IV

A writer’s ’prentice work is likely to be revealing, and O’Neill’s

is no exception. The one-act play _Thirst_, for example, reveals an

imaginative absorption in the violences and brutalities of life. Most

of the one-acts in the volume with _The Moon of the Caribbees_ have

more normal and convincing characterisation, but about half are built

upon abnormal situations involving incipient insanities or morbid

passions.

This interest in mental abnormality has not diminished. O’Neill’s plays

are studies in psychopathology. _Beyond the Horizon_ deals with a weak

romantic who takes refuge from harsh reality in dreams, and finally

dies of consumption. _Gold_ is a melodrama growing out of an insane

delusion. _Diff’rent_ is the horrible case-history of a victim of

sex-repression. _The Hairy Ape_ describes a character who, if he is not

a mere symbol, develops from incipient to raving madness. A play with

a normal beginning, “_The First Man_,” turns out to be a study of an

emotional fixation. _Welded_ depicts two egotistical introverts in whom

goes on the torturing conflict between passionate love and uncontrolled

temperament. The flames of lust and greed, fanned into madness--these

are the materials of _Desire Under the Elms_. _The Great God Brown_,

viewed apart from its symbolism, portrays split personality and

madness. _The Fountain_, beneath its exotic romanticism, is the story

of an _idée fixe_. The plot of _Strange Interlude_ might have come

from the case-book of Freud. If we cannot judge the chief character

of _Lazarus Laughed_ by human standards, we can recognise in Caligula

and Tiberius realistic studies of psychic abnormalities born of lust,

cruelty, and fear. And the author’s latest play, _Dynamo_, is a study

of religious mania.

The blighting effects of our industrial and social life seem hardly

adequate to explain this persistent interest in the pathological. To

follow the method of the new psychology which O’Neill uses so largely,

we are likely to be correct if we seek an emotional frustration; but

American life is hardly the chief cause. Similar interests are seen,

for example, in Ibsen, Strindberg, and Wedekind, all of whom must

have had their effect on the younger dramatist. My suggestion is that

O’Neill has found his highly romantic temperament incompatible with the

teachings of science, and has sought to evade the dilemma of modern

tragedy by the road of tears, exploiting both pathos and cruelty.

That his temperament is highly romantic is obvious. His early work is

almost Conradian in atmosphere; and his great vigour of imagination is

strikingly displayed in the gorgeous settings and strange situations

of plays like _Marco Millions_ and _The Fountain_. Indeed, in the

melodrama of fear and horror he is a genius, fertile in themes to

startle and amaze, and skilful in adapting them effectively to the

stage. Such a play as _Ile_, moreover, is not only horrible but

poetically true. _The Emperor Jones_ is in my opinion his masterpiece,

perfectly constructed and artistically inevitable. The settings and

plot contribute with as inexorable an art as that of Poe to a single

emotional effect, which is furthermore bound up with a clear and

convincing problem in character. The theme of _The Emperor Jones_ is

the regression of a negro to savagery; and as we watch the succession

of weird visions, and feel the emotional crescendo of the tom-toms,

at the same time we see the disintegration of the negro’s mind. The

parallel progress of outer and inner effects is beautifully executed;

and behind the individual we become aware of the dark tragedy of his

race.

But with so luxuriant a fancy, O’Neill has never been content to

construct a dream-world of his own, out of despair of the real one.

He has never abandoned the search for his dreams in actual life, and

as a consequence in his later plays his visions of beauty are forever

being distorted by the lurid light of disillusion. Thus he has seldom

written pure romance. _Marco Millions_ becomes heavy satire; and _The

Fountain_ leaves a bitter taste. For the most part he seeks to deal

realistically with contemporary life.

To see men as mere parts of a mechanistic and soulless universe, and

at the same time to long passionately for the beautiful visions of

imagination, is to find those visions a torture unless they can in some

way be reconciled with reality. Lesser writers have often been diverted

into a seeming reconciliation of them by becoming ardent propagandists;

by adopting programmes of reform, and writing problem or thesis plays.

