By JOSEPH WOOD KRUTCH

The first question which one would naturally ask in connection with O’Neill’s magnum opus has already been triumphantly answered by the production which the Theater Guild has given it.  The extraordinary length of the drama and the curious method by which it is developed have both been justified by the fact that it has proved itself eminently actable, and the size of the audiences which it is attracting demonstrate in the directest possible manner that it has the primary virtue of being consistently interesting.  To be profitable, all future discussions of the play must, I think, be concerned only with the nature and extent of its excellence, since it is indisputably excellent in some fashion and to some degree.

If the distinction of O’Neill were primarily intellectual it might be possible to /1/ give some hint of the quality of his work by outlining its action, but his thinking is not, perhaps, superior to that of half a dozen contemporary writers and the story which he tells of a woman who absorbs the lives of three men in order to compensate herself for the lover whom she has lost might mean anything or nothing. It is great chiefly because of the passion with which it is recounted and the largeness which it personages are made to assume; because its characters though drawn from modern life and treated in a rigorously critical fashion, attain, nevertheless, to heroic proportions instead of dwindling, as most characters in modern drama do, into triviality; and because in a word, O’Neill has the power, common in many ages but extremely rare in this, of making human emotions seem cosmically important.

Tragedy, said Aristotle, is the imitation of noble actions, Comedy the imitation of ignoble ones, and though most of the tragedies which we still read have been written since his definition was formulated there is only one respect in which we need to modify it.  “Imitation” seems to us a rather naïve word for the description of any artistic process, and we fumble about for one which seem to us more exact, speaking now of “interpretation,” of “expression,” or of “form” in our effort to describe how the artist, instead of merely imitating nature, interposes himself between us and it in order to give us a version which involves something of himself between us and it in order to give us a version which involves something of himself; but we must still hold essentially to the criterion of Aristotle.  A tragedy is a work which treats man as though he were noble, a comedy a work which treats him as though he were ignoble, and it is the chief distinction of O’Neill that he is capable of doing the former.

The Freudian psychology furnishes the most disillusioning and pettifying point of view from which human nature can be viewed; it seems to rob man of the last vestige of his dignity by tracing his most powerful feelings to the most trivial causes and it makes it impossible for him to trust the integrity of those emotions upon which his sense of his greatness is founded.  And yet O’Neill, working, though he does, in part at least, from this point of view, nevertheless succeeds in making his personages seem important.  Every one of the major characters in “Strange Interlude” is the victim of a fixation which tethers him, as it were, to a fixed joint from which no struggle can remove him further than the length of the cord by which he is attached, but because O’Neill’s intellectual realization of the predicament of his characters is accompanied by an emotional comprehension of the problems of that character as they appear to himself they retain something of the greatness of which an analysis, taken by itself, would have robbed them.  Tragedy is omniscient knowledge or in the perspective of eternity, but as he appears to himself.  It implies that this emotions be presented at their own valuation, and O’Neill is one of the few men living who can still do just that.

Nina Leeds has lost, under particularly painful circumstances, a lover whom she has never possessed.  Out of her need to compensate for his loss she develops a mystical and grandiose philosophy as the result of which she hold captive three men each with a history which makes him her predestined victim, and the catastrophe to which the whole play leads is that precipitated by the characters’ increasingly clear intellectual comprehension of the nature of their predicament.  Its theme may be said to be concerned with the relation between the mighty emotional experiences of the characters and the intellectually contemptible causes which give rise to them, and its greatness to consist in the extent to which both aspects are realized.  O’Neill sets a psychological analysis of his characters beside a direct presentation of their passion and thus asks by implication one of the most characteristic and important of modern questions:  Are the emotions of mankind to be evaluated with reference to their origins or merely with reference to their magnitude as emotions?

From the standpoint of technique “Strange Interlude” is, of course, of the very highest interest.  It succeeds by means both of its unusual length and its novel uses of spoken thought in presenting upon the stage a kind of story hitherto capable of being treated in the novel alone, and it may possibly establish a new kind of dramatic writing if others can be found to master its form as O’Neill has mastered it.  Yet the importance of the play considered as an isolated work does, nevertheless, consist essentially in the fact this approaches, as perhaps no other modern play approaches, true tragedy without imitating Greek or Elizabethan forms and without adopting any archaic point of view.  It arrests and startles its auditors because it moves them in a new way of making possible for moderns something which must be analogous to the experiences undergone when the great tragedies of the past were not only great as literature but intimately related to the spirit of the age which produced them, because, in short, it treats modern life in a fashion convincingly heroic.  There are many dramas written during the twentieth century of which it may be truthfully said that they are interesting, subtle, or true; of what other contemporary play can it be said that it is also and in all senses of the word “great”?