New-York tribune., 1921-01-30
As We Were Saying g
Saxza 6o<ko-o

Wo mean those fainter and still pleas
ing sounds that come a. the end Of all
Of Mr.. O'Neill's plays-the thud- of q
fallen aspiration. We have not seen
or read a single one of these plays in
which We did not see his hero, after a
mighty grasp at heaven, fall fiat on
his face in the dirt. We will try an
Impractical psychanalytic hand on Mr..
O'Neill and conclude that he began q
complex at Harvard over the noun
tain which labored and brought forth
a mouse.
When the first O'Neill plays appeared
at the Provincetown Players Theatcr
they came with the bite and rcfrcshment
of cold air. We were all abundantly fed
with the uplift OF the arrived drama
fists, and some Of US hardly hoped to
survive any more happy endings The
indicated peace and perfection Of
final curtains had made US willing to
acclaim anything great which seemed
ugly and halting and real enough to fit
in with our own experiences.
But we did not mean to ask Mr..
y Nel!i always to leave US biting the
dust. Nor do we mean to stay with him
if he does. We know that life does fall
into certain major patterns, but surely
not always into the same one. Life has
it's rhythms, and goes both up and down.
We can't feel that man has tho right
to speak perpetually Of starting at the
top and going down, as if it were never
true that he also started at the bottom
and came back up. The individual has
his rhythms, too. Ii is fine bet that
tho man of forty or fifty will arrive at
the splendid promise he gave at three.
It's as good one that st sixty or sew
enty he will have slumpcd back to
where he was at fifteen. 1t may also
be that at eighty he will have lost that
instructive cry for safety known as
conservatism and will blossom out
again, in the brief final time before he
is a hundred and back beside the fire.
place, waiting to die as q good party
meC
We believe that a dramatist Of calibcr
ia the ono who can write the rise of
man as well as his fall. We believed in
Eugene O'Neill in tho beginning be-
cause we believed that he had started
at the black end only because ho felt it
was being neglected. In tho old-fash-
ioned days OF painting, the painter put
in his blackest dab first, named it his
ultimate shadow, and then painted such
sun as went with it. That kept the
canvas from being shrouded in the kind
OF shadow that too bright and too
youthful a sun would cast.
SO VIC watched and applauded when
Mr.. O'Neill laid on the first good round
brown spot. We said hc knew his busl-
ness, and his canvas would repay our
shouting. What We have actually seen
since Is nothing moro nor less than Mr..
O'Ncill's patient, unalterablc dabbing
at the selfsamo spot. "Thc Emperor
Jonss," we think, is tho very perfection
Of Mr.. O'Neilrs brown spots. Nowhere
clso have we ever seen tho ironic circle
80 imprcssiyely closed. If he had not
prepared us for it by too many such as
"Thc Moon Of the Caribbcca." "In the
Zone" "3ound East for Cardiff" "Be-
yond the Horizon" "rhe Rope and so
on, wo should have been, IL possible,
even moro rhapsodic than We wero over
"The Emperor Jones" Even so, VIC
shall continue to regard 1t as the finest
| ironic gesture our thcater has known
| and tho one most applicable 10 lifc IT.
sels. But IL we had hoped that O'Ncill,
having finally done his best in that gal
Ilery, would then turn into another. there