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76 MELODRAMA
faithful representation of a hospital ward was a triumph for realism at the Ambigu in the February of 1896. Sims and Shirley went at once to see it, wrote their English version which they called a " new and original melodrama " partly because it left out the hospital — too daring an idea even for Sims — and staged it at the Princess's on 21 May as The Two Boys for a single copyright performance. When thrown open to the public in the September it had the irresistible title of The Two Little Vagabonds. At the start there is a matrimonial quarrel. In the bitterness of his heart George Thornton apprentices his infant son, Dick, to a burglar. But the boy devotes his time to caring for a sickly companion, Wally, who goes home with him when the Thorntons make it up ; and now Dick's peculiar education comes in useful, for he rescues his father from a blackmailer's den by helping him through a skylight. On their way home they cross a canal by the lock and open the sluice-gates; their pursuer, close upon them, misses his foothold and is drowned. After that nothing remains except the death-bed scene of Wally for the sake of tidying things up. It sounds just the kind of play to make East Lynne more popular than ever, but this is reckoning without current faith in the virtue of slumming. Two Little Vagabonds ran for the better part of a year, and was revived after two or three months. It was still more popular on tour.
There was profit in realism, no matter how the term was interpreted. The real live rabbit gave pleasure ; so did the unreal death of the actress pretending to be a boy on the stage-carpenter's tread-mill. What did these two have in common? Costume dramas were still nourishing (and Shakespeare was popular when the real live rabbit appeared in the Forest of Arden) despite the strong liking for modern dress. Hence it was not romance that was out of favour. Playgoers were striving to break away from melodrama. The more they tried the more they sank, for realism was accentuating villainy and heroism. With a prodigious effort virtue was, in fashionable theatres, bidden not to triumph. But it did so still, by clear implication, because all that could be set up in its place was a warning that the wages of sin is death. This new and rather depressing kind of melodrama enabled people to feel they were keeping abreast of the times — to them it was real. Yet each attempt to bring imagination nearer to actuality caused angry alarm. Zola never stepped beyond the bounds of melodrama. " The wages of sin is death " is all he had to say. But in saying it he demonstrated that the unspeakable was speakable. Vizetelly, who translated his novels, went to prison for giving it voice in England.
In Therese Raquin Zola offered Paris a masterpiece of the 1870s' brand of realism. There is an old woman who becomes helpless and speech