Of course, I realize that the fate of your hope rests on the doing of this play. Personally, I believe in it. And if I were so capitalized to do the things I want to do, I should make it my next play instead of the O’Neil play, which I started to blue pencil day before yesterday, and God knows, it needs some blue penciling. As I read it now, it seems terribly stretched out, and a lot of words with little active material. But having done so much with a rotten subject, such as I have been getting, I myself think that with the acquiescence of the author, a great play can be made out of “Beyond the Horizon.”¹⁸

Two months after the play opened, he wrote again to Elkins expressing satisfaction in his faith and his labors:

Of course you have learned by this time that O’neil’s play is one of the Season’s sensations and strange as it may seem, we are playing to really splendid houses.—now we are in a regular theatre— The Little—I closed For the defense to big business in order to keep Beyond the Horizon in NY and we are growing every day in advance. I shouldn’t be surprized if we stayed here until July—I am . . . sending you a review which I think—the best written of all the glorious tributes we received on the play—Its glorious to have done it Felton—very few beside Williams believed in it and even he got cold feet—I had to do it all cast it cut it and produce it—still I owe the finding of it to him. I’ve lost many pounds and am very tired. But what matters that.¹⁹

The extent of Bennett’s textual revisions cannot now be determined, but his work and his faith made theatre history. Although the play was so somber in tone, so unrelieved by comedy or melodrama that many reviewers predicted that it could never achieve a Broadway run, they were all immediately impressed with its quality, which in the United States had no precedent. The only American drama with which it was readily to be compared was The Great Divide, William Vaughan Moody’s melodrama of fourteen seasons earlier. In more contemporaneous theatre, St. John Ervine’s John Ferguson, which the Theatre Guild had staged in the spring of 1919, alone was comparable, but Beyond the Horizon was preferred to the British play as being of “larger aspect and greater force.”²⁰ Perhaps the play seemed more impressive than it is. In retrospect, it blends into the landscape of many later works written by O’Neill and others; but in its time, it was a signal, the first view of the serious American drama, and the history of its reception is important.

In general, the journalistic criticism was acutely responsive to the play’s statement and sharply critical of its structure. O’Neill’s play is the story of two brothers, Robert, a dreamer and poet who longs to go to sea and seek the promise that lies beyond the horizon, and Andrew, a more practical man, whose desire extends no farther than the family farm which he tends expertly. A love affair between Robert and Ruth, a girl both brothers love, drives Andrew to sea and keeps Robert on the farm. The play depicts the gradual decline of the marriage and concludes with Robert’s death. One reviewer saw the play only as a depiction of “the misery which follows the union of a man and woman who are incompatible,”²¹ but for the most part, the reviewers rightly understood the search of the dreamer, Robert Mayo, as the quest of a man for his proper element. Alexander Woollcott, in the New York Times, wrote that Robert is “chained to a task for which he is not fitted, withheld from a task for which he was born. . . . At the end he crawls out of the farmhouse to die in the open road, his last glance straining at the horizon beyond which he has never ventured, his last words pronouncing a message of warning from one who had not lived in harmony with what he was.”²² From Woollcott’s analysis, it is clear that O’Neill’s first major statement of his earliest tragic theme, one which he had evolved through the writing of the Glencairn plays, was understood without ambiguity.

Successful in understanding Robert Mayo, the reviewers were less able to comprehend Ruth and Andrew. Ruth was seen merely as a drag on Robert’s aspiration, a creature of instinct, who turned into a whining slut. Andrew, although he was understood as a complement to Robert, was not viewed as a dispossessed man, who, like Robert, is forced to seek salvation far from his native element. Significantly, in commenting on these two roles, the reviewers turned to a consideration of the performers, rather than of the characters, finding Miss MacKellar vivid and able, Edward Arnold too melodramatic to do justice to the play’s realistic style.

