By GILBERT W. GABRIEL

It is told by Oviedo of the early Spanish Conquerors that, sometimes when they were captured by the Indians, molten gold was poured down their throats, with the mocking command to “Eat, eat and take your fill!”  The same metal of a precious indigestible vocabulary is forced upon you by the “The Fountain,” Eugene O’Neill’s romance of one of the Conquistadores, which began to unfold at the Greenwich Village last night.  Utter dyspepsia of mind and spirit is the least punishment inflicted by this trial by scenery.

“The Fountain,” as has been told here in the past, is no new venture – on the author’s part, at any rate.  Mr. O’Neill wrote it all of a few years ago and sold it in turn to two other managerial organizations, both of which made wiser solutions of the bargain, forfeited their advances, and have no doubt freely added their blessings on the production as undertaken downtown by that triumvirate of which Mr. O’Neill is himself a member.  And, if blessings avail, “The Fountain” needs a sea of them.

For here, in spite of the noble mood in which the cast, and the occasional uprising of passages of beauty to break its grieving calmness, is an evening of poor rewards, extended much beyond its decent measure, inactive and too parlous, played almost wretchedly, and affording little consolation other than Mr. Robert Edmond Jones’s handsome return to romantic designs for his setting and costumes.  Like so many Village ventures, it is earnestly elaborate in a small way, much stress upon the pictures it can conjure.

Here, for once, is the foremost of our playwrights (a salute which not even “The Fountain” can make me retract) trekking a region hitherto strange to his talents, the jungle of the imaginative.  He himself raises the signpost of a preface to assure you that the Ponce De Leon of his New World epic is a creature of fancy, not of history, and that “‘The Fountain’ is not morbid realism.”

Of his forty-five or so dramatic opuses this is by no means the worst.  Yet it must rank among the most troubled, and might well have been met with that word which does honor to so many of the plays on his list – that brave word “destroyed.”  For it outtalks its aspiration, repeats its meanings with the meager melancholy of a barrel organ, and slithers too often in that peculiarly O’Neill territory where the sublime is watered by the maudlin.

There have been tragedies enough, Lord knows, about the Spanish conquerors.  Two generations ago no self-respecting American librettist would use other heroes than Cortez and Pizarro.  They tell of one famous opera where there were as many horses in the cast as there were Spaniards and Indians combined, and that, so fertile were the results of this equine assemblage, the boards of the stage began soon to put forth leaves!

But then, says Mr. O’Neill, his “The Fountain” is only incidentally concerned with America.  Indians he has in it – a goose fleshed, gaudily grease painted lot of scriveners, from the looks of them – and many hallowed names of state and church in the Era of Discovery, including Christopher Columbus.  But Ponce de Leon and his coming to Florida, that land which has passed from the Spanish brethren to the Marx Brothers, are merely pegs on which to drape the pity of man’s everlasting legend of a spring of eternal youth.  They are voluminous drapes, and they draggle.

One scene, perhaps the finest in the romance, shows Columbus’s flagship on the second voyage.  It ends in the devout fervor of a “Te Deum” at sight of land, with the sun suddenly and inexplicably rising from the west.  But this and the several episodes of parley with the Indians have about them that bliss of grouping and coloration which used to characterize such tableaux on the sides of the old time moving vans.

There are frequently sunny bits of architecture, featuring the symbolic importance of an actual fountain and running water.  A penultimate delirium of the dying Ponce de Leon brings in through gleaming jets and a dreamy blueness as many persons as harassed the sleep of Richard III.  And at last, in a spurt of exquisite phrasing, comes the key to the futility of all the old discoverer’s quest, when, in his agony, he cries aloud: “Oh, fountain of eternity, drink back this drop, my soul!”

To Walter Huston, who played so powerfully in Mr. O’Neill’s “Desire Under the Elms,” falls this massy part of Ponce de Leon.  But he does roughly with it, his voice apparently incapable of anything but loud and soft and loud again, his sincerity no talisman at all against awkwardness.  But, at that, it is a part which taxes the audience’s patience as much as the spokesman’s throat.  And quite all the performing – except, perhaps, Crane Wilbur’s – is rudderless and sometimes ridiculous.

But it is a bit sardonic that of the hero on whose grave was inscribed,

                        “Here rest the bones of a Lion,
                        Mightier in deeds than in name,”

a play should be made of words, words, and more words.