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90 MELODRAMA
opera at Her Majesty's and Covent Garden for many years. Outwardly they were unlike, for the father, long-haired and clean-shaven, suggested a German musician, while the son had the affably expansive smile of a salesman. But opera, very grand and foreign, was for both the greatest of life's glories. From this both derived their ideas of stage-management, which they bestowed upon the drama lavishly, extravagantly and sometimes deplorably.
Augustus Harris pere, as senior manager of the Princess's in i860, prevailed upon James Anderson, a leading tragedian of the day, to play Macbeth amid " new effects ". When Duncan was being murdered the witches exulted in a transparency high up in the castle wall ; their platform gave way, all were injured and one of them died. Then Banquo's ghost appeared in a transparent pillar where the lighting set his wig on fire. Under the same management, Les Couteaux D'Or of Paul Feval became The Golden Daggers by Edmund Yates, when Fechter appeared at the Princess's in 1862. Its sensation was a duel in punts on the Thames. The pleasant picture of moonlit water represented by steel gauze was spoilt when the punts would not move an inch without dragging the metal net after them.
The younger Harris regularly produced similar effects. Sometimes there were blunders bad enough to wreck any ordinary management. But his was not ordinary. " Seldom ", states the Dramatic Peerage of 1892, " can one chronicle so brilliant and successful a career " — when he was at the age of forty. The dazzlement began only twelve years earlier and was to last, because of his early death, only four years more. " Napoleon " and " colossus " were the compliments he earned in that brief period, chiefly it would seem because he made Drury Lane pay. But there was something else, taken for granted now but shining new then. His was the spirit of what became known as " big business ". Instead of interesting himself in the theatre either for its own sake or as a means of self-aggrandizement, he eyed it like a gamester ; his zest came from faces startled by Ins wild extravagance, his reward the punter's joy in having backed his fancy. At the start it was his father's death which kept him from shouldering his way into high finance. Then he consented, for the sake of ready money, to play Shakespeare's Malcolm at Manchester in 1 873 . After three years of acting he showed such a flair for " front of the house " that he suddenly became the manager of an opera company, and then just as suddenly took over sole responsibility for staging the Crystal Palace Christmas pantomime of Sinbad the Sailor, a tale whose very nature is " panoramic or ultrasensational ".
But Meritt was before him. He had taken the cue from Formosa ;