But while O’Neill shows the romantic’s characteristic hatred of

tradition and restraint, he is not content to do less than face the

fundamental problem. And if he hates “puritanism” and sympathises with

its victim, he by no means blindly admires the libertine. Indeed, he

seems to find no man whom he can whole-heartedly admire; he can exalt

no character or cause, and thus does not gain the elevation of heroic

tragedy. He finds life a muddle; he leaves it a muddle.

Too often, indeed, the muddlement gets into the construction as well

as the themes of his plays. _Desire Under the Elms_, one of the most

nearly tragic of his plays, starts as a study of greed, with old Cabot

as the central character. Cabot, in fact, has heroic qualities, for

he is a man of will. But half way through, the play turns off into

the more alluring theme of sexual lust; old Cabot is thrust into the

background; and the ending is, surprisingly, the traditional one of

crime and retribution. The play lacks artistic unity; it falls in two.

The lack of unity is felt, again, in _Anna Christie_, which in spite

of the author’s expressed intention has for the audience simply a

conventional happy ending. It is strikingly manifest in _Strange

Interlude_. The central character of this alone knits together the

various situations and themes of the nine acts. Of the situations

three or four distinct plays might have been built. Of the themes

there are at least eight; and it is impossible to say which the author

considered central. Much, for example, is said about “happiness”

as the end of life. Again, the doubtful value of self-sacrifice is

illustrated. From Darrell’s point of view, love, that blind biological

urge, seems to be a modern variety of Fate. More than once Nina

expresses the notion that God is a woman. The most powerful scene of

the play is where Nina exults over her “three men”: are we to look

for possessiveness in love as a theme? Or a woman’s need of several

sorts of love? Or is the play a study in relativity with reference

to insanity? Certainly the character with the insane inheritance is

actually the most normal person. Or perhaps we have a study in the

results of meddling with other people’s lives. The popular success of

this play is hardly an indication of unification. That success seems

to be attained in spite of lack of unity, and to rest chiefly on the

novelty of the nine acts and of the technic of spoken thought, on the

frank treatment of sex, and on the great power of characterisation and

of separate situations.

Here is a writer with a genius for the theatre, a powerful imagination,

and great emotional force, who except in shorter studies of

melodramatic horror seems unable to canalise his energies into rounded

and unified works of art. He suffers the conflict he symbolises in

“Dion Anthony,” between his inborn longing for goodness and beauty,

and an acquired frustration, cynicism, and despair. Often the despair

conquers; but we must honour him for the fact that, having no faith,

he persists in seeking one. Unlike lesser writers he is no compromiser

with truth as he sees it; but in one play at least he has persuaded

himself into a positive affirmation. The play is _Lazarus Laughed_.

The symbolist technic of this play forces attention upon the

underlying theme. Only Lazarus is unmasked, and he is thus shown

freed from the illusions of mortality. The rhythmical repetitions and

symmetrical groups of the choruses materialise ethical sympathies and

antagonisms. And the theme is stated repeatedly: there is no death.

But when we try to understand this affirmation we are repeatedly

baffled. It cannot be the Christian belief in personal immortality. The

resurrection of Lazarus would give ground for such a view were it not

obvious that the author has taken over a Christian legend merely as

starting point for his non-Christian allegory. Not only is Christian

immortality not preached, but Christian morality is not expounded.

The hero displays not humility but arrogance. For him men are not

evil until redeemed by the grace of God; they are innately good but

perverted by fear. He thus incites them not to love one another because

children of a loving God, but to live passionately and instinctively.

To be freed from the fear of death means for those who come under

his spell not to live on earth after the Golden Rule, in meekness to

forgive and suffer wrong; but to drown all human interests in a mad

delight in death. And they laugh with exultation at the prospect of

annihilation. The paradox seems essentially irrational.

Cries Lazarus: “Once as squirming specks we crept from the tides of

the sea! Once as quivering flecks of rhythm we beat down the sun. Now

we re-enter the sun! Cast aside is our pitiable pretence, our immortal

egohood, the holy lantern behind which cringed our Fear of the Dark....

