Eugene O'Neill
By A. V. COOKMAN
BY nature a rover and adventurer, Mr. Eugene O'Neill has not until now ceased to .rove from one dramatic experiment to another and to write adventurously. • Since Beyond the Horizon established him as America's leading dramatist he has been a dozen things by turn and nothing long—a sentimentalist in The Straw, a realist, ruthless, stern and bitter in Diff'rent, a dreamer, a fantastic, a grim humorist in The Emperor Jones, a symbolist in The Hairy Ape and The Great God Brown, a tragic realist in Desire Under the Elms, a satirist in Marco Millions, a romantic in The Fountain, an antinomian in Strange Interlude, a neo-classicist in Mourning Becomes Electra, and in Lazarus Laughed and Dynamo less a dramatist than an impetuous thinker in search of a creed. Whatever we may think of his actual achievements no one can say that he has not striven heroically after variety, and in a theatre choked with dead technical devices the craftsman who is at once ardent and honest is a figure we are always eager to applaud. It would be ungrateful to grudge Mr. O'Neill some relaxation. All the same it is surprising to observe how prosaically this stormy voyager settles himself into the grandfather's chair by the fire and in Ah, Wilderness !—a title adapted from the most quoted line in the Rubaiyat—mildly amuses the company with a quiet, homely little comedy of family life. Our surprise is not lessened when we discover that this comedy, for all its tenderness and wisdom, might have come to us from any one of several other American dramatists and has in fact been made theatrically rather more effective by Miss Rose Franken in Another Language.
In this strange interlude Mr. O'Neill, as if suddenly taken with the graciousness of life, sets himself to bathe a staid New England family in the reflected glow of youth's bright dreams. Richard suffers, but not more severely than is usual in the case of a romantic and spirited boy upon whom poetry has just dawned in all its splendour. He has Omar to console him in his vehement dissatisfaction with the state of things in his dull " large small-town," and Swinburne contributes lurid passages to the impassioned letters which he writes to the timid daughter of a hot-tempered neighbour. One night when his love affair is in a tangle he slips away to the nearest saloon and rapidly sows his wild oats. He is penitent and humble the next day, and in the mood to listen to the advice of his wisely .tolerant father. There is, the faintest possible suggestion that Loves Young Dream may pass, but even if it should—" Spring isn't everything," says the boy's father, turning to his wife, " There's a lot to be said for Autumn. That's got beauty, too. And Winter—if you're together." The piece promises a pleasant evening in the theatre. It will stir the sentiments only. In short, Ah, Wilderness I unlike almost every other play that Mr. O'Neill has written during the past fifteen years, is less a challenge to reconsider him from a new angle than an inducement to cease considering him.
But with this mediocre comedy comes Days Without End, an energetic and a courageous treatment of a difficult religious theme, which restores to us the Mr. O'Neill we recognize, with his passion for experiment, his valuable and perilous inde- pendence of tradition, and his superb indifference to com- mercial success. Inevitably the new piece makes a technical experiment. The hero, John Loving, is split into two per- sonalities, a Jekyll and a Hyde played by two actors. One of Ah, Wilderness ! and Days Without End. By Eugene O'Neill. (Cape. is. 6d.) them is called Loving and wears a mask whose features repro- duce exactly the features of John's face—" the death mask of a John who has died with a sneer of scornful mockery on his lips." The personalities are separated that they may, like the Good and the Evil Angels in Marlowe's Dr. Faustus, put the two sides of a case during the crisis of the hero's life, and John's uncle, a priest, exists only to hear the case and to comment upon it. It is scarcely necessary to say that no new dramatic principle is thus introduced ; in Strange Interlude Mr. O'Neill extended the soliloquy and now in Days Without End he reverts to the Moralities and personifies it.
It may be that he is still casting about for the solution of the problem which baffled him in Strange Interlude. The characters of that play spoke not only the words addressed to other persons in the play, but their own thoughts as well. Mr. O'Neill found no method to enable his audience to dis- tinguish between the two planes on which he was writing, switching about confusedly between different language-con- ventions, and so tending to obscurity, He may hope that by personifying aspects of character he will be enabled to continue moving away from particular towards universal protagonists and yet escape what apparently he feels to be the irksome discipline of verse. In assessing the value of this device we must assume a flawless performance, no easy task, and it may be a failure of one's own imagination to suppose that on the stage the Hyde of this play would look too much like an automaton to achieve that intensification of illusion which is the only purpose of any convention, and that his symbolic death in the final scene when the ecstatic Jekyll is freed from his incubus would scarcely be worth the price paid for it. But in reading the play the impression persists that a frank reversion to the " aside " and the soliloquy might well have been more satisfactory.
Days Without End resumes—and possibly it may end— Mr. O'Neill's resolute search for a creed. Ten years ago, in Lazarus Laughed, he found assurance in the defiant faith that though men pass, Man, like the sea, remains ; five years later, in Dynamo, he was, like the hero of the present play, " a dyed-in-the-wool mechanist ; but now " the road finally turns back towards home." John Loving, who has denied God, has found happiness in married love and has betrayed that happiness, is led to seek his wife's forgiveness and the lost unity of his life at the foot of the Cross, symbol of the larger love. The studies of the wife and of the temptress have a rare acuity, but the story of infidelity is scarcely strong enough to support the central theme. A too easy emo- tionalism and a streak of morbidity in John rob the conversion of the universal significance which it is plainly intended to possess. The conflict between him and his alter ego, though their debate reaches no great height of argument, is im- pressive, and the spectacle of a tortured human being in the toils of doubt has dramatic power but not the supreme power of compelling us to identify ourselves with him in his struggle for a particular faith. Beyond a doubt Mr. O'Neill is blessed with a passion for absolute beauty, but the divine accident which happens to the great dramatists when their characters without stepping outside the play speak universal truth has yet to happen to him. For he seems to have been burdened with an impatience which will not let his philosophy of life mature. He hopes to take the Kingdom of Heaven by storm. Days Without End is another instance of this impatience to report upon the progress of his mind.
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