Satisfied with the play’s central character, its theme, its realism and its dialogue, the reviewers to a man found fault with the play’s structure. In effect, they sent O’Neill back to Baker’s classroom, objecting to the exposition as clumsy, and in particular faulting what they called a “chronic looseness of construction,” especially as it was evidenced in the division of each act into two scenes, one in the farmhouse, the other on an open road. The poor production perhaps occasioned their censure. In its original staging, the play ran close to four hours,²³ much of which was spent in interminable waiting while the scenes were being shifted. Especially in Act III, the change of scene was thought to dissipate the emotional force of Robert’s death. Woollcott, who objected to the scenery as being painted “in the curiously inappropriate style of a German postcard,” took the play severely to task on this score, and other reviewers were no less outspoken. *

Despite the critical carping at technical problems, Beyond the Horizon made O’Neill an important American dramatist. At the time of the Morosco opening, his second long play, Chris Christopherson, was being readied for a March tryout in Atlantic City, and The Straw, for which O’Neill had the highest hopes, had been taken under option by George Tyler. In process also were Gold and a new work, The Silver Bullet, which was to become The Emperor Jones. The production, in short, was accompanied by a renewed sense of energy manifested not only in the number of plays O’Neill had in hand but also in an important development of his themes and techniques. The play seemed a work of a new and vital imagination, and its success was unquestionably valid. Certainly the play is the first major work of the O’Neill canon. It is fully characteristic. It is also a clearly “American” play, and thus an important “original.” Yet, as with many of the one-act plays that had preceded it, O’Neill relied heavily on the work of others for important seminal inspiration and general direction. Beyond the Horizon, like Bound East for Cardiff, is at once original and deeply derivative.

In 1926 in a letter to Edward Sheldon, O’Neill acknowledged two important influences on his work:

Dear Edward Sheldon:
I was immensely grateful for your wire about (The Great God) Brown. Your continuous generous appreciation of my work during the past years has meant a great lot to me, has been one of the very few things that have gratified me and satisfied me deep down inside. I say this—and I want you to know I say it!—with the deepest sincerity. Your Salvation Nell, along with the work of the Irish Players on their first trip over here, was what first opened my eyes to the existence of a real theatre as opposed to the unreal—and to me then, hateful—theatre of my father, in whose atmosphere I had been brought up. So, you see, I owed you this additional debt of long standing.²⁴

The debt to both Sheldon and the Irish Players is evident in Beyond the Horizon.

After a stormy run in Boston, where Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World generated its customary riots, the players from the Abbey Theatre had come to New York in November, 1911, under the management of George Tyler. Riots were expected when the Synge work opened, and wisely the directors determined to hold back its production until audiences had had a taste of the Players’ quality. They opened, therefore, with a bill of short plays, including The Rising of the Moon and Spreading the News by Lady Gregory and a two-act tragedy by T. C. Murray called Birthright. O’Neill saw all the Players’ New York performances, and his general indebtedness to their quasi-poetic, yet realistic, style is important, if obvious. More particular is his debt to Murray’s play. His borrowing from it was extensive and continuous throughout his life.²⁵

Birthright is a Cain and Abel story set on a small Irish farm owned by Bat Morrissey and his wife, Maura. Hugh, the elder of their sons, is to inherit the farm, while the younger, Shane, leaves to make a new life for himself in America. Hugh, in his father’s opinion, is less able to run the farm than Shane for he has other interests than farming. He is a poet, something of a dreamer, but also he is interested in sports and has become the village hero because of his skill at hurling. In sharp contrast to Shane, whose whole life is centered on the farm, Hugh likes dances and other forms of amusement. In Shane, Bat recognizes one of his own kind, but Hugh is alien to him. He feels that no one to whom the farm is not an entire way of life should inherit it, and, when Maura complains that he is hard on Hugh, he tells her what the farm means:

BAT  . . . Hard, is it? That’s the quare saying from your mouth. I’d like to know who is hard. When I bought this place thirty years ago with the bit o’ money I made in the States what kind was it? Tell that an’ spake the truth! Tell it now!

