whole voice up to a more even standard of excellence.
It leaves the best notes as good as ever and brings the notes which
naturally are not so satisfactory, nearer the standard of the best. The
great singers, in addition to natural aptitude, remain students
throughout their careers.

There are certain fundamental principles in a correct method of
voice-production, for it is based upon study and knowledge of the organs
concerned therein. But if the method were a hard-and-fast one, it would
not be correct. For there are so many individual differences, physical
and temperamental, between pupils, that there must be elasticity and
adaptability in a method that claims to produce the best results.

Knowledge and experience should be combined in a teacher. Garcia wrote
a voice-manual; and Tosi published a method as far back as 1723. But a
teacher who has bought a translation of the "Traite complet de l'Art de
Chant" by no means is a second Garcia, nor has a teacher who chances
to have read Tosi's book a right to set himself up as an instructor of
singing after the old Italian method. The old Italians, like Tosi and
Porpora, were men of great practical experience in teaching, and they
understood how to adapt method to individual needs. Consciously or
unconsciously, their method was physiological--the fundamental
principles of the physiology of voice-production were there; but these
great teachers knew that individual differences had to be allowed for
and that a singing-method is not a shoemaker's last.

Sometimes, indeed, it is the pupil who makes the master. One of those
born singers, man or woman, whom Nature has endowed with superlative
gifts and whom some unknown yet meritorious teacher, perhaps in America,
has started aright, goes abroad and, after a while, comes forth, not
made, but fortunately not marred, from a foreign vocal studio and
enters upon a great career--and the foreign teacher's fame becomes
international. The real foundation for that career may have been laid
in an American city. But ambitious young Americans, instead of seeking
out that teacher, will flock to the foreign one.

In such matters we are the most gullible people on the face of the
earth. An Italian, now dead, but in his day the most high-priced
singing-teacher in London, used to devote the greater part of his lesson
periods to telling his pupils how fond certain members of the English
Royal family were of him and to pointing out the souvenirs