Luigi Pirandello
Pirandello has written a great deal. In addition to the numerous plays by which he is rightly known, there are several novels and a large number of short stories—so large a number, in fact, that he is collecting them in a twenty-four volume edition under the title, Novelle per un anno—one for each day of the year. Five of the twenty-four volumes have been published so far—closely printed books of some three hundred pages each; but I find in them little of the Pirandello who is an important figure in Italian literature to-day. Despite his announcement in the preface that many of the stories are new, that all have been carefully retouched and many rewritten, they bear the brand of journalism. They rarely descend as low as the average American magazine story, but, for all the prolific inventiveness they reveal, they have something of the same monotony, adequate workmanship and lack of distinction. Nor is the significance of the thought or emotion often striking. Now and again one does get a hint of the Pirandello of the plays—in the extraordinary, almost wasteful (and often wasted) power of characterization, for example, or in the preoccupation with death—but these things are obscured by the verbose pedestrian prose, quite without freshness. This lack of distinction is certainly not due to carelessness; rather, the tales seem heavy and laboured. Indeed, from all that I have read of Pirandello I am inclined to believe that it is only conversation, dramatic dialogue, that he can write well and freshly. There would be nothing surprising in this. It is notoriously rare for a good dramatist to be a good novelist or novellista. And I am not even convinced that the monotonous melancholy of the stories (somebody dies in almost every one) has much to do with their author’s predisposition to tragedy. The tragic ending is almost as much a convention in an Italian, as the happy ending in an American, story; and since in only a few of these tales have I felt the note of real poignancy and been even faintly moved, I am the more inclined to class their sadness as conventionality.
Those that deal with Pirandello’s own native Sicily have greater warmth, a hint of tenderness. Lontano, the story of a Norwegian sailor left, ill with typhoid, by his ship companions at the little town of Porto Empedocle, nursed by the niece of that absurd, delightful, old character, Don Paranza, a Sicilian ‘Vice Consul for Scandinavia,’ finally marrying her, and settling down to live in that sunburnt country, an eternal stranger to every one, including his wife, is genuinely touching. But the undistinguished prose in which it is too wordily told is like a dry field that should be burned over for the sake of the fresh green grass struggling beneath.
The last stories in this volume (the fifth) are the best, hint more clearly at the Pirandello of the plays, at both his virtues and his defects; so it is just possible that the entire collection is being made chronologically (though nothing is said of any such plan in the preface), in which case, to judge them fairly, one ought, I suppose, to await the publication of the other nineteen volumes.
It would be unfair to blame these stories for lacking profundity of thought, since a story may of course have profound significance without actually expressing any thought at all, were it not that there is a great deal of philosophizing in them, and that often it is made the point of the story. Since this is so, it seems fair to note that the philosophizing is pretty superficial. Take, for instance, the story called Niente (which is far superior to most of the others because it is nearly all in dialogue). A hack doctor is awakened at three in the morning at the pharmacy where he is on duty, to attend a young man who has attempted to commit suicide. But on arrival at the horrible tenement-house in which the tragedy took place, he finds that the victim, dying, has been removed to a hospital. So the whole story is simply conversation—first between the doctor and the annoyed middle-class relative of the suicide, then between the doctor and the wretched inhabitants of the apartment in which the young man had lived. Bit by bit through this dialogue the tragedy and its causes are revealed, with a skill worthy of that displayed in Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore. (Indeed, of this story a striking one-act play might easily be made). One would like the point to be merely the revelation of the obscure tragedy, with no more moral to it than to Kipling’s Without Benefit of Clergy—or with the tremendous moral of its not having one. But what, instead, do we get? The doctor’s philosophizing. The unfortunate young man (he says) had written verses, wanted to be a poet, dreamed of glory—and the daughter of the house was in love with him. Supposing he had lived, what would his dream of glory have come to? A poor useless book of verse. And his dream of love? ‘Your daughter! He’d have married your daughter!’ he cries to the irate dishevelled mistress of the house. ‘Oh, beautiful and adorned with all the virtues, I have no doubt, but still a woman, my dear lady, a woman! And after a little, good God! with children and misery, think what she’d have been! And the world, my dear woman, do you know what the world would have become for him? A house! This house!’ And the doctor goes out, muttering: ‘No books! No women! No house! Nothing!’