MAURA  A cold place it was surely—a cold, poor place, with more o’ the rock, an’ the briar, an’ the sour weed than the sweet grass.

BAT  Well, an’ who blasted every rock that was in it?

MAURA  Sure, ‘twas no one but yourself, Bat.

BAT  An’ who rooted out the briars, and often tore ‘em out with his own two living hands?

MAURA (conciliatingly). ‘Twas yourself I know. Alone you did it.

BAT  (with rising anger). An’ maybe you’d tell me now again who drained the western field that was little better than a bog—an’ who built the strong fences an’ planted the thorn on them—an’ who made the land kind where the grass was that dry and coarse you’d think ‘twas the strings o’ the lash on that whip beyond? Tell me that, will you? Tell me that now?

MAURA  Sure, I know, Bat, ‘twas yourself—and the good God that gave you the great strength.

BAT   I’m hard, am I? I’ve been out in the darkness before the dawn, an’ remained stuck in the trench an’ the furrow all day, till the black darkness came on me again, and the moon came up, and the faintness on me that I couldn’t walk into this house for staggering no better than a cripple or a man that would be drunk. An’ for what, I ask you? For what Maura? For my brave Hugh, for an idler and a scamp and a-a-a worthless blackguard! I’m hard, Maura, am I?

MAURA  Wisht, sure, I didn’t mean it. I didn’t mean it at all. I didn’t, indeed, Bat.

BAT  I’m hard, am I? ‘Tis your son is hard, and you know it. The sweat o’ my body an’ my life is in every inch o’ the land, and ‘tis little he cares, with his hurling an’ his fiddling an’ his versifying and his confounded nonsense! . . . I tell you again—an’ mind my words for it—’tis the black look out for this place when he gets it, an’ only for your talk, an’ your crying, ‘tis that blackguard’s name an’ not his brother’s would be on that trunk there this night!

MAURA  Wouldn’t it be the queer thing entirely, Bat, to send the eldest son away, and he with your own father’s name on him?

BAT  Would it, then? Would it? Tell me, had I ever to go away myself? What was good enough for me ought to be good enough for my brave Hugh—but of course I’m only a poor ignorant ploughman, and he’s the scholar. The scholar! God bless us!

MAURA  Don’t talk foolish, Bat. Sure no one thinks that way of you, and least of all the boy himself . . . (half musingly). ‘Tis the strange thing surely, his own father to be the only one in the parish that’s not proud of him; and everyone talking of him, and the priest himself praising him, and his picture in the paper for the great rhymes he made. . .

BAT  That’s more o’ your foolish talk, an’ ‘tis you have helped to make him the kind he is. Your blood is in hini. I see it in every twist and turn of his and every wild foolish thing coming from his mouth. . . . Good God, woman, will his grand rhymes an’ his bits o’ meddles an’ his picture an’ the people’s talk pay the rent for us? . . . Well, surely, ‘tis the foolish thing for a farmer to marry any but wan with the true farmer’s blood in her. I should have guessed long ago what ‘ud come of it when I married wan that had other blood in her veins. . . . But Shane isn’t gone yet—and maybe he’d never go! . . . ²⁶

The difference in the brothers is somewhat crudely dramatized. Hugh’s sensitive, poetic nature is suggested when he disgraces himself by fainting while shoveling a manure pile, and Shane’s affection for the farm is shown by his concern for a mare who is the pride of Bat’s eye. When the spectators at a hurley match bring Hugh home in triumph, they startle the mare who shies and breaks her leg, despite what Shane can do to calm her. The mare must be shot. Maura comments,

‘Tis the terrible misfortune, surely. ‘Tis the great loss entirely. . . . And Bat, sure, ‘twill kill him, and he always so proud of the brown nearly mare. . . . The poor thing, and she always so good and willing, and the great worker for seven long years.

