University of Virginia Library

§ 5

So much for the playwright as realist. Then there is the other side of O'Neill—the side that may, perhaps, be counted on to mitigate the severity of his realism if it doesn't altogether displace it. It is the quality which was first feebly discernible in

"Fog," published with "Thirst" seven years ago—the quality which found surer expression in "Where the Cross is Made" and the longer play derived from it, "Gold"; the quality which was finally dominant for the first time in "The Emperor Jones," that soul-baring tragedy of a black monarch thrown back on his personal and racial fears in flight from his rebellious subjects. It is the quality of the imaginative, of a new and virile kind of romance, which has thus grown to a ruling-place among O'Neill's several styles of expression. Here, too, as in his realism, the issue is tragic, but with a profounder pity, a readier sympathy and admiration for the struggler against fate. This is the O'Neill whose eyes have got the better of his mouth, whose own vital force found anchorage in time, but not before he had seen the essential tragedy of life face to face on stormy seas, in unkempt lodging-houses, and notorious barrooms.

It has been O'Neill's misfortune to have his plays reach the stage out of the order of their composition. "Gold," therefore, seems to have been the successor to "The Emperor Jones," though in reality it is a considerably older piece of work. Its progenitor, the one-act sketch, "Where the Cross is Made," is a fantastic study of an old sea-captain who finds what he thinks is treasure while marooned on a tropic isle, who sends his comrades back to rescue it, and who goes mad awaiting their return. There is too much antecedent action, too much to be explained for the one-act form, and O'Neill, therefore, expanded his material into a full-length play, with the first scene on the island, the second and third at home preparatory to the dubious voyage, and the last in Captain Bartlett's ghostly cabin atop his home, whence in his madness he peers out to sea in vain for the lost Sarah Allen. It is almost impossible to tell from the clumsy production of the play just what are the values and the possibilities of "Gold." It is fairly evident, though, that the second and third acts are weak and that the author was feeling his way toward a new romanticism in the psychology of the mystical and the subconscious.

I asked O'Neill not long ago what the theater meant to him and life.

"The theater to me," he said, "is life—the substance and interpretation of life."

"And life?"

"Life is struggle, often, if not usually, unsuccessful struggle; for most of us have something within us which prevents us from accomplishing what we dream and desire. And then, as we progress, we are always seeing further than we can reach. I suppose that is one reason why I have come to feel so indifferent toward political and social movements of all kinds. Time was when I was an active socialist, and, after that, a philosophical anarchist. But to-day I can't feel that anything like that really matters. It is rather amusing to me to see how seriously some people take politics and social questions and how much they expect of them. Life as a whole is changed very little, if at all, as a result of their course. It seems to me that, as far as we can judge, man is much the same creature, with the same primal emotions and ambitions and motives, the same powers and the same weaknesses, as in the time when the Aryan race started toward Europe

from the slopes of the Himalayas. He has become better acquainted with those powers and those weaknesses, and he is learning ever so slowly how to control them. The birth-cry of the higher men is almost audible, but they will not come by tinkering with externals or by legislative or social fiat. They will come at the command of the imagination and the will."

All of O'Neill's plays have reached the stage from their author's imagination by medium of a penciled handwriting so small that it takes a lens to read it. Several times he has tried to enlarge his script so that some one else could copy it, but he has always relapsed after a few pages into blinding miniature. Meticulous and deliberate, perfectly formed, a page from the drawing-board on which he composes seems to typify the exactitude, the power of penetration, and the relentlessness of the mind that guides the hand. In that same intense, introspective cipher, with a patience born of hours and months at sea, is emerging slowly the ambitious panorama of his legend drama. In it, later, will come another negro play as original in conception as "The Emperor Jones," and a trilogy analyzing and interpreting our materialistic civilization that is still dimly in the back of his head.

It is too early yet to try to place Eugene O'Neill as playwright and as artist. He has just begun his career, but in some ways he seems to have begun it at a point beyond where many others have left off. Whether he can sustain the pace he has set himself and develop it with the variety and the flexibility demanded by the day in which he lives, is a question for time to answer. I do not think he is nearly so much interested in the answer as he is in completing the job in hand. And that is a good sign. It is a good sign, too, that he has chosen as his head-master in his profession such a one as Synge, and it is an even better sign that he has caught the secret of the master without slavishly copying him; for no one more than O'Neill recalls so distinctly the lyric speech of the author of "The Playboy of the Western World," that quality in dialogue which cries out to be spoken aloud—a quality observed by both with a quick ear for the cadence of the colloquial.

After all, though, O'Neill is roundly and soundly American, the product of our life and our thought and our civilization. To call him our greatest living playwright, though, even if he deserved it, would not be very flattering just now. Greater than what other? The field is discouragingly barren. Perhaps it is just as well to leave the question open by admitting that he points the way toward one worthier than himself, and that he himself in full maturity may be the one to whom he shows the way.