Now, despite its vividness, this is thin and superficial and, if taken as the moral, at least as inadequate as any other moral would have been to such a tragedy. It may perhaps be taken as an adequate moral if the point of the story is not the young man’s tragedy, but the character of the doctor; but I fear that, instead, we have here Pirandello himself in a characteristic mood of hatred and disgust for grovelling life. In the last story in the book, La distruzione dell’uomo, you get the mood again, and the moralizing, unrelieved by a really possible, poignant tragedy. Here a young student murders a commonplace woman of forty-seven because she is about to have a child. She has been pregnant year after year before this, but each time has had a miscarriage. This time it is clear that the child will be born. And the student, in disgust for her, her husband, the squalid tenement-house they, and he, live in, and the squalid world beyond, murders the woman with her unborn child, feeling fiercely that he is murdering humanity itself, destroying Man.
A pity! Not only because there are a dozen moods that might be felt in considering that middle-aged couple, that distressing eighth-rate apartment-house, with its dirty dishevelled walls and ragged display of washing and the filthy children swarming in its courtyard, instead of the one, not very perceptive mood of disgust to which we are held; but also because in the expression of even this one mood Pirandello has here, as often elsewhere, overdone himself, so that positively one finishes the story in such a reaction of cheerfulness as almost to agree with dear Pippa’s favourite remark. There you had it all—a masterly picture of the house, of the quarter (that quarter of Rome has certainly changed for the better of late years), and of the heavy elderly couple, she with vast distorted stomach, he with an only less vast one, making laboriously the daily walk prescribed for her by the doctor, out past the church of Sant’ Agnese and back again, out and back again. Why not let it go at that and leave the reader to feel what he pleases? Most readers, I think, would feel pathos in the solemn anxiety of those two to add one more inhabitant to that house and quarter—and world, if you like. But if disgust was all one could feel, that, too, he would surely feel more keenly if left to feel it undirected.
The best known of the novels, Il fu Mattia Pascal, first published some twenty years ago when Pirandello was still a comparatively young man, is better written than the short stories. Or is it? Perhaps it has, rather, a youthful brio that they lack, a kind of gusto that rushes one along through the dry heaps of words. And also it is told in the first person; which gives it an advantage. It is only in this gusto that the book is young, however. Its spirit is not young at all, but cool, rather hard and sophisticated—not in a callow way, but maturely. I like the moralizing in the novel as much as I dislike it in most of the short stories, partly because here it is a natural expression of the characters who indulge in it, partly because it is in itself often very suggestive; indeed, I am inclined to think that the moralizing is the best of the book. On the other hand, the most interesting thing is the plot, because in it one discerns the as yet incoherent beginnings of an idea that, developed, has come to haunt Pirandello—the idea of the reality of illusion, and thus of the manifold nature of personality. In the plays one almost never gets away from some variation on this theme. Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore is hardly less frankly concerned with it than Vestire gli ignudi or Come prima, meglio di prima. But in the novel there is only the foreshadowing of the idea; it is certainly not made clear to the reader, and was almost equally certainly not yet clear to Pirandello himself; and the result is confusion.
Mattia Pascal is believed by his family and friends to have committed suicide. A body supposed to be his is discovered and formally buried. Taking advantage of this, he gives himself a new name, Adriano Meis, invents a past for himself, and sets out to live anew, free. But he finds that he cannot endure the emptiness of liberty any more than he could endure the chains in which he struggled when alive. He is sucked back into life, and eventually falls in love with a girl, Adriana, but cannot marry her because the man as whom she knows him is a fictitious man, with no papers, no stato civile, nothing. He—or, at least, the man he was before he died—has a wife already. So he ‘commits suicide’ a second time, becomes once more Mattia Pascal, and returns to his home—to find his wife long since married to his best friend, and with a baby. As far as I can make it out, what he then does is to live in a state half-way between life and death. He leaves his wife to his friend, and becomes—calls himself—‘the late Mattia Pascal.’