Shane reacts bitterly to the shooting:

Do you know there was a kind of quare feeling come over me, an’ I turning the gun at her?—a kind of shiver it was, an’ a mist before my eyes. . . . ‘Tis strange I’ll be feeling going across in the big ship, an’ thinking of the lonely look in her big eyes with the death coming down on them like a dark dream.²⁷

Evidently, Birthright is a play that stirred O’Neill’s imagination deeply, and some aspects of his creative processes can be judged from the use he made of the play. He saw the play in 1911, and it provided him with the germinal plot idea for Beyond the Horizon, seven years later. O’Neill’s story of two brothers, one a poet, the other a true farmer, with the former due to possess the land while the latter must go to sea, is too close to the structure of relationships in Birthright to be put down as mere coincidence. Beyond the Horizon is a re-imagining of the elements of Murray’s play which by 1918 might well have been only a general recollection of a good plot idea.

The process, however, did not stop there. His imagination continued to feed on Murray’s characters. Some residue of its initial impact remained in 1924, when he wrote Desire Under the Elms, retelling again the story of the struggle of a farmer’s sons for the land. The long dialogue between Bat and Maura, in which Bat attributes his “hardness” to the qualities of the land is seminal to Ephraim Cabot’s great monologue on the same theme in the second act of Desire Under the Elms, and Ephraim, like Bat, feels that his wives were unfit to bear him the right kind of sons.

Years later, in 1935, it appears that when he was writing A Touch of the Poet, although by then he may have remembered nothing of Murray’s play, he found welling into his mind an image of an Irish peasant woman, waiting while her husband’s mare was being shot. In creating the character of Nora Melody, he may also have recalled how Maura waited for one of her family to return by keeping busy about the house during a long vigil in the night.

The evidence suggests that O’Neill had been so deeply moved by his first sight of the Irish Players in Murray’s work that the play embedded itself in his subconscious mind. A residuum of that emotion remained with him, letting half-forgotten images come to the surface whenever the connotative conditions were right,** and especially whenever he wrote of the land. Such a process may be no more than one of the usual processes of creativity, and, at its best, with O’Neill as with other writers and their “sources,” the germinal elements take radically different form and meaning when they are fully developed. Occasionally, O’Neill was trapped in slavish imitation, as when in Before Breakfast he imitated Strindberg and was caught less by a genuine commitment than by an intriguing concept, manner or style. More often, the process permitted O’Neill to respond emotionally and completely, and to re-see his source material in his own terms, as he did in his use of Conrad in Bound East for Cardiff and of Murray’s play in three of his major works.

To say that he responded emotionally does not mean that he was incapable of formulating consciously the “influence” on his work. What is interesting is that he does not mention those works that, like Birthright or Conrad’s tales, lay close to the center of his creative impulses. Instead, in discussing the sources of Beyond the Horizon, he casts back to an autobiographical experience.

I think the real life experience from which the idea of Beyond the Horizon sprang was this: On the British tramp steamer on which I made a voyage as an ordinary seaman . . . there was a Norwegian A.B. and we became quite good friends. The great sorrow and mistake of his life, he used to grumble, was that as a boy he had left the small paternal farm to run away to sea. He had been at sea twenty years and had never gone home once in that time. I don’t imagine he had written home or received a letter from there in years.

He was a bred-in-the-bone child of the sea if there ever was one. With his feet on the plunging deck, he was planted like a natural growth in what was “good clean earth” to him. If ever man was in perfect harmony with his environment, a real part of it, this Norwegian was.

Yet he cursed the sea and the life it had led him—affectionately. He loved to hold forth on what a fool he had been to leave the farm. There was the life for you, he used to tell the grumblers in the fo’c’stle. A man on his own farm was his own boss. He didn’t have to eat rotten grub, and battle bedbugs, and risk his life in storms on a rotten old “Limejuice” tramp. He didn’t have to wait for the end of a long voyage for a pay day and a good drunk.

No, sir. A man on his own farm could get drunk every Saturday night and stay drunk all day Sunday if he wanted to! (At this point the fo’c’stle to a man became converted to agriculture.) Then too, a man on a farm could get married and have kids. . . .

