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86 MELODRAMA
William Terriss appeared in a new version by Halliday of Nicholas Nickleby.
Obviously there was a temporary revolt against brutal realism. Perhaps a story of Tom Robertson's early struggles may show how this operated in an author's mind. On being shown into a nursery when a rice-pudding was on the table, he burst into tears — his own children were starving. Yet he wrote the scene of a roly-poly pudding in Ours without an inkling that hungry men before Sebastopol regarded food as anything but a joke. That was realism without reality. Little Gerty, The Lamplighter's Daughter turned this the other way round. It was adapted by George Lander from a novel, " The Lamplighter ' , for the Prince of Wales's, Liverpool, in 1876. Gerty, an unwashed Cinderella unromanticized, is driven out of doors into the snow, though " The scene should not be painted as if covered with snow, as it would be out of place when it is used again in the last Act ". There is a preposterous plot with a fire at sea as its sensation. At last in " The Churchyard, as in Act I (no snow) ", the comic servant recalls how he caught gold-fever in California and there heard a confession, and so gives Gerty 's father back his good name. It is about as far-fetched as a story could be, but when the child confesses to having eaten " the make-weight " 1 any audience would know there was such a thing as hunger. This, of course, was Jo's doing. Dickens at third or fourth hand was more natural than " naturalism ".
Should plays mean anything or nothing? There was no harm in meaning nothing, for excitement was valued for its own sake : scenic marvels had been more important than morals ever since Boucicault began. But what was indignantly called " the play panoramic or ultra-sensational " went further. There was a time, mourned an oldfashioned critic like a child with more cake than it could eat, when one sensation scene was sufficient for any play, but now one was needed for each act. The lament deserves its place in the history of grumbling. As one more glimpse of realism, The Still Alarm by Joseph Arthur, an American drama brought to the Princess's in 1889, is peculiar. From the programme it would seem that the performance was meant to demonstrate (a) the use of fire-escapes in public buildings and (b) the social welfare of firemen. " Surely ", D. L. Murray comments, " one of these cases where the title makes a play." What read like a terrifying hint of cataplexy, the mesmeric state 'twixt waking and sleeping caused by a sudden shock of fear, merely meant that villains had put the bell out of order.
1 When loaves were sold by weight a slice of bread had to be supplied with one that was underweight.