Chapter IV: Part 4

Now, intelligence averaging no higher in Italy than elsewhere, the result of this condition upon the arts is disastrous. It compels them to retain outworn forms that may be in themselves as good as newer forms, or even better, but that cannot be employed to-day for the fresh expression of emotion or thought. A deadly imitative conservatism crushes the arts in Italy. In painting hardly any influence later than that of the French Impressionists is apparent; in music almost none later than Debussy; in stage-setting and lighting none, positively none, later than Belasco. The staging of operas in the remodelled Scala is magnificent; the detail is elaborate and costly; the costumes are impeccable; real stars twinkle in a purple night-sky indistinguishable from that of Rapallo. But of the interesting experiments in non-realistic stage-setting that are being made in Germany, America, and to a lesser extent in France, there is no trace. There daren’t be. Just one such stage-set was attempted at the Scala last season--a timid one, at that; but the public would have none of it. Perhaps it is better for the arts not to have too many people care much about them, and undoubtedly it is better for the artists. Composers like Malipiero or painters like Ferrazzi must either be neglected or attain, and be content with, a reputation abroad; but they may get a wry satisfaction from the knowledge that if their work is good enough to endure until it ‘dates’ as something perfect out of a dead past, their pictures will then (but not until then) be hung in every gallery, and their music performed at every theatre, of their native land.

The tyranny over literature is not quite so great as that over music, for the obvious reason that a book is read in solitude by an individual, not performed before a very articulate audience, and also because the reading public is smaller than the opera public. Nevertheless, if small, it is of the same kind and only a little more alert to new impressions. It, too, knows what it wants and that this is art. The result is to weaken and emasculate literature. Not, of course, that a writer of integrity will deliberately seek to give the public what it wants, but he can hardly avoid being discouraged by the knowledge that it wants only a repetition of something that has already been done. Moreover, the writer is, after all, himself an Italian, with the Italian’s thorough early grounding in verbosity, rhetoric and sentimentality, and with his instinct to keep life and literature separate. He attempts, even desperately, to write about life, but somehow the attempt does not often succeed. The result is thin and tired. Some spark is lacking. The stuff does not ring true. It remains ‘literary.’

But have not writers, and other artists, in all countries had to struggle with difficulties, from which they have emerged more or less triumphantly? Surely English literature has sprung from a milieu hostile to all the arts, and is but the more vigorous for that? True, and so do they struggle in Italy; but it is as though they must start from farther back and overcome elementary handicaps that they should surely be spared. Even to nullify that persistent early training in opulent rhetoric and that in verbosity must demand heroic effort; yet most of them have conquered the former, and some the latter. It is a triumph that they do actually write freshly. But that attitude toward literature as a thing in itself is hard to overcome. And there are other dangers and difficulties.

For example, the literary clique. In Italian life the individual is strong, the organized group weak; which is a splendid and sane condition of affairs. In Italian literature, as in the other arts, the group flourishes disastrously and frequently submerges the individual. Let a man write a few books that reveal talent, and immediately a group forms about him, with a cult of its hero and a critical estimate of his work to which he will thereafter find himself attempting to conform, thus, hedged about by a wall of literary ideas, growing less and less capable of an individual interpretation of life itself. Or perhaps there are three or four men about whom the group forms, either because they resemble one another in thought or in manner of expression, or perhaps only because they happen to live in the same city. Then the result is even more harmful, since the various individual writers also react upon one another. Witness the young Florentine group--Soffici, Palazzeschi, Papini, etc.--all once writers of promise, all fallen into premature decay. Panzini has suffered perceptibly from this kind of thing; lesser writers have suffered even more. When G. A. Borgese was writing his first novel, _Rubè_, the reverent clique about him heralded the yet unfinished book as a masterpiece, the first genuine synthesis of--I forget what, but the word ‘synthesis’ must certainly have been used. Any one who has read _Rubè_ is aware that it is very far from being a masterpiece. That is not Signor Borgese’s fault. What _is_ his fault, however, and of great detriment to the novel, is his obvious determination throughout to make it a masterpiece.

Ah, well, cults exist in other countries than Italy. One recalls the well-known scene in Victor Hugo’s salon, where the Master sat on a kind of pontifical throne, and uttered occasional maxims to the worshippers grouped about his feet. ‘Je crois en Dieu,’ he announced once, after a long silence. Another and reverent silence followed. Then a woman spoke. ‘Chose étrange!’ she murmured. ‘Un dieu qui croit en Dieu.’

No enumeration of the handicaps under which an Italian writer must struggle would be complete without mention of the prolonged baneful influence on both prose and verse, but especially on prose, of D’Annunzio. D’Annunzio himself is what he is, and I have no intention of discussing here the merits and defects of his own important achievement; I am only glancing at the influence his work has for thirty years exerted on minor writers--an influence bad almost without qualification. It has led scores of writers away from simplicity, away from life (by which I do not mean only away from realism), into a deliberate tortured complexity, beneath which was nothing, a blank emptiness. Even to-day Italian prose has not shaken itself quite free from that appalling influence. It corrupts the work of Virgilio Brocchi oddly, since there is at bottom nothing ‘Dannunziano’ in its spirit, and it pervades that of Antonio Beltramelli, to mention only two contemporary novelists of some talent. It is greatly to the credit of Panzini that there is no trace of it in his work, though he has been subjected to it all his life, being of precisely D’Annunzio’s age.