We will to die!” In a manner strikingly similar to that of Jeffers,

O’Neill exalts pan-evolutionary nature; having passed beyond horror at

the scientific demonstration of an inhuman universe, he attempts to

pull himself out of humanity into a rapturous acceptance of Nature.

But Jeffers finds no source for laughter in his god “that laces the

suns with planets, the heart of the atom with electrons.” Whence does

O’Neill derive his mirth?

He may well have got his inspiration from Nietzsche. I have summed

up Nietzsche’s idea in _The Birth of Tragedy_ as “an intoxicated joy

in annihilation and union with nature.” Significantly it is just

following an attack on Christianity that he exalts the laughing mood.

We must fear the “romantic,” he says, because the romantic tends to end

comforted like a Christian. “No! ye should first of all learn the art

of earthly comfort, ye should learn to _laugh_, my young friends, if ye

are at all determined to remain pessimists: if so, you will perhaps,

as laughing ones, eventually send all metaphysical comfortism to the

devil--and metaphysics first of all! Or, to say it in the language of

that Dionysian ogre, called Zarathustra:

“‘Lift up your hearts, my brethren, high, higher! And do not forget

your legs! Lift up also your legs, ye good dancers--and better

still if ye stand also on your heads!...

“‘This crown of the laughter, this rose-garland crown--to you, my

brethren, do I cast this crown! Laughing have I consecrated: ye

higher men, _learn_, I pray you--to laugh!’”

It needs intoxication--of one Dionysian sort or another--to find such

incitements mirth-provoking. It is necessary to abandon all reasonable

grounds for comfort except the rather chilly one that we are physically

made of stardust, and therefore should rejoice to dissolve our living

complexity back into it. _Lazarus Laughed_ indeed arouses a fair

measure of the necessary intoxication, so imaginative and emotional is

it. But its comfort can last, I fear, only while we actually hear the

laughter of Lazarus.

V

Thus our most gifted American dramatist, together with other finer

spirits of to-day, is unable to accept traditional modes or satisfy

the desire for admiration and worship. Romanticism, in identifying man

with nature, hastened the decay of a heroic tradition which it at first

attempted to foster; and under scientific naturalism the decay ended

in dissolution. Whether the author uses a so-called “naturalistic”

technique after Ibsen or Maupassant; or whether, like Wedekind or

Jeffers or Cabell, he seeks other modes of expression, so long as he

thinks of man as in no way superior to the outer world or different

from it, he is none the less subject to the naturalistic point of

view.[41]

Recently, to be sure, certain developments of science have given rise

to hopes of mysticism within a naturalistic monism. The argument,

so far as an unscientific reader understands it, seems to run thus:

Einstein has offered proof that time and space form a continuum and

that events are “relative.” Studies of the atom have upset orthodox

conceptions of physics, and physicists themselves are beginning to

talk about matter in terms that sound for all the world like Bishop

Berkeley. Science admits a mysterious enveloping Unknown.

The new hypotheses, of course, merely re-enforce the acknowledgment of

ultimate mystery which thoughtful people have always made. The novelty

of the new mysticism is that it builds not on theology or metaphysics

but mathematics and laboratory experiment. The next step in its

argument is the dubious one.

If science grants an enveloping Unknown, the man who would explain

that Unknown in terms of his desires is as likely to be right as one

who explains it in inhuman terms. And if there is a chance that one’s

desires may be true, it needs no psychologist to assure us that plenty

of people will immediately assume that they are true. For them science

seems to justify mysticism and open the door for the hosts of dreams,

so long shut out of a rationalistic universe. But the weakness of

such wishful thinking seems obvious; and to the humanist the whole

argument is beside the point because it would vindicate human values by

naturalistic data.

If some scientists are nowadays growing mystical, it is not therefore

logical to deny the facts that their controlled experiments have

demonstrated. The dilemma of modern tragedy remains very real. There

is no refuge in obscurantism through return to illusions which science

has shattered. Reason denies the objective reality of our dreams; and

so long as the honest man accepts a monism which identifies man with

nature, he can find no justification for tragic exaltation.

The humanist, however, denies the necessity for this identification.

