Part 13

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.

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.

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.

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.