How long, ask you, will it take to become an artist? No one knows. Two minds differ—in fact, no two are alike. A few months suffice to make the crudest student an adept singer; or rather, is time enough to make him sing as well as his mind wishes. From that time on the voice grows better only as the mind grows and comprehends how to further use the voice. So, then, as soon as one can sing so as to acceptably please friends, it is a duty which the pupil owes himself to sing for those whom he pleases. The effort gives him experience and prepares him to meet the next circle. As the ability grows, seek to sing before greater artists, and with the best singers. The time will come—it may be one year, two years, three years, or even more—when it is best to go before the best artists of the world and secure their commendation and their co-operation (silently it may be) to further for you the prosecution and completion of your pre-arranged plan regarding your music. What matters it how long this takes. Life is, if you are using it aright, a perfection of a plan of existence which will end only when we pass over the River. A portion, more or less long, used in making a musician and an artist, is but a part of the whole, and a development of the talent lent us by the good Father, and which we, by our effort, eventually return to Him, added to, and made beautiful because of the Heavenborn Art—music—which we have absorbed to ourselves. Nor is this all, for in the development of our own talent we have carried the whole world unconsciously upward nearest the pure, the beautiful and the true.
CHAPTER II.
DESULTORY VOICE PRACTICE.
"Nothing should be done without a purpose."
Aurelius.
"Music is never stationary; successive forms and styles are only like so many resting-places—like tents pitched and taken down again on the road to the Ideal."
Liszt.