The elevation which Ibsen gains in _Ghosts_ through beauty of structure
and atmospheric effect does not carry over to the theme; here the
author frankly chooses honesty and foregoes sublimity. Few or no
writers since have been at once as great and as honest. If we observe
the literature of the last quarter century to see how it has met the
dilemma, we shall find perhaps an explanation of current anarchy and
experimentation. Some take refuge in subtle evasions, disguised by the
cleverness of novel technic or material. But those who do not evade the
issue follow two roads: _the road of laughter_, which goes by way of
irony and satire; and _the road of tears_, by way of pathos or cruelty.
The former path, since it leads away from the tragic emotions, need
not detain us long. With effort the romantic can school himself into
a detachment of head from heart in which he can smile at the contrast
between his dreams and the reality. His laughter may be bitter, but
it is laughter. Pirandello, aware of the flux and illusoriness of
life, deliberately contrasts it with the permanence and significance
of fiction; and extracts mirth from the grotesquerie and cleverness
of his paradoxes, in spite of the disillusionment underlying them.
Anatole France armoured his sensibility with detached artistry and the
_esprit gaulois_. Aldous Huxley, too much the moralist to be wholly
detached, solaces himself with savage satire. The whole work of Cabell
is a series of repetitions of one bitter “jest” involving the night
before and the morning after. Such writers, emotionally romantic but
intellectually sceptical, choose to laugh at their predicament rather
than weep.
The road of tears concerns us directly. It usually follows the way of
pathos. Though Aristotle made pity and fear correlative emotions, it is
a fact that we feel the former more for the weak victim like Ophelia
than for the hero, and that the more we admire, the less we need weep.
Pathos must be subordinate in heroic tragedy if the play is to elevate
our spirits. Obviously, however, the modern who sees nothing to admire
is left with pathos as his chief effect.
Pathos and horror we find in Hardy, little mitigated by any admiration
except for the author’s artistry. Rarely we find a heroism of sorts
in characters like Michael Henchard; but it is significant that the
author ended his novels with _Jude_. Galsworthy’s habitual irony always
borders on pathos if not sentiment. French “naturalism” is harsher and
at times, as in _Madame Bovary_, finds expression in bitter irony. But
pathos is none the less its most powerful effect. _The Old Wives’ Tale_
of Arnold Bennett is an English imitation; here we feel the pathos of
mere mortality quite apart from anything the very ordinary characters
do. In Theodore Dreiser, “naturalism,” though sadly in need of pruning,
still bears its bitter fruit. It is characteristic of its spirit that
Dreiser uses the word “tragedy” with reference to the fate of a Clyde
Griffiths.
But since pathos skirts the gulf of sentimentality, the “hard-boiled”
generation since the war have turned from it. Those of the younger
group who cannot laugh have as a result begun to explore another
emotion, which lies even deeper in our nature, and which is also
compatible with disillusionment. The savage in all of us finds a fierce
and hard delight in torture. Significantly the word “sadism” has become
fashionable. We may name the emotion “cruelty,” though the word is
perhaps inadequate.
In the drama an important forerunner of contemporary exploitations
of cruelty and sex, as well as of expressionism, was Frank Wedekind.
Cruelty is manifest in James Joyce. In D. H. Lawrence it accompanies
a pathological exaltation of sexuality, and thus gives him greater
hardness than his American parallel, Sherwood Anderson. A very
interesting instance of it is the work of a contemporary American poet
whose fame is still unequal to his remarkable achievements. I speak of
Robinson Jeffers.
Jeffers’ long narrative poems spread a more than Thyestian banquet of
horrors. With surprise we learn that in private life the author is so
unwilling to inflict pain that “he never picks a flower wantonly.”
But in his art he more than compensates for such sensibilities. _Roan
Stallion_, for example, depicts the passion of a modern Pasiphaë. The
unlucky husband is trampled by the stallion, and the woman shoots the
animal. _Tamar_ deals with incest between brother and sister, and ends
with a fire which burns down the house and its more or less crazy
inmates. _The Tower Beyond Tragedy_, though treating the Clytemnestra
legend with great power, ends in the incest motive between Orestes and
Electra.
The perversity of theme, however, is partly compensated by elevation of
treatment, for Jeffers has a certain grandeur of style, drawing as he
does upon Greek literature, the Bible, modern psychology, and physical
science for thought, and the beauty of natural scenery for description.
A passage which illustrates at once his power of style and his drift
toward cruelty is found in preparation for the crucial scene of _Roan
Stallion_.
Humanity is the start of the race; I say
Humanity is the mould to break away from, the crust to break
through, the coal to break into fire,
The atom to be split.
Tragedy that breaks man’s face
and a white fire flies out of it; vision that fools him
Out of his limits, desire that fools him out of his limits, unnatural
crime, inhuman science,
Slit eyes in the mask; wild loves that leap over the walls of nature,
the wild fence-vaulter science,
Useless intelligence of far stars, dim knowledge of the spinning
demons that make an atom,
These break, these pierce, these deify, praising their God shrilly
with fierce voices: not in a man’s shape
He approves the praise, he that walks lightning-naked on the
Pacific, that laces the suns with planets,
The heart of the atom with electrons: what is humanity in this
cosmos? For him, the last
Least taint of a trace in the dregs of the solution; for itself, the
mould to break away from, the coal
To break into fire, the atom to be split.[40]
In interpretation of his thought Mr. Louis Adamic quotes Mr. Jeffers
as saying that civilisation tends inevitably toward downfall through
sexual introversion. Although to attempt to “break out of humanity”
after the fashion exalted in _Roan Stallion_ is, to be sure, dangerous,
“misinterpreted in the mind of a fool or a lunatic,” nevertheless the
fault of the civilised person is that he “regards man exclusively,”
“founding his values, desires, his picture of the universe, all on
his own humanity.” Mr. Jeffers thus levels his attack directly at the
foundation of humanism, and allies himself with the naturalists who
seek salvation in the physical.
He thus flies from normal humanity into cruelty and perversion. But the
end of these is death. And in poem after poem is expressed the longing
for the peace and endurance of granite,--of the grave. The violent
destruction of the individual is the logical outcome of his creed, and
the denial of human values leads to the annihilation of humanity.
This tendency, the extreme development of which we find in Jeffers, we
find in less degree in our leading American dramatist. But in Eugene
O’Neill it is obscured by other qualities; and generalisations are
rendered difficult because he is groping and experimental, not only in
technic but in philosophy. Because of this difficulty as well as for
his intrinsic importance, O’Neill requires special consideration.