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XIV INTRODUCTION
What, then, was new in melodrama as the twentieth century approached? Strictly speaking, the answer might be, " Nothing ", since essentials remained unchanged; but there was a continual outcry over scenic superficialities, and these are well worthy of our concern in spite of, or because of, their insensibility to the absurd — always one of melodrama's hallmarks. Realism, which altered nothing, was supposed to alter everything. In the vain hope of achieving truth to life, scenes were constructed to reproduce on the one hand calamities reported in the newspapers, and on the other the small, insignificant details of ordinary homes. Realism had yet another meaning. When uttered in a tone of horror it stood for the encroachment into fiction of such scandalous subjects as bigamy and infidelity or worse — straight from courts of law, in modern dress.
These were judged to be immoral in their tendency, and something had to be done to counterbalance them. Hence the ever-increasing stress laid on the sense of guilt, the argument being that if sinners in plays were sufficiently conscience-stricken their influence over audiences would be good or, at least, not quite so bad. Here is the clue to the maze of dramatic literature which reflects the divergent beliefs that set everybody at loggerheads while the old century was giving birth to the new. Neither Ibsen nor Irving can be left out of our reckoning : both were involved in the sense of guilt, though one saw in it a sign of grace and the other a proof of damnation. And when Ibsen had won the day, so that virtue could no longer be regarded as a sure means of profit, since he had so clearly demonstrated it to be its own painful reward, the day not only of melodrama but also of melodramatic thinking might reasonably have been said to be over. But it was not. First it took on a new lease of life in the theatre, and then started a fresh existence in films, talking-films, radio, television and threedimensional films with other mechanized metamorphoses to follow.
Such lively survivals of the spirit which has been my study, means that this book cannot be regarded in a purely antiquarian light. People still weigh existence in terms of praise and blame, and still believe, despite all the evidence to the contrary accumulated during two world wars, that heroes prosper while villains die miserably. Perhaps it is possible to prefer this in modern entertainments to beer and skittles, perhaps not, but we need not be deluded by it now we know whence it comes and what it is worth. In Victorian settings it had a charm altogether lacking in ours. After the feeble displays of half-hearted wickedness that we are treated to by living authors who aspire to be moralists, playgoers might like to be reminded what genuine melodramas were like when vice and virtue were cherished not as the luxuries they seem to be now, but as necessities.