Chapter 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.