A Nest of Linnets

by Frank Frankfort Moore

In a second he had become Othello, and the laughter was frozen on the face of every one in the circle. This magician carried them at will from world to world. They were powerless before him. He left them gasping, looking at one another as if they had just awakened from a dream.

“A genius!” murmured Mr. Linley, when Garrick had gone, and a long silence followed in the room. “’Tis a doubtful privilege to be visited by a genius. It unfits one for one’s daily work.”

“Nay, sir,” cried Tom, “I would fain believe that the visits of a genius are like those of an angel—that he brings us food, in the strength of which we can face the terrors of a wilderness as the prophet did—the wilderness of the commonplace.”

“True—true,” said his father. “Still, I think that ’tis just as well for us all that the visits of a genius have the qualities which have been ascribed to those of an angel. Now we shall begin our studies. After all, Mr. Garrick only delayed us for twenty minutes. It might have been much worse.”

“Yes, it might have been Mr. Foote,” said Polly.

“That would indeed have been much worse,” said her father. “Mr. Foote makes us laugh, and leaves us laughing; Mr. Garrick makes us laugh, and leaves us thinking.”

And then the lessons began.

Even the delight of hearing her brother play one of Bach’s most ethereal compositions for the violin and harpsichord failed to make Betsy submissive to the ordeal from which she shrank. Her father seemed especially exacting on this morning, but he was not so in reality; it was only that Betsy felt more weary of the constant references to the technicalities which her fine feeling now and again discarded, greatly to the advantage of the composition which she was set to interpret, but which her father, with all the rigid scruple of the made musician, insisted on her observing.

And Tom, whom she had trusted to take her part, believing that he would understand her feelings by considering his own—Tom stood by, coldly acquiescing in her father’s judgment in all questions of technique; nay, he showed himself, by his criticism of her phrasing at one part of an air from Orféo, more a slave to precision than was her father. She had had some hope of Tom when he had begun to improvise that mysterious accompaniment to her singing on the previous evening. Surely any one who could so give himself up to his imagination as he had done would understand how she should become impatient of the reins of technique! Surely he would understand that there are moments when one can afford to sing out of the fulness of one’s heart rather than in strict accordance with the suggestions of the composer!

Alas! Tom had failed her in her hour of need. He seemed to think that the privilege of improvising should be enjoyed only by a player on the violin, and that it would be the grossest presumption on the part of a vocalist so to indulge her imagination. And thus, bringing weariness and disappointment to the girl, the day wore away.