Chapter III

The elevation which Ibsen gains in _Ghosts_ through beauty of structure and atmospheric effect does not carry over to the theme; here the author frankly chooses honesty and foregoes sublimity. Few or no writers since have been at once as great and as honest. If we observe the literature of the last quarter century to see how it has met the dilemma, we shall find perhaps an explanation of current anarchy and experimentation. Some take refuge in subtle evasions, disguised by the cleverness of novel technic or material. But those who do not evade the issue follow two roads: _the road of laughter_, which goes by way of irony and satire; and _the road of tears_, by way of pathos or cruelty.

The former path, since it leads away from the tragic emotions, need not detain us long. With effort the romantic can school himself into a detachment of head from heart in which he can smile at the contrast between his dreams and the reality. His laughter may be bitter, but it is laughter. Pirandello, aware of the flux and illusoriness of life, deliberately contrasts it with the permanence and significance of fiction; and extracts mirth from the grotesquerie and cleverness of his paradoxes, in spite of the disillusionment underlying them. Anatole France armoured his sensibility with detached artistry and the _esprit gaulois_. Aldous Huxley, too much the moralist to be wholly detached, solaces himself with savage satire. The whole work of Cabell is a series of repetitions of one bitter “jest” involving the night before and the morning after. Such writers, emotionally romantic but intellectually sceptical, choose to laugh at their predicament rather than weep.

The road of tears concerns us directly. It usually follows the way of pathos. Though Aristotle made pity and fear correlative emotions, it is a fact that we feel the former more for the weak victim like Ophelia than for the hero, and that the more we admire, the less we need weep. Pathos must be subordinate in heroic tragedy if the play is to elevate our spirits. Obviously, however, the modern who sees nothing to admire is left with pathos as his chief effect.

Pathos and horror we find in Hardy, little mitigated by any admiration except for the author’s artistry. Rarely we find a heroism of sorts in characters like Michael Henchard; but it is significant that the author ended his novels with _Jude_. Galsworthy’s habitual irony always borders on pathos if not sentiment. French “naturalism” is harsher and at times, as in _Madame Bovary_, finds expression in bitter irony. But pathos is none the less its most powerful effect. _The Old Wives’ Tale_ of Arnold Bennett is an English imitation; here we feel the pathos of mere mortality quite apart from anything the very ordinary characters do. In Theodore Dreiser, “naturalism,” though sadly in need of pruning, still bears its bitter fruit. It is characteristic of its spirit that Dreiser uses the word “tragedy” with reference to the fate of a Clyde Griffiths.

But since pathos skirts the gulf of sentimentality, the “hard-boiled” generation since the war have turned from it. Those of the younger group who cannot laugh have as a result begun to explore another emotion, which lies even deeper in our nature, and which is also compatible with disillusionment. The savage in all of us finds a fierce and hard delight in torture. Significantly the word “sadism” has become fashionable. We may name the emotion “cruelty,” though the word is perhaps inadequate.

In the drama an important forerunner of contemporary exploitations of cruelty and sex, as well as of expressionism, was Frank Wedekind. Cruelty is manifest in James Joyce. In D. H. Lawrence it accompanies a pathological exaltation of sexuality, and thus gives him greater hardness than his American parallel, Sherwood Anderson. A very interesting instance of it is the work of a contemporary American poet whose fame is still unequal to his remarkable achievements. I speak of Robinson Jeffers.

Jeffers’ long narrative poems spread a more than Thyestian banquet of horrors. With surprise we learn that in private life the author is so unwilling to inflict pain that “he never picks a flower wantonly.” But in his art he more than compensates for such sensibilities. _Roan Stallion_, for example, depicts the passion of a modern Pasiphaë. The unlucky husband is trampled by the stallion, and the woman shoots the animal. _Tamar_ deals with incest between brother and sister, and ends with a fire which burns down the house and its more or less crazy inmates. _The Tower Beyond Tragedy_, though treating the Clytemnestra legend with great power, ends in the incest motive between Orestes and Electra.

The perversity of theme, however, is partly compensated by elevation of treatment, for Jeffers has a certain grandeur of style, drawing as he does upon Greek literature, the Bible, modern psychology, and physical science for thought, and the beauty of natural scenery for description. A passage which illustrates at once his power of style and his drift toward cruelty is found in preparation for the crucial scene of _Roan Stallion_.

Humanity is the start of the race; I say
Humanity is the mould to break away from, the crust to break
through, the coal to break into fire,
The atom to be split.
Tragedy that breaks man’s face
and a white fire flies out of it; vision that fools him
Out of his limits, desire that fools him out of his limits, unnatural
crime, inhuman science,
Slit eyes in the mask; wild loves that leap over the walls of nature,
the wild fence-vaulter science,
Useless intelligence of far stars, dim knowledge of the spinning
demons that make an atom,
These break, these pierce, these deify, praising their God shrilly
with fierce voices: not in a man’s shape
He approves the praise, he that walks lightning-naked on the
Pacific, that laces the suns with planets,
The heart of the atom with electrons: what is humanity in this
cosmos? For him, the last
Least taint of a trace in the dregs of the solution; for itself, the
mould to break away from, the coal
To break into fire, the atom to be split.[40]

In interpretation of his thought Mr. Louis Adamic quotes Mr. Jeffers as saying that civilisation tends inevitably toward downfall through sexual introversion. Although to attempt to “break out of humanity” after the fashion exalted in _Roan Stallion_ is, to be sure, dangerous, “misinterpreted in the mind of a fool or a lunatic,” nevertheless the fault of the civilised person is that he “regards man exclusively,” “founding his values, desires, his picture of the universe, all on his own humanity.” Mr. Jeffers thus levels his attack directly at the foundation of humanism, and allies himself with the naturalists who seek salvation in the physical.

He thus flies from normal humanity into cruelty and perversion. But the end of these is death. And in poem after poem is expressed the longing for the peace and endurance of granite,--of the grave. The violent destruction of the individual is the logical outcome of his creed, and the denial of human values leads to the annihilation of humanity.

This tendency, the extreme development of which we find in Jeffers, we find in less degree in our leading American dramatist. But in Eugene O’Neill it is obscured by other qualities; and generalisations are rendered difficult because he is groping and experimental, not only in technic but in philosophy. Because of this difficulty as well as for his intrinsic importance, O’Neill requires special consideration.