The symbolist technic of this play forces attention upon the underlying theme. Only Lazarus is unmasked, and he is thus shown freed from the illusions of mortality. The rhythmical repetitions and symmetrical groups of the choruses materialise ethical sympathies and antagonisms. And the theme is stated repeatedly: there is no death. But when we try to understand this affirmation we are repeatedly baffled. It cannot be the Christian belief in personal immortality. The resurrection of Lazarus would give ground for such a view were it not obvious that the author has taken over a Christian legend merely as starting point for his non-Christian allegory. Not only is Christian immortality not preached, but Christian morality is not expounded. The hero displays not humility but arrogance. For him men are not evil until redeemed by the grace of God; they are innately good but perverted by fear. He thus incites them not to love one another because children of a loving God, but to live passionately and instinctively. To be freed from the fear of death means for those who come under his spell not to live on earth after the Golden Rule, in meekness to forgive and suffer wrong; but to drown all human interests in a mad delight in death. And they laugh with exultation at the prospect of annihilation. The paradox seems essentially irrational. Cries Lazarus: “Once as squirming specks we crept from the tides of the sea! Once as quivering flecks of rhythm we beat down the sun. Now we re-enter the sun! Cast aside is our pitiable pretence, our immortal egohood, the holy lantern behind which cringed our Fear of the Dark.... We will to die!” In a manner strikingly similar to that of Jeffers, O’Neill exalts pan-evolutionary nature; having passed beyond horror at the scientific demonstration of an inhuman universe, he attempts to pull himself out of humanity into a rapturous acceptance of Nature. But Jeffers finds no source for laughter in his god “that laces the suns with planets, the heart of the atom with electrons.” Whence does O’Neill derive his mirth? He may well have got his inspiration from Nietzsche. I have summed up Nietzsche’s idea in _The Birth of Tragedy_ as “an intoxicated joy in annihilation and union with nature.” Significantly it is just following an attack on Christianity that he exalts the laughing mood. We must fear the “romantic,” he says, because the romantic tends to end comforted like a Christian. “No! ye should first of all learn the art of earthly comfort, ye should learn to _laugh_, my young friends, if ye are at all determined to remain pessimists: if so, you will perhaps, as laughing ones, eventually send all metaphysical comfortism to the devil--and metaphysics first of all! Or, to say it in the language of that Dionysian ogre, called Zarathustra: “‘Lift up your hearts, my brethren, high, higher! And do not forget your legs! Lift up also your legs, ye good dancers--and better still if ye stand also on your heads!...