, something highly important, remains to be superimposed.
Voice is physical. But everything that colors voice, charging it with
emotion, giving it its peculiar quality and making it different from
other voices, is largely, although not wholly, the result of a psychical
control--a control not exercised mysteriously from without, like
Svengali's over Trilby, but by the singer himself from within. Every
singer is his own mesmerist, or he has mistaken his vocation. For while
voice is a physical manifestation, its "atmosphere," its emotional
thrill and charm, is a psychical one--the result of the individual's
thought and feeling, acting unconsciously or, better still,
subconsciously, on that physical thing, the voice.

Between the two, however, between mind and body, there lies, like a
borderland of fancy, yet most real, the nervous system, crossed and
recrossed by the most delicate, the most sensitive filaments ever
spun, filaments that touch, caress, or permeate each and every muscle
concerned in voice-production, calling them into play with the rapidity
of mental telegraphy. Over this network of nerves the mind, or--if you
prefer to call it so--the artistic sense, sends its messages, and it
is the nerves and muscles working in harmony that results in a correct
production of the voice. So important, indeed, is the cooperation of
the nervous system, that it is a question whether the whole psychology
of song may not be referred to it--whether the degree of emotional
thrill, in different voices, may not be the result of greater or less
sensitiveness in the nervous system of different singers. This might
explain why some very beautiful voices lack emotional quality. In such
singers the physical action of the vocal organs and of all the resonance
cavities of the head may be perfect, but the nerves are not sufficiently
sensitive to the emotion which the song is intended to express, and so
fail to carry it to the voice.

Immense progress has been made in anatomical research, and in no other
branch more than in the study of the throat and of the larynx, which is
the voice-box of the human body. There also has been a great advance in
the study of metaphysics. It would seem high time, therefore, that both
the results of modern anatomical study and the deductions of advanced
psychological research, should be recognized in the use of that subtle
and beautiful thing, the human voice, which in its ultimate quality is
a combination of p