he Tetrarch. As for John the Baptist the camel's hair with
which he was clothed must have cost as pretty a penny as any of the
modern kind, and if he wore a girdle of skins about his loins it was
concealed under a really regal cloak. He was a voice; but not one
crying in the wilderness. He was in fact an operatic tenor comme il
faut, who needed only to be shut up in a subterranean jail with the
young woman who had pursued him up hill and down dale, in and out of
season to make love to her in the most approved fashion of the Paris
Grand Opera.

What shall we think of the morals of this French opera, after we have
seen and heard that compounded by the Englishman Oscar Wilde and the
German Richard Strauss? No wonder that England's Lord Chamberlain asked
nothing more than an elimination of the Biblical names when he licensed
a performance of "Herodiade" at Covent Garden. There was no loss of
dramatic quality in calling Herod, Moriame, and Herodias, Hesotade, and
changing the scene from Jerusalem to Azoum in Ethiopia; though it must
have been a trifle diverting to hear fair-skinned Ethiopians singing
Schma Yisroel, Adonai Elohenu in a temple which could only be that of
Jerusalem. John the Baptist was only Jean in the original and needed
not to be changed, and Salome is not in the Bible, though Salome, a
very different woman is--a fact which the Lord Chamberlain seems to
have overlooked when he changed the title of the opera from "Herodiade"
to "Salome."

Where does Salome come from, anyway? And where did she get her
chameleonlike nature? Was she an innocent child, as Flaubert represents
her, who could but lisp the name of the prophet when her mother told
her to ask for his head? Had she taken dancing lessons from one of the
women of Cadiz to learn to dance as she must have danced to excite such
lust in Herod? Was she a monster, a worse than vampire as she is
represented by Wilde and Strauss? Was she an "Israelitish grisette" as
Pougin called the heroine of the opera which it took one Italian
(Zanardini) and three Frenchmen (Milliet, Gremont, and Massenet) to
concoct? No wonder that the brain of Saint-Saens reeled when he went to
hear "Herodiade" at its first performance in Brussels and found that
the woman whom he had looked upon as a type of lasciviousness and
monstrous cruelty had become metamorphosed into a penitent Magdalen.
Read the plot of the opera and wonder!

Salome is a maiden in search of her mother whom John t