Now this is all very unsatisfactory, not really worked out, and in that single sense ‘young.’ Whatever significance was intended remains obscure, because, I am convinced, it was obscure to the author. There is an abundance, a super-abundance, of ideas—enough, it must be admitted, to justify in part those critics who already twenty years ago found Pirandello ‘too cerebral.’ But my own objection is not that Mattia Pascal reasons about himself exceedingly at every moment, nor even that I cannot discern significance beneath the story, can only feel that it might have held some profound significance. A study of a man who reasons exceedingly is a quite legitimate subject for a novel, and it is not essential that a study of character should pretend to be anything more. My objection is that, even granting the contradictions that go to make up any individual, Mattia Pascal does not hold together. He is shown us at the beginning as an impetuous young man of considerable force of character; yet, when freed from his unpleasant surroundings, and, by a run of luck at Monte Carlo, the possessor of 82,000 lire, he sets out to live frugally on this sum for the rest of his life, doing nothing at all. Would he really have behaved in this way? The explanation, that he could never have a stato civile, is weak. He was not so possessed of love for his own country as to have to live there. He could have gone anywhere else, almost (this being before the war), and have been taken at his word. Indeed, before his stroke of luck, he had seriously thought of emigrating to America. Neither was he a sick soul burdened by life and glad to be free from it. He was merely, quite justifiably, burdened by the conditions of his own personal environment. He might well, being curious and cynical, have done for a short time what he did; but two months of it would have bored into action the Mattia Pascal we had met. Again, he is hard to the point of callousness, if not of brutality; that we see at once. Nevertheless, in his way, he did love the girl he married, and that he was not incapable of intense emotion we see from his grief at the death of his child. Then, allowing for all possible contradictions, is it conceivable that he could have so gaily let his wife imagine him dead and, if not grieve for him, at least remain in misery, while here was he with 82,000 lire in his pocket? He might have done it—but so blithely? Again, we are shown him really in love with the gentle and pathetic Adriana. Yet he can simulate a second suicide and leave her, at any rate, to an agony of grief. Why? Because as Adriano Meis he has no real existence, is but a shadow. He has no stato civile, and can’t marry her; while, if he is Mattia Pascal, he can’t marry her, since he has a wife already. Nonsense! He could have told Adriana the truth, broken the whole tenuous chain of reasoning, and let her decide whether she would escape abroad with him and marry him as Adriano Meis. A hundred to one that she would have done so despite her religion! But if she had not, she would have been infinitely less unhappy than he made her by what he did do. There is a hardness, a cruelty, about all this that is due more to the author than to the protagonists. It is as though he would not let them alone. They are flesh and blood, and he will treat them as marionettes—for the purpose of his thesis. And, to save me, I cannot make out what his thesis really is. It might be: that there is no such thing as freedom, no escape from life; or that liberty is more unbearable than slavery; or that everything is illusion. It does not seem to me to be clearly any one of these things or any other—least of all what Pirandello himself indicates in a short essay written for the new edition of the novel: that people are the marionettes of their own idea of themselves until that idea becomes intolerable and they tear off the mask and reveal their naked faces. This is, in truth, an idea that underlies the plays, and Pirandello, writing to-day, may now read it back into what he wrote twenty years ago, but I challenge any one to discover it in the novel itself. A perplexing, unsatisfactory, frustrated book, but closer than the short stories, in power, to the plays.
There are two of the plays that I have neither seen nor read, but, among all the others, L’uomo, la bestia e la virtù stands by itself. It is true that here you get, and with a vengeance, the idea expressed in that supplementary essay to the novel—about the burattinaio who makes people imitate puppets until at moments of intense feeling they break loose and become natural; but there the resemblance ends. For this play is a wild, magnificent, breathless farce. Yes...? The exasperating thing in writing about Pirandello is that one must qualify any such definite statement as that. The play is, indeed, a rollicking farce—for the audience; but for the characters it is a desperate drama coming to the sheer edge of tragedy. Now in a typical farce of the French variety (to which, in its exceedingly risky plot, its tricks and unexpected turns, this play might well belong) the spectator feels that the characters are only playing at suffering, in order to heighten for the audience the farcical effect. Here they are in desperate earnest, in anguish. Once grant the absurd situation, which, after all, is conceivably possible, and their agony is not even overdone. They are real people struggling in the midst of a farce situation. And, with this, cruelty is deliberately, maliciously forced upon the spectator by the author. For the more acutely the characters suffer, the more violent becomes the spectator’s mirth. There is something—I don’t know—sadistic about it, and afterward one is left troubled, uncomfortable and a little resentful toward the author. It is as though one had laughed at a man who had fallen down in the street, when really he had been seriously hurt by his fall. And also what is one to think of a farce in which things as profoundly true as the following are said? ‘A real home, with all the sweet painful associations that the word “home” stirs within us, is what others—our fathers and mothers—made for us with their thoughts and their solicitude. And their home was not that one, but the one their parents had made for them.’... ‘You look at others from the outside, and they don’t interest you. What are they for you? Nothing! Images passing in front of you! Inside, inside, you must feel them, identifying yourself with them, testing their suffering by making it your own!... Oh, I know! The passions of others, even the saddest, the most poignant, make every one laugh. Of course! You haven’t ever felt them, or else, accustomed to mask them (because you are all stuffed with lies), you no longer recognize them in a poor man like me who can’t hide and control them.’
