Like so much else in his life, his heroic effort to finish his last novel came too late; and the luck which might have kept him alive until he had finished was not with him. He had predicted to Perkins in the middle of December that he could complete a first draft by January 15, and at the rate he was going he might have done so; on December 20 he completed the first episode of Chapter VI. The next day he had a second, fatal heart attack.
Between Susan Glaspell and Eugene O'Neill there lies a fundamental artistic difference that may be rooted in the difference of sex as well as of temperament. Allowing for the fact that clear-cut contrasts are more or less illusory, we may yet assert that where O'Neill is at bottom the man of feeling, Glaspell is the woman of thought. From this distinction may be derived a list of antitheses. With O'Neill's overflow of feeling comes a straining toward violence and melodrama; he reveals little humor; he is fond of primitive persons, usually men bent upon achieving their purpose at whatever cost; he is voluble, as if his persons' thoughts were struggling to clarity through the mist of inchoate feelings. Glaspell's intensity of thought, on the other hand, induces a straining toward wit, an eminently intellectual process; her humor—leaving aside the question of its body or successfulness—presupposes persons of sophistication. As O'Neill inclines toward the masterful man, so she leans toward the rebellious woman. Where the author of The Hairy Ape spurts out words like the gushing of a geyser, Glaspell is reticent, laconic; O'Neill is expression, where Glaspell is repression. "Do you know, dearest", says Ian in her Tickless Time, "you are very sensitive in the way you feel feeling? Sometimes I think that to feel feeling is greater than to feel."
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