nging could be
dispensed with. That, practically, is what the direction to breathe
naturally amounts to. For such breathing is both natural and artistic.
Unfortunately, however, a singer is not a somnambulist, and when he
faces his teacher, or a large audience, he not only is not in that
deliciously unconscious state induced by normal slumber, but he is very
much awake, with the added tension caused by nervousness and excitement.
He is conscious, self-conscious in the artistic sense, unless he has
been trained to appear otherwise. For, in the final analysis, that lack
of self-consciousness, that ease and spontaneity which we associate with
the highest art, is, save in the case of a few superlatively gifted
individuals, the result of method and training. Therefore, the direction
to breathe naturally is begging the question. It states a result,
without explaining how it is to be acquired. Once acquired, method is
merged into habit and habit into seeming instinct--that is to say, it
becomes method, responding so spontaneously to the slightest suggestion
of the will, that only the perfected result of it is apparent to the
listener. Under such favorable conditions created by a correct method
of instruction, the nervousness inseparable from a debut, and in many
singers never wholly overcome even after frequent public appearances,
is disguised by an assumption of calm, into which the poise and aspect
of a trained singer naturally fall. All this is much facilitated by the
fundamental acquisition of correct breathing.

This correct breathing, which is the artistic respiration of the
accomplished singer, is based upon physiological laws which can be
described, prescribed and practised. When Salvatore Marchesi, the
husband of Mathilde Marchesi, and himself a famous singer, said that
prepared or instructed mechanical effort to get more breath results in
less, he said what is true only if the instruction is wrong. His dictum,
if accepted unreservedly, would leave the door open to all kinds of
"natural," haphazard and go-as-you-please methods of breathing, the
"simplicity" of which consists in simply being incorrect. The physiology
of breathing is an exact science, and the singer who is taught its
laws and obeys them, will acquire in due time the habit of artistic
respiration. It is that breathing that is as natural and unconscious
as in normal slumber, so _natural_ in fact that it has to be acquired
through correct instruction, beca