away and be at rest.
She knew that her father was incapable of understanding her sensitiveness, and she had looked forward to the return of her brother, who might help her father to understand. Alas! the instant she saw that strange light in his eyes she knew that she had nothing to hope for from him. And now she was putting on her clothes to begin another day which should be as all the weary days which had gone before—a day of toiling over exercises with her father at the harpsichord, so that her voice should not be wanting in flexibility when she would appear before an audience in the Assembly Rooms on the evening of the next day.
“Oh for the wings of a dove!” her heart was singing, when, pausing for a moment, with her beautiful hair falling over her shoulders, she heard the strains of her brother’s violin floating from the room below. He played the violin beautifully, but.... “Oh for the wings of a dove to fly away and be at rest!”
Mr. Garrick called upon them before they had left the music-room. The children were delighted with Garrick, who could imitate, in such a funny way, their father giving a lesson, and Dr. Johnson assisting by the superiority of his lungs the excellence of his argument on some very delicate question—say, the necessity for building a hospital for spiders which had grown old and past work. This he made the subject of an animated discussion between Dr. Johnson and Sir Joshua Reynolds, keeping the whole family in fits of laughter at Dr. Johnson’s polysyllabic references to the industry of the spider, and then bringing tears to their eyes at his picture of the heartlessness of allowing a grey-haired spider to be cast upon the world in its declining years. Of course the children appreciated the ludicrous mistakes made by Sir Joshua, whose infirmity of deafness caused him to assume that Johnson had said exactly the opposite to what he was saying. And then he pretended that he heard a knock at the door. He hastened to admit a gentleman with a very lugubrious face, and before he had opened his mouth there was a cry of “Mr. Cumberland! Mr. Cumberland!” In the truest style of Richard Cumberland, he hastened to decry the whole spider family. Their spinning was grossly overrated, he declared; for his part, he had known many spiders in his time, but he had never known one that was a spinster.
This sort of fooling was what Garrick enjoyed better than anything else, and he brought all his incomparable powers to bear upon it. He played this form of comedy with the same supreme perfection that he displayed in the tragedy of Hamlet. Even Tom Linley, who was inclined to be coldly critical of such buffoonery, soon became aware of the difference between the fooling of a man of genius and that of an ordinary person. He laughed as heartily as his younger brothers and sisters during the five minutes that Garrick was in the room.
“By the way,” cried the actor when he was taking his leave (Mr. Linley had just entered the room), “our friend Tom Sheridan goes to Ireland to-morrow. He has been released from his little difficulties which sent him to France. It seems that his chief creditor in Dublin actually petitioned the court to grant Tom exemption from any liability to pay what he owes. Is not that an ideal creditor for one to have? What persuasive letters Tom must have written to him! But for that matter, he could persuade the most obdurate man out of his most cherished belief.”