ears and stir the fancy of his listeners--in the beginning of the
second act, where there is a murmur of real Japanese melody. As a rule,
however, Signor Mascagni seems to have been careless in the matter of
local color, properly so, perhaps, for, strictly speaking, local color
in the lyric drama is for comedy with its petty limitations, not for
tragedy with its appeal to large and universal passions. Yet it is in
the lighter scenes, the scenes of comedy, like the marionette show, the
scenes of mild pathos, like the monologues of Iris, and the scenes of
mere accessory decoration, like that of the laundresses, the mousmes in
the first act, with its purling figure borrowed from "Les Huguenots"
and its unnecessarily uncanny col legno effect conveyed from
"L'Africaine" that it is most effective.

CHAPTER XII

"MADAMA BUTTERFLY"

This is the book of the generation of "Madama Butterfly": An adventure
in Japan begat Pierre Loti's "Madame Chrysantheme"; "Madame
Chrysantheme" begat John Luther Long's "Madame Butterfly," a story;
"Madame Butterfly," the story, begat "Madame Butterfly," a play by
David Belasco; "Madame Butterfly," the play, begat "Madama Butterfly,"
the opera by Giacomo Puccini. The heroine of the roving French
romanticist is therefore seen in her third incarnation in the heroine
of the opera book which L. Illica and G. Giacosa made for Puccini. But
in operatic essence she is still older, for, as Dr. Korngold, a
Viennese critic, pointed out, Selica is her grandmother and Lakme her
cousin.

Even this does not exhaust her family history; there is something like
a bar sinister in her escutcheon. Mr. Belasco's play was not so much
begotten, conceived, or born of admiration for Mr. Long's book as it
was of despair wrought by the failure of another play written by Mr.
Belasco. This play was a farce entitled "Naughty Anthony," created by
Mr. Belasco in a moment of aesthetic aberration for production at the
Herald Square Theatre, in New York, in the spring of 1900. Mr. Belasco
doesn't think so now, but at the time he had a notion that the public
would find something humorous and attractive in the spectacle of a
popular actress's leg swathed in several layers of stocking. So he made
a show of Blanche Bates. The public refused to be amused at the
farcical study in comparative anatomy, and when Mr. Belasco's friends
began to fault him for having pandered to a low taste, and he felt the
smart of failure in addi