What a qualification to have to add to the innocent remark that L’uomo, la bestia e la virtù is a roaring farce and unlike the other plays! It is certainly unlike them in a technical way, however. For, after a brief and skilful exposition, it rushes on toward a distant developed conclusion. In this it differs radically from all the other Pirandello plays with which I am acquainted. They move backward, rather than forward. No one has made such an art of exposition as Pirandello. Perhaps no one before him grasped its possibilities. Remove the deceitful robe of cleverness, and the exposition of most plays is revealed as nowise different than in the days when two servants were disclosed, dusting, and conversing about the imminent return of young mistress who had been... etc. There is always the feeling of haste, that this must be got over with, so that the audience will know where things stand and the play can begin. Now this is totally unlike real life (which is what Pirandello is concerned with), where all that has gone before to create a certain situation is richer and more complicated than the development of that situation in two hours and a half can possibly become. Pirandello throws you into the midst of a situation which you begin to apprehend as interesting (absolutely as things might be in real life if you entered a room full of people you did not know); then, as he digs down beneath it, turning up other and other facts that have gone before, as intensely dramatic; and, finally, as itself almost the climax. (How magnificently this is done in Come prima, meglio di prima!) In fact, in the best of Pirandello’s plays the exposition is all but everything. The initial situation, that looked so simple at first, is revealed at last as only one step this side of the catastrophe. At the end, that one step forward is taken, and the curtain falls. Certainly this is true of the almost unbearably painful Vestire gli ignudi (called, heaven knows why, a comedy!) and of what is perhaps Pirandello’s masterpiece, Enrico IV.
All of the plays are thesis plays. The ‘this-fable-teaches...’ is never absent, and there is no doubt that it is with this, the moral, that Pirandello started. Well, many lesser artists than he have started out with a moral, and then, blessedly, thrown it overboard half-way on the voyage. Not Pirandello! He clings to it, worries it, and makes human sacrifice on its altar. Perhaps he would not do this, were it not, as I have already suggested, that his theses are always one thesis, variations on an idea that haunts him. As well as I can make it out (for it is a perplexing elusive thing), the idea is that illusion is essential to life, which last, bare and unadorned, would be unendurable. Vestire gli ignudi—clothe the naked. And that all the varieties of illusion in regard to personality gain, as soon as thought, an objective life of their own. What am I? I am my naked self, but I am, with equal truth, my own very different idea of myself, and the varying ideas that all those who know me have of me. (To say nothing of the different person I was yesterday and of the still different person I shall be to-morrow). Each one of these ideas has an objective life of its own, and gets often in the way of the others; which makes of any individual a fluctuating insecure complexity. Given this terrifying conception and its intensity in Pirandello’s mind, Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore is revealed as not in the least a tour de force, but as an allegorical expression of the passionately felt Idea. Pirandello never goes in for tours de force; he is too desperately in earnest.
Now this (I trust I have not done it too much injustice) is extremely interesting, and plays written around it, with puppets working it out, would in any case be more stimulating than those written around, say, Brieux’s thin theses. But the heart-breaking thing is that Pirandello has genuine creative genius, and that genius and a thesis cannot live together any better than youth and crabbed age; sooner or later the former becomes too strong for the latter. He sets out to create characters that shall prove his point, and, lo! the puppets spring into real life, become actual men and women, while he, the burattinaio, continues to flog them onward along the path of the Idea. The result is, in almost every case, an exasperated sense of frustration in the observer, the conviction that an abstract idea has killed something true.
