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92 MELODRAMA
life showed a Collision on the Atlantic, TattersalTs with its Sale of Horses, Cremorne with its Dancing Platform and 10,000 Lights, Goodwood on the Grand Race-Day, the Thames Embankment with its Electric Witness, and Seven Dials by Night. These were still drawing crowds to Holborn when Harris had to prescribe a cure for the listless tendencies of Drury Lane. There in 1880 Pettitt, Meritt and he together created The World out of a notion taken from the Grecian's Rescue On The Raft a dozen years earlier. They " treated melodrama very much like a pantomime ". A ship was blown up, there was a mutiny on board, a raft disturbed the peace of mid-ocean with dead and dying, a man was incarcerated in a lunatic asylum on a false certificate, a villain who desired to compromise a woman's honour met a just fate in tumbling headlong down a hotel lift-shaft, and Harris as the player of this part bore hissing with " delightful indifference ". Clement Scott praised the authors for discovering the golden rule that had guided the pens of Charles Reade, Dion Boucicault, Wilkie Collins and all the most popular writers of drama or fiction. " Believe me," he solemnly averred, " it is not cant, or humbug, or claptrap, to deal in generous sentiment ; it is human, it is nature. The mask of affectation and the veneer of cheap satire are rudely torn off when a popular play is represented. People don't want to be told when their hearts and better natures are touched ; they feel it."
So they were again made to feel it in Youth, the Drury Lane drama of 1 88 1, by Paul Meritt and Augustus Harris, with the latter as hero. The Rev. Joseph Darlington once sinned with Mrs. Walsingham. Now he casts her off and she revenges herself upon his son, who is arrested at her soiree and sent to prison. There he is saved from death by an " illiterate fellow " who in a manly maimer declares that no brazen bully shall kill his pal. The " Departure of the Troopship " leads to " The Defence of Hawk's Point " (Rorke's Drift) and " The Son's Return ", where Clement Scott found " more nature " in all the manly and generous actions between man and man. To another critic Pluck ; A Story Of £$0,000, by Pettitt and Harris in 1882, was " one of the worst plays of its kind winch has ever been placed on the stage of a West-End London theatre ". The heroine who claims the -£50,000 is to travel by the 9.15, which the villain decides to wreck. Harris has him arrested for fraud and forgery, so that he comes to the station handcuffed. Railway lines curve across the stage with a practicable wooden bridge, signal-posts and other accessories (which is precisely how the scene had been set for the body-on-the-line episode in Land Rats And Water Rats at the Surrey). The approaching engine is heard