By J. BROOKS ATKINSON

In awarding the Pulitzer Prize to "Strange Interlude," the judges of that profound institution have acted as sensibly as one could require. Whatever one may think personally of the story and the significance of Mr. O'Neill's long drama, it is a heavily freighted piece of work, uncompromising, forceful and sustained. For several years the judges have apparently decided to overlook the precise terms of the Pulitzer award. No one will dismiss "Strange Interlude" as a play demonstrating "the educational value and power of the stage in raising the standard of good morals, good taste and good manners," as no one will believe Mr. Wilder's exotic "The Bridge of San Luis Rey" to be a novel presenting "the whole atmosphere of American life, and the highest standard of American manners and manhood." Now that the Pulitzer Prizes have come to signify popularly the "best" examples of native work during the year, it is no doubt wise for the judges to select their choices on that unqualified basis--and to salve their private conscience as agreeably as they can. Having chosen what they consider to be the "best," they will be subject to sufficient abuse whether they whittle the terms of the award or not. For the amusing paradox of all prize awards is that the judges are always wrong and the critics of the judges are always right.

You need not accept any prize award as fair. Indeed, if you dissent from it you become automatically a judge of judges, which is a position of sublime personal importance.

Since the last of January Mr. O'Neill's play has been crowding the John Golden Theatre and vexing the patience of those who want to see it. In book form it has been selling in numbers enviable in the barter of printed plays. It has drawn such critical enthusiasm--superlatives and panegyrics--that the excerpts printed on the jacket blind the credulous reader's eye. Accordingly, those of us who have tempered our approval walk cautiously through the deserted streets at night and remain modestly in the background at social gatherings. What friends we have we esteem more highly than ever. And we console ourselves with Ibsen's sententious objurgation: "The majority is always wrong; the minority may be sometimes right."

The plot, and the consequences of the plot, of "Strange Interlude" enjoy the prestige of current popular science. Those who have abandoned poesy long enough to study the libido scientifically recognize in Mr. O'Neill's characters the fixations and the obsessions that lead to unspeakable calamity in this tortuous civilization. If this is so, as several commentators have remarked, perhaps not enough has been said about the conclusion of the play. Attempting to live with scientific enlightenment, all the characters, except the innocent Sam, arrive at the nadir of unhappiness. When Nina and Darrell are discussing what qualities the father of her illegitimate offspring should have, he remarks: "And the man should have a mind that can truly understand-- a scientific mind superior to the moral scruples that cause so much human blundering and unhappiness." Well, it turns out that although he does have a scientific mind he commits every one except the untutored Sam to prolonged torture and a twisting of human forces that may never ravel out cleanly as long as life endures.

What prevents "Strange Interlude" from being a great play is just this cramping intrusion of the tenets of science. The characters are automata; the plot is restricted in its scope. Although the play is in nine acts, Mr. O'Neill has no time in which to develop his characters in the round and to show us the subordinate qualities which have made them people of standing in the world. Their boring propensity to talk exclusively about themselves implies a personal importance they do not have. Mr. O'Neill is not writing with his usual perspective. Not that science is wrong, but that, as the scientists readily confess, it is so much less than life; and not that Mr. O'Neill has surrendered to the tyranny of science, like the arid-minded casebook dramatists, but that the human values of his plot and characters are limited. Referring, doubtless, to Freud, W. H. Hudson remarks in his wise and warm posthumous volume: "I fancy that when a modern philosopher suggested that the esthetic sense, the sense of beauty in all things, is but an overflow of the sexual feeling, he was not spinning it all out of his brain, but had taken the sexual selection theory at Darwin's own valuation and made the sex feeling the root instead of making it one of the many distinct elements contained in the root." Great drama, great literature, great art in general flourish in that remote "strange interlude" in space just beyond the far edge of science.

All that we can learn carries us there; all that we are bursts there into the poetry and the inscrutable tragedy of life. Mr. O'Neill often journeys there in his dramas. But in "Strange Interlude" he has not ventured far enough to have written a great drama. To accept his tragedy as great and inevitable one must agree that the situation is actually beyond the control of his characters.

Now that Mr. O'Neill has won the Pulitzer Prize for the third time, it is interesting to recall the progress he has made in the eight years since "Beyond the Horizon" and "Emperor Jones" were produced. In the first place, he has written a prodigious number of plays. In the second place, he has been leaving his successive achievements behind year after year until both "Beyond the Horizon" and "Anna Christie," which won the earlier prizes, now seem like apprentice work.

Everything he writes is, in a measure, apprentice work. That may explain the vague sense of dissatisfaction many of us feel about his successive attacks and forays upon the enigma of life. Setting himself each time a tremendous task, he may never execute it to the satisfaction of every one. As long as he continues to smash his way ahead he will be performing the most vital service possible to American drama.