Consider the play called Come prima, meglio di prima. Here, once again, you get the now matured idea of a person who is believed to be dead, but who, living under another name, comes to think of his first self as real, objective, apart from his living self; something to hate, or be sorry for, or jealous of. Fulvia has left her husband and their three-year-old daughter thirteen years since, and gone to the bad. The reasons for this behaviour are only hinted at, but appear adequate. (One never doubts the truth of the beginning of a Pirandello play). The husband, a distinguished surgeon, now discovers Fulvia, who has attempted to commit suicide in an obscure village pension, saves her life by a brilliant operation, and, to atone for his faults and give her back her daughter (who has grown up believing her to be dead), takes her home as his second wife. There, however, she is hated by her own daughter, Livia, as an interloper and an offence to the memory of the dead mother. Also Livia soon divines that this step-mother has been no better than she should be, and, being unable on investigation to find any evidence of marriage, finally concludes that the woman is merely her father’s mistress. A noble and tragic situation; a strange case, if you like, but none the less significant for that, since about it cluster the intensest human emotions. But how does Pirandello use it? For a thesis point! When, outraged by the accusation of her own daughter—all the more that it is an implied insult to the newly-born baby-girl—the wife breaks loose and tells Livia the truth, ‘Ah, now you can’t stay, now that you’re alive!’ cries the husband, in effect. ‘If you live, you can’t stay here; you could only have stayed on condition you remained dead!’ Fulvia admits this, triumphantly, and goes away with her month-old child to live in abject poverty with a casual lover from her old courtesan days, for whom she cares nothing. It is enough to make one cry with rage—not because it is an unhappy ending, but because it is so untrue. Why must she go away, just as before, save (meglio di prima) for her child? Once Livia’s illusions about her mother are shattered, is it any worse for her to live with her mother than without her? There is nothing noxious to the girl in Fulvia. They have lived together for the past ten months. Then why? Because Pirandello will have it so for the sake of his thesis. And would she have gone? Would she have taken her baby into poverty under the protection of a man who is so close to being mad that one is never quite sure on which side of the line he stands? Of course she would not. And her husband is not a bit harder for her to endure than he has been for the past ten months—less hard, really, now that she has her baby.
Oh, well, that is always the way with Pirandello. Hardly a one of his ‘inevitable’ situations that could not be solved by a burly Philistine intrusion of common sense. But at the moment, on the stage, one does not always perceive this, so patiently and skilfully have the strands of the thesis been woven together. The worst of it is that in this play, and in others, not only the final solution is false. (That would be a comparatively small thing to pardon). Like the camel in the tent, falsity has been edging its way in almost since the beginning. The characters reason and subtilize unendurably. Now, in that interesting supplementary essay to Il fu Mattia Pascal, Pirandello replies to the critics who complained that his characters always reasoned too much and so were inhuman, that reason is precisely what is human, what men have over beasts, and that never do men reason so intensely (and whether rightly or wildly, what does it matter?) as when they suffer, because they are trying to get at the cause of their suffering. Profoundly true, without a doubt. So far as I am concerned, I welcome eagerly his characters’ reasoning or raving—so long as it is theirs. But what his critics really feel, I think, is that in such plays as Come prima, meglio di prima, Vestire gli ignudi, La vita che ti diedi, the characters are often constrained to repeat lifelessly Pirandello’s own reasoning. And this is doubly unfortunate, since, curiously, they seem to us to have such an amazing life of their own. For it is an extraordinary fact that, while you feel Pirandello’s presence in his plays as the burattinaio, as a perhaps rather cruel and disdainful personality behind the scenes, you never identify him with any of the characters. Sometimes he talks for them, and then for a little while their life is suspended, or weakened; for they (and this should delight him, as a proof of his thesis) are stronger, more alive, than he. They are terribly alive. Their words (when they are not his words) lay bare atrociously their throbbing painful emotions. They are so real that I think I prefer reading the plays to seeing them acted, splendidly built for the stage though they are, not to have the personalities of the actors trespass upon those of the characters themselves. What have they to do with theses? Yes, people do indeed reason when they suffer; but one recognizes the true note. One knows when it is they who reason, and when it is only pallid he.
Enrico IV, however, I admire without reservation. It seems to me a very great play indeed, this tragic and terrible story of a young man who, costumed as the Emperor Henry IV of Germany, is thrown from his horse during a carnival cavalcade, and suffers a lesion of the brain which makes him lose his mind and thereafter believe himself the mediaeval Emperor as whom he was travestied. So, at least, his friends and relations believe, through the care of one of whom, his nephew, he has been confined, during the twenty years since his accident, in a solitary villa magnificently decorated in simulation of the period in which he fancies himself living, and waited upon by valets in costume and by four servants employed to represent ‘Secret Counsellors’ of Henry IV’s. Hither, at the beginning of the play, with a scheme that they hope may restore his mind, come the woman whom as a young girl he had loved, her daughter who is a picture of what she then was, her lover the Baron Belcredi, her daughter’s fiancé, and a doctor. But the truth, which we learn toward the end of the second act, and the others (save only the ‘Secret Counsellors’) later, is that eight years since, twelve after the accident, ‘Henry IV’ (no other name is given him in the play) recovered his mind. But when he came to understand what had happened—that he himself had grown middle-aged and grey-haired as Henry IV, that there was no place left for him in the life of others, which had gone on without him, that the young girl he had nobly loved had married, coarsened, taken as a lover the odious Belcredi—he resolved not to return to that life (where, even before his accident, his cynical worldly acquaintances contemptuously called him mad because he did not conform to their empty society standards), but to live on in his own fictitious mediaeval life—no madder than the other. Only now, in a spasm of disgust for these people coming before him in costume, for the woman he loved so purely bringing her hateful lover into his presence, for all the lies, lies, lies, with which, far more than his ‘mad’ life, their ‘sane’ lives are filled, does he reveal the truth. At the end, the willed fiction in which he lives is so strong that under its influence he kills Belcredi.
