rt of thing.
Can we thank nine months with Mme. Marchesi for the instantaneous
success and subsequent brilliant career of Mme. Melba? Against this
training offset the years and years of road playing and the more years
of study at home in retirement to account for the career of Mrs.
Fiske. The Australian soprano was born with a naturally-placed and
flexible voice. Her shake is said to have been perfection when she was
a child; her scale was even; her intonation impeccable. She had very
little to learn except the roles in the operas she was to sing and her
future was very clearly marked from the night she made her debut as
Gilda in _Rigoletto_. Mme. Patti was equally gifted. Mme. Pasta and
Mme. Fremstad, on the other hand, toiled very slowly towards fame. The
former singer was an absolute failure when she first appeared in
London and it took several years of hard work to make her the greatest
lyric artist of her day. The great Jenny Lind retired from the stage
completely defeated, only to return as the most popular singer of her
time. Mischa Elman has told me he never practices; Leo Ornstein, on
the other hand, spends hours every day at the piano. Mozart sprang,
full-armed with genius, into the world. He began composing at the age
of four. No training was necessary for him, but Beethoven and Wagner
developed slowly. In the field of writers there are even more happy
examples. Hundreds of boys have spent years in theme and literature
courses in college preparing in vain for a future which was never to
be theirs, while other youths with no educations have taken to writing
as a cat takes to cat-nip. Should we assume that the annual output of
Professor Baker's class at Harvard produces better playwrights than
Moliere or Shakespeare, neither of whom enjoyed Professor Baker's
lectures, nor, I think I am safe in conjecturing, anything like them?

What, after all, constitutes training? For a creative or
interpretative genius mere existence seems to be sufficient. Joseph
Conrad, Nicholas Rimsky-Korsakov, and Patrick MacGill all were sailors
for many years before they began to write. We owe "Youth" and the
first section of _Scheherazade_ to this accident. MacGill also had the
privilege of digging potatoes; he writes about it in "The Rat-pit."
Mrs. Patrick Campbell learned enough about how to move about and how
to speak in the country houses she frequented before she began her
professional career to enable her immediately to take a p