The sailor O’Neill describes is doubtless the same man who inspired the figure of Olson in The Long Voyage Home, where O’Neill first began to articulate the sense of a man’s relationship with elemental forces. The thematic concept provides the strongest link to Robert Mayo, whose connection with the Norwegian sailor is somewhat tenuous. As O’Neill explained it:

I thought what if he had stayed on the farm with his instincts? What would have happened? But I realized at once he never would have stayed. . . . I started to think of a more intellectual, civilized type—a weaker type . . . a man who would have my Norwegian’s inborn cravings for the sea’s unrest, only in him it would be conscious, too conscious, intellectually diluted into a vague intangible romantic wanderlust. His powers of resistance, both moral and physical, would also probably be correspondingly watered. He would throw away his instinctive dream and accept the thraildom of the farm for—why, for almost any nice little poetical craving—the romance of sex, say.

And so Robert Mayo was born. . . .²⁸

The account of the genesis of the character is evidently aimed at public consumption. It shows O’Neill emerging as a public figure and capitalizing to an extent on his rough-and-tumble past. His ironic treatment of Robert Mayo as the victim of a “nice little poetic craving” is far from the way he is presented in the play. The uncharacteristic sophistication of the statement may well reflect the easy cynicism of such associates as George Jean Nathan with whom he had been corresponding.

In fact, Robert Mayo is one of the many early self-portraits, and in describing him O’Neill first uses the phrase that will become a significant key to the description of his tragic hero:

He is a tall, slender young man of twenty-three. There is a touch of the poet about him expressed in his high forehead and wide dark eyes. His features are delicate and refined, leaning to weakness in the mouth and chin. (81)

In his lineaments, the faces of John Brown, the Poet in Fog, and something perhaps of Smitty, are to be seen clearly. Later heroes, all “touched” with poetry, will be cast in the same mold and will be similar in appearance. If O’Neill’s account is in any degree true, to turn his staunch sailor friend inside out meant that what he found as an opposite was himself. The publicity is little more than a mask, for in Robert Mayo, O’Neill explored his own truth.

In the play, O’Neill plunges Robert into a Strindbergian matrimonial drama, much as he had done earlier with John Brown and Alfred Rowland, and as he later was to do with other self-portraits, Dion Anthony, Curtis Jayson in The First Man, and Michael Cape in Welded. Ruth and Robert Mayo are shackled to one another in soul-destroying bondage of the sort that O’Neill had discovered in The Father and The Dance of Death. The primary effects are the same in Beyond the Horizon as they are in Strindberg. After the death of spirit, the man plunges toward physical death and the woman moves toward infidelity. That the tone of the play is not especially like Strindberg’s is partly the result of its merger with the Irish folk drama that supplied the basic narrative situation, and partly also because a third “source” somewhat diminished the Strindbergian overtones.

Legend has it that the title for the play came from a conversation O’Neill held with a small boy on the Provincetown shoreline. The boy wondered what lay “beyond the horizon,” and the phrase provided O’Neill with his title.²⁹

Whether the anecdote is true or not, any reader of the literature of the United States in the first quarter of the twentieth century will recognize in the title’s imagery what might be called the “Horizon Syndrome,” an affliction that manifested itself in countless inspirational poems, stories and short plays in precisely the way O’Neill used it—to suggest boundless aspiration for a somewhat vaguely defined freedom of spirit. To cite a single, potentially influential example: in November, 1912, Edward Sheldon’s play, The High Road, was produced in New York. It is the story of a farm girl who is seduced by a traveling artist and leaves home. In the course of her life she becomes a woman of some political prominence.*** Early in the play, Sheldon gives full development to the horizon imagery. The high road leads through apple country, “winding like a ribbon,**** until it is lost in the far distance of the violet hills.”³⁰ The first act love scene between Mary Page and the artist, Alan Wilson, provides an example of the inspirational motif:

MARY  (pointing)—Do you see where the moonlight hits the rocks on the top of that hill? It makes it look like a house all built o’ gold. . . .

