Inevitably, of course, despite their imitation and amateur excess, the plays reveal marks of later power. Yet what is interesting lies less in their spasmodic merits than in the pattern that can be traced through the group as a whole. Building on the technical elements suggested by A Wife for a Life, the plays, despite their variety of subject matter, form a unified group whose design sets forth the initial terms of the playwright’s artistry and thought. They range in subject from scenes of well-bred suburban life to studies of prostitutes and pimps. They consider marital difficulties, questions of free love, the poverty of sailors, the need for artistic freedom, the insensitivity of commercial America, the problems of college students. In technique they range from semi-abstract, quasi-allegorical fables, through glossy domestic triangles, to squalid realistic studies of lower-class and slum life. Their narratives are sometimes intricate and in the worst sense “clever,” and at other times they approximate a simple, plotless revelation that is a form of stage poetry. Their social awareness spreads from strenuous anti-capitalistic diatribe to an affection for the idle rich that characterizes the most slickly commercial Broadway fare. In genre and tone, they reach from outrageous melodrama and near tragedy to something like Shavian comedy. Yet, for all their diversity, when viewed as a group, they reveal a unity of effort and consistency of direction. Together, they converge on the significant initial definition of O’Neill’s characteristic style achieved in Bound East for Cardiff. With this play he strikes once, firmly, in the center of his target. That it should have been written amidst so many errors of taste and judgment suggests that as he worked the goal was becoming clearer, and the dramatist’s disciplines were being learned. Yet of this play, once it is viewed in the context of his other efforts, there is more to say than that O’Neill “kept his eye on life” and wrote of what he knew.

To call such melodramatic destiny “fate” is to do little but to excuse youthful dramatic excess and the circumstantial trickery of the narratives. This granted, however, there remains something impressive in the way each of the characters is crushed by his environment. In spite of the nonsense of the individual stories, a pattern emerges dimly that was at least the beginning of a philosophical position. Man is caught by something—a force of an as yet unidentifiable nature whose power is absolute. O’Neill does not thus early claim that men belong to the force, or even that its power of dealing death is somehow to be associated with its power to give life. Yet these assertions will come, and from such perception, O’Neill will make his start toward tragedy.

His attempt to discover a world view in irony born of melodrama points toward a second characteristic of the group of plays. These efforts are not only without a clear philosophical conception, but they are often anti-intellectual. Fog and Servitude take the most explicit intellectual positions, yet neither is especially impressive for the quality of its thought. Fog strings together socialistic clichés borrowed perhaps from Shaw, while Servitude seeks to argue against the favorite heroine of Shaw and Ibsen, the so-called “New Woman.” In neither play does O’Neill display a vestige of the power of the European playwrights to argue and attack. Despite his superficial indebtedness to them, he does not follow them as a propagandist for a new society. His social awareness was to develop slowly and was never to become a major focus of his statement. As in A Wife for a Life, he moved away from a broad social view, preferring to present an action that was essentially private.

Private emotion forms the basis of such positive elements as the plays offer. In none of them except Servitude does O’Neill permit his characters genuine hope. Man does not have the possibility of circumventing the fatal control. Yet once or twice, the characters are given insight into one another and are permitted to find in the resultant communion a momentary release from their problems. Full insight, such as comes to great tragic heroes, is impossible for these small creatures. They see no more of themselves or their circumstances than mortals ordinarily do. In trouble, men find one another more readily than they find God, and it is so here. The discovery of another human being who can serve as priest and friend is the nearest approach to an idea of good that O’Neill could at first achieve. It is not much—an accidental, impotent, transitory thing, that in the end remains as it began, a purely personal recoil from pain. Yet it is the only positive note discoverable in the plays.

Failing to discover ultimate patterns of meaning, the characters are left alone with their destinies. They are soiled and silent, unable to do more than face what must come. Never fully heroic, often acting on hysterical impulse, the lonely ones turn toward death as the only exit. To some of them death is a cessation of pain; to others, dying is a way of warding off life; to yet a third group, death is a way of expiation, a way of facing the dead. Needless to say, in the first plays, neither the positive personal communion nor the negative descent into death is evolved completely as drama or concept. Taken alone, each is a paltry thing. Yet a partial pattern of meaning evolves from the melodrama and from it greater plays are to be shaped. To mention Titus Andronicus is to suggest that such a course of development is not without precedent.