All this, as I have given it, is the barest, most unsatisfactory sketch. The play itself is amazingly rich, and it knocks at the foundations of ready-made ideas until the cheap flamboyant architecture built upon them totters. In this region between sanity and madness one is, if not closer to truth, at least further from falsehood, since everything is questioned. What is reality? what, illusion? what, madness? what, sanity? what, life itself? ‘All life is crushed by the weight of words, the weight of the dead. Here am I. Can you seriously believe that Henry IV is still alive? Yet—see! I speak and give orders to you who are alive. Does this, too, seem a jest to you—that the dead continue to govern life? Yes, here it’s a jest; but go out from here, out into the world of the living. Day is dawning. You think you’ll do what you like with this day? Yes? You? Customs and traditions! Begin to talk, and you’ll but repeat words that have always been said. You believe you’re living. You’re only re-hashing the life of the dead.’
Here in this play one finds the most perfect example of Pirandello’s great use of exposition and the clearest proof of its value. The entire tragedy is present from the beginning; the step forward at the end is almost incidental; the drama lies in the revelation of what was already there. Yet I know of no other modern play so breathlessly dramatic. Terror hovers over the darkening room at the end of Act II.
Here, too, obviously, and more richly and completely than ever before, we have that same haunting thesis. But here it is not forced upon the characters, but emerges from them. Pirandello doubtless himself means every word that he makes Henry IV say; but it is Henry IV, not he, who is speaking—and living. And so vividly real and objective are these characters that one feels it but a coincidence that the thesis which emerges from their lives and thoughts is presumably identical with Pirandello’s own thesis. (A ‘coincidence’ that has never quite happened before, and that I fear will never quite happen again).
Tremendous as the thesis is, and here an integral part of the drama, it is not with it that one’s meditations on this extraordinary play end, but with the characters themselves. Their objectivity is amazing; you can walk around them. And, almost, one might say, Pirandello has applied his system of exposition to them, as well as to the plot. For example, Belcredi is odious; yet he is no monster, but only a revelation of how odious is the ordinary libertine man-of-the-world. The Marchesa Matilde is a coarsened embittered wreck of a woman, pathetic because she is aware of her degeneration; but she is only a revelation of what a lady of society, who has been capable of something better, becomes. In short, while there are in this and the other plays strange characters—the central figure in Enrico IV, Marco Mauri in Come prima, meglio di prima, for example—there is a larger number of average people whom we might, any of us, meet at any time. And it is, I think, Pirandello’s highest merit that he makes the former entirely credible, and reveals the significance that we, duller, had not perceived in the latter. A rare virtue, indeed, in a playwright, who must, we had almost come to believe, exaggerate his characters to the point of caricature. For this and for his magnificent development of exposition Pirandello imposes himself as a really great dramatist, despite his obtrusive thesis and despite also his unsatisfactory attitude toward life.
What that attitude is, is revealed, curiously, as unmistakably in the plays as in the short stories or the novels. ‘Curiously,’ because, as I have said, the characters have so complete a life of their own. One gets it, of course, in those painful thesis-interims, when not they are talking, but he; and (one reading the plays) in the stage instructions. But even this does not quite explain the fact that somehow, oddly, one is always aware of Pirandello’s presence. He is the puppet-master who will not be obeyed, looking on at the antics of his rebellious marionettes with a fastidious distaste, a contemptuous pity. He appears to have a sick, but not weak, disgust for life. Well, one certainly does not ask for optimism. Any one who can look upon the world as it has been revealed to us of late years, and yet flaunt a blithe and hopeful spirit, deserves only an audience of children. But the attitude one divines in the bravest seems to be: ‘So that is what humanity is—humanity of which we are a part! Very well, then; carry on.’ From Pirandello one gets only the first half of the pronouncement. The end of all his observation is despair, which is only endurable to us because it is not weak, but glows with so fierce an anger.