incomparable magnificence: it has that intangible
quality that smites you with its own mood: just the something that marks
the difference between an artist and a genius. There are those who sniff
at him. "No artist," they say; "look what he sings." They would like him
better if he were not popular; if he concerned himself, not with Puccini
and Leoncavallo, but with those pretentiously subtle triflers, Debussy
and his followers. Some people can never accept beauty unless it be
remote. But true beauty is never remote. The art which demands
transcendentalism for its appreciation stamps itself at once as
inferior. True art, like love, asks nothing, and gives everything. The
simplest people can understand and enjoy Puccini and Caruso and Melba,
because the simplest people are artists. And clearly, if beauty cannot
speak to us in our own language, and still retain its dignity, it is not
beauty at all.

Caruso speaks to us of the little things we know, but he speaks with a
lyric ecstasy. Ecstasy is a horrible word; it sounds like something to
do with algebra; but it is the one word for this voice. The passion of
him has at times almost frightened me. I remember hearing him at the
first performance of "Madame Butterfly," and he hurt us. He worked up
the love-duet with Butterfly at the close of the first act in such
fashion that our hands were wrung, we were perspiring, and I at least
was near to fainting. Such fury, such volume of liquid sound could not
go on, we felt. But it did. He carried a terrific crescendo passage as
lightly as a school-girl singing a lullaby, and ended on a tremendous
note which he sustained for sixty seconds. As the curtain fell we
dropped back in our seats, limp, dishevelled, and pale. It was we who
were exhausted. Caruso trotted on, bright, alert, smiling, and not the
slightest trace of fatigue did he show.

It seems to have been a superb stroke of fortune for us that Caruso
should have come along contemporaneously with Puccini. Puccini has never
definitely written an opera for his friend; yet, to hear him sing them,
you might think that every one had been specially made for him alone.
Their temperaments are marvellously matched. Each is Italian and
Southern to the bone. Whatever Caruso may be singing, whether it be
Mozart or Gounod or Massenet or Weber, he is really singing Italy.
Whatever setting Puccini may take for his operas, be it Japan, or Paris,
or the American West, his music is never anythi