Without in the slightest degree disparaging the truth or worth of

physical knowledge he maintains that the realm of value has significant

validity when taken as distinct from the realm of fact. The realm of

value belongs to man; that of fact, to outer nature. One depends on the

other, but the two are different.

Value depends on the operation of physical laws, but it remains value.

The fallacy of the naturalist has been the assumption that to explain

the cause of a thing is to explain away its value. Human emotions may

be caused on the naturalistic plane by the secretion of endocrine

glands or what not; on the human plane they remain what they were to

Homer or Shakespeare. It is interesting to know about chromosomes

and Mendelian laws, about biochemistry and vital machinery; but human

values remain the same. Whatever the findings of science, man humanly

speaking is still what he always was: comic, pitiful, despicable--now

and then sublime.

The humanist is concerned with the realm of values, and thus is

concerned with ethical laws. The lives of all men progress under

these laws; and the endeavours of great men have been to discover and

formulate them. To the humanist it seems evident that literary art,

dealing as it does with human actions, must deal with ethical laws,

which are the foundation of conduct. And it would seem obvious folly to

attempt to divorce literature from them.

Romantic art as recreation is a blessing to jaded mortals; and

naturalistic art at its best is, within its limits, penetrating. But

to the humanist it seems that both types of art have failed in dealing

with ethical laws. The romantic is always an extremist, demanding

perfection, or denying the existence of goodness. The naturalist has

become so absorbed in the mechanism of the instrument that he has

become deaf to its music. The humanist desires emotional satisfaction;

he desires to face the truth. But he also wishes to preserve a

normal humanity in which human values are central. Though hearing

the revelations of science, he keeps his ear attuned to the music of

humanity. Though enjoying the thrills of liberated feeling, he is

unwilling to purchase them at the expense of moderation or proportion.

He believes not in prohibition but in temperance.

Ethical laws are what make man human, and it is these that the artist

must ponder. And to find guidance he cannot do better than follow

Arnold’s advice--not less sound for being tiresomely familiar--to know

the best that has been thought and said in the world. He must break

with the contemporary tradition of romantic scorn for tradition; he

must seek to become a part of the great tradition, by knowing the

best. To become a part of it does not mean to attempt mere imitation;

it means that the artist will be forevermore dissatisfied with

pettiness or insincerity in himself, and will have a lofty but possible

standard by which to measure his work.

Those who work in the “modern temper” are unable to discover a worthy

heroism to exalt. But if one turns to the records of classic art, he

will find a nobility of spirit no less admirable to-day than in the

past. His response will be an evidence of the existence of heroism,

a proof of its reality in human nature. It will be a proof of its

reality, of course, not in perfection but in aspiration. And if one

looks about him he will find the same aspiration in living men and

women. He will find it even expressed in deeds--imperfectly, humanly.

If he should be artist enough to give adequate expression to what

he feels and sees, he could rise above the dilemma against which

naturalism has forced our modern literature.

Cynicism will, to be sure, urge that every man finds what he looks

for, and to look for greatness will lead to a denial of evident

imperfections. The humanist professes himself not unaware of the

latter. Long before naturalist novelists pictured the _bête humaine_,

Christianity declared man innately evil; but unlike naturalism,

Christianity believed man capable of redemption by Grace. The humanist

as such is not concerned with theology, and is content to believe that

Grace, however it comes, is sometimes found. He is inclined to doubt

that it comes only to those who have joined a church; he is inclined

to believe that nobility is found now and again in all sorts and

conditions of men. But the main thing is that it exists; and no artist

who does not see the good with the evil sees life steadily and whole.

To follow the narrow path between cynicism and romantic idealisation;

to recognise the imperfections in man and the inevitable domination of

physical force over the individual, and yet to preserve admiration for

the indomitable spirit which drives the individual to will and to do

nobly; and finally to find adequate means of artistic expression--that

is the task of one who would write great tragedy. Though hard, it is

still possible. Only when the artist follows lofty standards can he

hope to control and guide his own efforts toward sublimity. While

humanism offers him no magic key to success, it offers him hope, and a

discipline.