ALAN  I’ve climbed those hills. . . . It’s hard work, but I didn’t care. I just pushed along and thought of the welcome waiting for me at the top.

MARY  An’ what was it like when ye got there?

ALAN  There was nothing but the plain, bare rocks.

MARY  Wasn’t ye awful disappointed?

ALAN  Perhaps—just at first—but then right off I saw the golden house again. . . . Across the valley—on the hills beyond! . . .

MARY  An’ when ye’d climbed up the next hill, it was just the same? . . .An’ no one’s ever walked into the house an’ sat close by a winder an’ looked out over the world?

ALAN  Not one. Only each time that you climb a hill it seems a little bigger and a little brighter. . . .³¹

Although O’Neill was clearly writing in a recognizable vein, Beyond the Horizon was rightfully received as a compelling original. As his first major play, it properly builds on all his most significant earlier work. His sense of a special relationship between man and his environment had emerged at the outset of his career in his perceptions about the sun and the fog and especially about the power the sea has over men’s lives. To this he added the relatively recent idea, derived in part from Conrad, of the power of hope to sustain men. Then, in depicting the details of Robert’s marriage, he drew upon his understanding of husbands and wives derived from Strindberg. Finally, in Robert and Andrew, he sketched the poetical self-portrait and its materialistic counterpart with which he had been occupied since Fog. What emerged finally was the memorable figure of a man “touched” with poetry, O’Neill’s true tragic protagonist. Robert was a man who was out of harmony with his environment, who could not “belong” and who therefore was condemned to live between hope’s eternal optimism and the inevitability of despair. Beyond the Horizon is thus a summing-up of O’Neill’s early years as a playwright; at the same time, the merging of his major thematic preoccupations produced a new structure which would serve as a base for further development. It is also true, as is often the case with the emergence of an important playwright, that the tragedy defined for its audiences certain formulations which they chose to accept as beliefs of their society.

In retrospect, the causes of the success of Beyond the Horizon are complex. To be sure, the play was a naturalistic tragedy in the modern mode by a young American playwright whose career had excited interest. Its production was a labor of love by important actors who had idealistically rejected wearisome commercial success as a testament of their faith in it. It appeared in a context of growing enthusiasm for the new theatre as an art form, and it was sufficiently well written to merit serious discussion. Yet, there have been equal successes under similar conditions. Jesse Lynch Williams’s Why Marry?, which won the first Pulitzer Prize in 1918, Zona Gale’s Miss Lulu Bett or Owen Davis’s Icebound, which received the award in 1921 and 1923 respectively, were in their ways equally impressive. Yet these plays are forgotten and Beyond the Horizon survives. It does so because, with great clarity and with the simplicity of a fable, its theme established a major tragic motif of American drama.

Man’s relationship with nature has, of course, been a constant theme in literature under a wide variety of formulations and interpretations. The concept of natural man as being an exemplar of the good, or of reversion to nature as indicating the brute in man, of man’s soul as being in or out of tune with nature, or of man turning endlessly in space as the victim of uncomprehending forces of his environment—none of these has novelty. Yet O’Neill’s use of man’s desire to belong to nature as the source of a tragic action was an important new variant on an old theme. It was one that was to appeal to a great number of American dramatists, following O’Neill’s lead, in the 1930’s and 1940’s, and it was to form a major motif of his own cycle on American history, A Tale of Possessors, Self-dispossessed.

As developed by O’Neill tragic disharmony with nature is depicted most often in terms of private, personal loss in such figures as the Hairy Ape, Eben Cabot or Dion Anthony. Many of those who came after him broadened the scope beyond a purely personal focus to include social disorders and to picture man as a victim of suffocating societal pressures. Even here, however, from American authors, the explanation of the malady of both the individual and his society is the fundamental dislocation between man and nature.

