By JOSEPH WOOD KRUTCH

In this age of intellectualized art there is an inevitable but unfortunate tendency to assume of Eugene O’Neill, as of every other arresting artist, that this greatness musts lie somehow in the greatness or in the clarity of his thought; to seek in “All God’s Chillun” some solution of the problem of race or in the “Hairy Ape” some attitude toward society; and then, not finding them, to fail in the fullest appreciation of the greatness which is his.  It as not thought which drove him, as a young man, to seek adventure among the roughest men he could find, and it was not thought which he brought back from this and other experiments in life.  Something tempestuous in his nature made him a brother of tempests, and he has sought wherever he could find them the fiercest passions, less anxious to clarify their causes for the benefit of those who love peace than eager to share them, and happy if he could only be exultantly a part of the destructive fury.  It is a strange taste, this, to wish to be perpetually racked and tortured, to proceed from violence to violence, and to make of human torture not so much the occasion of other things as the raison d’ętre of drama; but such is his temperament.  The meaning and unity of his work lies not in any controlling intellectual idea and certainly not in a ”message,” but merely in the fact that each play is an experience of extraordinary intensity.

Young-man-like, O’Neill first assumed that the fiercest passions were to be found where the outward circumstances of life were wildest and most uncontrolled.   He sought among men of the sea, ignorant of convention and wholly without inhibitions, powerful appetites and bare tragedies, embodying his observation in the group of little plays now performed for the first time as a whole (and performed well) at the Provincetown Theater under the title of “S.S. Glencairn”; but maturity has taught him the paradox that where there is most smoke there is not necessarily most fire.  He has learned that souls confined in a nut-shell may yet be lords of infinite space; that spirits cabined and confined by very virtue of the fact that they have no outlet explode finally with the greatest spiritual violence.  As though to signalize the discovery of this truth he has, in his latest ply, “Desire Under the Elms” (Greenwich Village Theater), limited the horizon of his characters, physically and spiritually, to the tiny New England farm upon which the action passes, and has made their intensity spring from the limitations of their experience.  Whether he or Robert Edmond Jones conceived the idea of setting the stage with a single permanent scene showing one end of the farmhouse, and of removing sections of the wall when it becomes necessary to expose one or more of the rooms inside, I do not know; but this method of staging is admirably calculated to draw attention to the controlling circumstance of the play.  It is a story of human relationships become intolerably tense because close and limited, of the possessive instinct grown inhumanly powerful because the opportunities for its gratification are some small, and of physical passion terribly destructive in the end because so long restrained by the sense of sin.  To its young hero the stony farm is all the wealth of the world, the young wife of his father all the lust of the flesh.  In that tiny corner each character finds enough to stimulate passions which fill, for him, the universe.

By half a century of unremitting labor Ephraim Cabot has turned a few barren hillsides into a farm, killing two wives in the process but growing himself only harder in body and mind and more fanatical in his possessive passion for the /578/ single object which has absorbed his life.  Two of his sons, rebelling against the hopelessness of their life, leave him for the goldfields; the third, who remains with him in dogged determination to inherit the farm, he hate; and so he marries once more in the hope of begetting in his old age a son to whom, as part of himself, he can leave his property without ceasing to own it.  But he has reckoned without considering the possessive instinct of the wife herself, and so between the three, and in an atmosphere charged with hate, is fought out the three-cornered battle for what has become the symbol of earthly possessions.  Love springs up between the wife and her foster son, but in such a battle the directest win, and love, confusing the aims of these two, dooms them to tragedy, while to the old man is left the barrenness of lonely triumph.  Unlike the others, he has a god, the hard God who hates the easy gold of California or the easy crops of the West, the God who loves sumps and stones and looks with His stern favor upon such as wring a dour life without softness and without love from a soil barren like their souls.  And this God comforts him:  “I am hard,” he says, when he learns that the baby, murdered by its mother, is not his but his son’s:  “I am a hard man and I am alone – but so is God.”

It may with some show of reason be objected that O’Neill’s plays are too crowded with incident, that the imagination of the spectator refuses sometimes to leap with the author so quickly from tense moment to tense moment, or to accept violence piled so unremittingly upon violence, and his latest play is not wholly closed to such objection; but impetuosity is an essential part of his nature and not likely ever to be subdued.  To those who, like the present writer, can overlook it, it brings great compensation.  “Desire Under the Elms” will be, with one exception, the most moving play seen during the current season.  It is competently acted and Mary Morris and Walter Huston deserve special mention.