University of Virginia Library

ONE of our most unmistakable traits as Americans is to personify ideas and movements in human guise. We like, for instance, to make Foch stand for Allied invincibility, Lenine for the spirit of revolution, or Edison for our native ingenuity. Having our idol or devil, we set about to inquire with prying curiosity into the inmost intimacies of those whom we have chosen thus to honor. It is a bit disconcerting to us, therefore, after agreeing upon Eugene G. O'Neill as the personal symbol of our awakening American drama, to find that little is known about the man himself. True, he has had four plays on Broadway in the last two seasons, "Beyond the Horizon," "The Emperor Jones," "Diff'rent," and "Gold." Two more will have reached the stage by the time these lines are read, "The Straw" and "Anna Christie," while a third, based on a legend as old as man, is likely to be disclosed before another summer arrives. Yet despite this wide and growing acquaintance with O'Neill as a dramatist, the man remains for the general public only a name, a symbol, a luring and mysterious example of that association with the sea which has always stirred the imagination.

I doubt whether any other contemporary has bothered so little as O'Neill whether the public was curious about him or not. Certainly, there is in his work no deliberate challenge to find out, if you can, what he is like, no conscious bait for the busybody. That is probably only another way of saying that he is primarily the artist, that there is nothing of the propagandist in him, no desire to stimulate interest in his dogmas and theories or in himself as guaranty of further attention to those theories. I do not believe he has any theories; theories are fallible, undependable things.

After all, though, there is close kinship between O'Neill the playwright and the man, and to know the man is to understand his work the more clearly. For out of the life he has lived and the philosophy he has gained from it he draws many of the characters and scenes and ideas for his plays; and even when he goes to his imagination for the raw material, his checkered experiences on sea and land invariably color the use of it.