For example, in Robert Sherwood’s The Petrified Forest, the nomadic Alan Squier, after citing Eliot’s “The Hollow Men,” explains that the poem refers to the intellectuals who have attempted to package nature. Nature, however, is hitting back, not through floods and holocausts, but through neuroses, and is “proving that she can’t be beaten. . . . She’s taking the world away from the intellectuals and giving it back to the apes.”³² Sherwood’s view of a blindly vengeful nature as the cause of the modern distemper prevails over all other indictments of society in the play. In Maxwell Anderson’s High Tor, the American is viewed as a stranger to his own land, a pessimistic base for a sweet-sour comedy. The action of Sidney Howard’s They Knew What They Wanted is interpreted by the commentary of a rationalist doctor and a simple country priest, but neither reason nor faith resolves the potentially tragic situation of the comedy. Instead, the grape farmer, Tony, whose capacity for simple charity and power of forgiveness are derived from his long-harmonious association with the earth, brings peace to the troubled relationships. As a final example, Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman finds everyman’s problem to be caused by his divorce from the land. Willy remembers the grassy plains of the west, the music of the flute, the shadowy patterns of leaves, and his last action is the frantic, symbolic gesture of planting seeds in the sterile earth.

In the light of later developments, Beyond the Horizon proved a seminal play, establishing a theatrical pattern which endured for at least two decades. Inexpert as it was in many of its elements, in the whole it showed O’Neill to be a dramatist who could speak significantly to his audiences, by presenting them with a meaning which was accepted as an important truth, and in effect an aspect of national belief: that man will only be complete when he lives in a right relationship with the earth.

The cosmos of the play is equally divided between land and sea. If Andrew had stayed on the farm, if Robert had gone to sea, each would have held true to his essential nature and been able to live in harmony with the elements around him. The implication, therefore, is that Robert belongs to the sea and Andrew to the land. It is not enough to say that Robert’s longing for the sea is “too conscious, intellectually diluted into a vague, romantic wanderlust.” The phrase might have held true for Smitty, yearning toward the moon on the deck of the Glencairn, but Robert, in the cup of the hills, cut off from the horizon, is imprisoned, forcibly held back from joining the element to which he rightly belongs. His weakness and his romanticism are irrelevant; until he can unite himself with the sea, he can be no stronger. On land, the unyielding furrows are sterile, and, by the same token, Andrew finds no nurture at sea but travels unmoved to romantic shores, seeing only abused land. Andrew’s corruption is epitomized by his perverting the farmer’s instinct and gambling in wheat. Robert makes the point specifically: “You used to be a creator when you loved the farm. You and life were in harmonious partnership. And now—.” (161)

Andrew and Robert stand sharply opposed, the poet and the materialist in the same relationship as the figures had been set in Fog. The fact that the two, now, are brothers is suggestive. O’Neill sees them—perhaps because he sensed in his relationship with his own brother a similar radical opposition—positive and negative images of what he called “longing and loss.” Despite the gulf between them they are chained together, and, later, in more complex plays he will repeat the same strange fraternal conflict—for example between Dion Anthony and Billy Brown in The Great God Brown and between the two halves of John Loving’s personality in Days Without End.

In the action of Beyond the Horizon, there is no solace. Like the sailors of the Glencairn, Andrew’s wants are easily satisfied, but the source of his discontent remains unlocated. Robert, however, is different, for he is touched with a poet’s power of vision and is able to bring unspoken needs to a level of consciousness. He is able to articulate hope, to sense what lies beyond the farthest range of vision.

To be sure, in the play he does not frame matters in such terms. Admitting he is a failure, he says that he can justly lay some of the blame for his stumbling “on God.” (161) Yet it is hard to understand how God is to be blamed for Robert’s ruin. “God” in such a scheme can mean little more than such a hostile, “ironic life force” as destroyed the heroine of The Web. O’Neill, emerging as a poet, is no longer concerned with what is totally negative, as such derivative deterministic conceptions essentially were. To him, now, the real forces in the play are the powers in the sea and the land that, while they reject alien children, hold out promise of peace and harmony to those who truly belong. The promise is important. Robert claims it at the end of the play, mistakenly asserting that he has won it through “sacrifice”: