“She has a wonderful voice,” said Mr. Ashford, with more decision than usual.
“But—pardon me if I interrupt,” cried the Signor, who had come in while they were talking, “no method; no science. She wants training—the most careful training. The more beautiful a voice is by nature, the more evident is the want of education in it,” the musician added, with meaning. He did not look at Mr. Ashford, but the reference was very unmistakable. The Dean looked at them, and smiled as he took up his shovel hat.
“I leave you to fight it out, Science against Nature,” he said; “as long as you don’t forget that you are both expected this evening at the Deanery—and to sit in judgment as well as to dine.”
“I know what my judgment will be beforehand,” said the Signor; “absolute want of education—but plenty of material for a good teacher to work upon.”
“And mine is all the other way,” Mr. Ashford said, with some of the vehemence of intellectual opposition, besides a natural partisanship. “A lovely voice, full of nature, and freshness, and expression—which you will spoil, and render artificial, and like anybody else’s voice, if you have your way.”
“All excellence is the production of Art,” said the Signor.
“Poeta nascitur,” said the Canon; and though the words are as well known as any slang, they exercised a certain subduing influence upon the musician, who was painfully aware that he himself was not educated, except in a professional way. The two men went out together through the door into the Great Cloister, from which they passed by an arched passage to the Minor Cloister, where was Mr. Ashford’s house. Nothing could be more unlike than the tall, stooping, short-sighted scholar, and the dark keen Italianism of the Anglicised foreigner—the one man full of perception, seeing everything within his range at a glance, the other living in a glimmer of vague impressions, which took form but slowly in his mind. On the subject of their present discussion, however, Ashford had taken as distinct a view as the Signor. He had put himself on Lottie’s side instinctively, with what we have called a natural partisanship. She was like himself, she sang as the birds sing—and though his own education, after a few years of St. Michael’s, had so far progressed musically that he was as well aware of her deficiencies as the Signor, still he felt himself bound to be her champion.
“I am not sure how far we have any right to discuss a young lady who has never done anything to provoke animadversion,” he said, with an old-fashioned scrupulousness, as they threaded the shady passages. “I think it very unlikely that such a girl would ever consent to sing for the public.”
“That is what she says,” said the Signor, “but she can’t understand what she is saying. Sing for the public! I suppose that means to her to appear before a crowd of people, to be stared at, criticised, brought down to the level of professional singers. The delight of raising a crowd to one’self, binding them into mutual sympathy, getting at the heart underneath the cold English exterior, that is what the foolish girl never thinks of and cannot understand.”
“Ah!” said the Minor Canon. He was struck by this unexpected poetry in the Signor, who was not a poetical person. He said, “I don’t think I thought of that either. I suppose, for my part, I am very old-fashioned. I don’t like a woman to make an exhibition of herself.”