CRIMSON BOOKSHELF

FROM the earliest plays of O'Neill there has been a recurrent struggle to find some essence in man and his universe beyond its tragic appearance: that naturalistic appearance which is the core of "The Moon in the Caribees" and "Desire Under the Eims." We may call it a cosmic yearning for a God of eternal meaning, but this philosophical and poetic urge has seemed always to be only half in earnest, at once passionately sought for and scornfully east aside. In "Strange Interlude" there are poetic outbursts from Nina identifying God with herself as an all-compassionate Mother, and men as flashes in the electrical display of God. In "Mourning Becomes Electra" the dramatist seemed to drift into a completely mechanistic attitude, at least to give expression to such a concept. "Days Without End" is indeed a modern miracle play, if we consider this undercurrent attitude even in its barest outline.

This modern miracle play is the conversion of a sensitive middle-aged man John Loving, back to the Catholic form of Christianity through a perfect marriage. John is one of the "modern temper" group of twentieth century intellectuals who has run the gamut of atheism, socialism, and Bolshevism. That love and marriage had been abolished in the latter state and that schoolboys were throwing spitballs at Almighty God delighted this iconoclast. But it is the religion of love as symbolized and poetized in Christian dogma that brings him to conversion. Religion supplied the necessary ideal meaning of his earthly and therefore transient love. The similar position that the philosophic poet and man of letters, George Santayana, has taken in the past ten years may clarify what this miracle play is trying to express. Santayana has returned to the catholic form of Christianity because he feels the necessity for an ideal, as well as for a rational expression of the meanings and values of life. He further believes that Christianity, ideally, seizes the essence of human life and ought therefore to be eternal. It may be destroyed, he emphatically warns, by entangling itself with a particular account of matters of fact, matters irrelevant to its ideal significance. Thereon hangs a more complex problem. The O'Neill drama attempts to express this ideal significance in relation to one man's emotions. O'Neill has gone along with Santayana and T. S. Eliot, towards a general reconsideration of the religious problem.

As a dramatic piece for the stage "Days Without End" is badly deficient. It is largely a desk revaluation of the whole life and experience of one man. The device of a mask is used to represent the rational self, the skeptic half, of John Loving. In the first three acts John discusses and debates the ending of his autobiographical novel with his dual self, with his uncle, a priest, and with his wife, Elsa. During his matrimonial happiness, John had once been faithless in a moment of pity for an abused woman. The dramatic point lies in the question of whether his wife shall be told of the incident in the end of the novel and the sinner forgiven. The rational self calls such a solution sentimental and urges an ironic conclusion, the wife dead, the confession unuttered. The other woman, a friend of both, relates the story in disguise to form the wife; then Loving discusses this point with his wife in relation to the two possible endings of the novel. Elsa sees through the fiction but cannot bring herself to forgiveness. She catches pneumonia and is on the verge of death. The husband is numbled fights his rational self to death and is converted beneath the crcifix. The wife lives.

For such an emotion this expression seems most inadequate. One is tempted to say that a dramatic or narrative form of poetry would be far better. But O'Neill has previously expressed the thoughts and feelings of his characters in a poetic prose that sounded their depths. There is only one moment, the last scene in the play, which approaches a full poetic expression of what the dramatist means. Both dramatically and poetically "Days Without End" seems to be peculiarly deficient in communication.