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 addition, he grew heartily ashamed of himself. His affairs, moreover, began to take on a desperate aspect; the season threatened to be a ruinous failure, and he had no play ready to substitute for"Naughty Anthony." Some time before a friend had sent him Mr. Long's book, but he had carelessly tossed it aside. In his straits it came under his eyes again, and this time he saw a play in it--a play and a promise of financial salvation. It was late at night when he read the story, but he had come to a resolve by morning and in his mind's eye had already seen his actors in Japanese dress. The drama lay in the book snugly enough; it was only necessary to dig it out and materialize it to the vision. That occupation is one in which Mr. Belasco is at home. The dialogue went to his actors a few pages at a time, and the pictures rose rapidly in his mind. Something different from a stockinged leg now!

Glimpses of Nippon--its mountains, waters, bridges, fl