(One firm exception must be made to all that I have said about the thinness and flaccidity of Italian prose. Side by side with literary prose, there has always existed in Italy a polemical prose which has never lacked vitality. To-day it is stronger than ever. It is, in fact, terrific in its vigour, insolence and scurrility. This is probably because it is not considered a form of art; so that in it people let themselves go, and express with unrestrained violence their fiercely partisan hatreds. At any rate, to find really living, breathing, Italian prose you must turn to-day to the polemical editorials of the press--the bitter stinging attacks on political adversaries that you will find in the _Popolo d’Italia_, the _Giustizia_, _Cremona Nuova_, and the Genoa _Lavoro_).[1]

Although I have enumerated a good many obstacles to the achievement of anything really significant in contemporary Italian fiction, I am still dissatisfied. Given sufficient strength, sufficient vitality, writers should have surmounted even these difficulties.

Given sufficient strength. Perhaps that is the real point. The men striving are not strong enough.

Poets come from wherever God put them, but, almost without exception, the prose writers of Italy spring from the bourgeoisie. From the ‘popolo,’ none; from the aristocracy, ‘Black’ and provincial (even when residing in Rome itself), occupied only with religion, the retention of its rights and the adequate marriage of its children, or from the cosmopolitan aristocracy, occupied only with diversions, there have come but one or two names. No, the writers come from the bourgeoisie. And the bourgeoisie, in England far stronger than any other class, is in Italy the weakest, the least full-blooded.

Despite the fact that my own intimate Italian friends and close acquaintances are perforce members of the middle and upper classes, it is of that vast third class, the ‘popolo,’ that I think first when I think of Italy. Pardon the foreign word. ‘The common people’ is too superior, ‘the People’ obscured by demagogic connotation. Also, before continuing, I must beg you to believe that I am not being sentimental, that I have no parlour belief in the Nobility of Labour, but that I base what I have to say on what I personally know (and I wish it might be more) of a great many individuals belonging to this class.

The virtues that make the ‘popolo’ in the main so lovable--cheerfulness, sturdy patience, kindliness, self-sacrifice, great generosity, ready active pity for suffering--are of course released through the difficult laborious existence the ‘popolo’ leads and has always led. Potential vices lie darkly awaiting their chance in the heart of every man. Not class, but only the circumstances of class prevent their unfolding. The second generation of a peasant family that has been promoted (if you can call it that) to the shop-keeping class is apt to be as harsh and greedy as any family of Sicilian absentee landlords. The vices so long crushed down have come into their own with a vengeance. No matter. Greed and selfishness may be less common in the Italian ‘popolo’ than elsewhere merely because there is scant nourishment for them in poverty, but that the virtues I have mentioned are so apparent there is a tribute to the race. Poverty can release them; it cannot create them.

The point is, however, that the virtues I have mentioned as roughly characteristic of the Italian ‘popolo’ are the warm-blooded virtues of life. A generous or a self-sacrificing man is more alive than a greedy or a selfish man. And life really seems to be richer, fuller and more exuberant in this class than in any other. There is nothing stolid or dull about these people. Their passions are strong, but not of the body alone; they flow over into the mind. An Anglo-Saxon day-labourer or a Finn or a Swede has his recurrent moments of terrific passion, sexual or other, but between times appears to relapse into a state of blank mental non-existence. This is, at least, the impression he makes on an outsider. Of course, behind his inarticulateness a broad silent stream of thought _may_ be flowing; but, frankly, I doubt it. Nothing that he says when he does occasionally break his silence justifies the assumption. The Italian of a similar class is, if friendly toward you, immensely communicative; and I submit that if a person is communicative it is because he has something to communicate.

The Italian of the ‘popolo’ surely has a great deal. His mind is alert, his curiosity unbounded, and, best of all, his fancy exuberant. More often than not, he has a strong sense of humour. His mind is as robust as his body. And, though he interlards his conversation with proverbs (his share in the racial curse), it consists otherwise of vivid, unhackneyed, often magnificently ungrammatical turns of phrase, that convey freshly his own direct sensations.

Now this last is characteristic only of the ‘popolo.’ In polite conversation Italians of other classes mostly talk like books. That appalling education of theirs has been too much for them. Oh, not that there is any radical difference between them and the Italians of the ‘popolo’! The education has been too much for the latter also--when it exists. Such letters as I received during the war from slightly educated Italians of the ‘popolo’ at the front! Letters in the style of Manzoni, letters in the style of _Cuore_, letters whose rhetoric could not possibly bear any relation to the sights and sounds and emotions the writers were experiencing. I felt like crying: ‘Evviva l’analfabetismo!’

But how different it was when these same men talked of what they had experienced! Neither war-correspondence nor imaginative writing has ever given me the illusion of actual presence on the battlefield that I received from their words. They would describe, quite simply, some small homely fact, some unimportant episode, because it was what had struck them, and at once the whole scene would spring into sharp life. Nor was it always merely straight description. Sentiment and even character analysis were hidden underneath. Of the new raw officers rushed without sufficient training to the front after Caporetto, one soldier said kindly: ‘Poveretti! they didn’t even know the difference between the sound of an Austrian shell and an Italian.’ ‘When I shot I never aimed at any one. I didn’t want to kill,’ said another man (who had received the Bronze Medal for going out with two companions and capturing a machine-gun). ‘We didn’t like the shocktroops; they frightened us,’ said the same man. ‘They looked wild. They went out, half drunk, with their long knives in their teeth, and they never took any prisoners.’

My hope for Italian literature is that sooner or later it may come from the ‘popolo,’ and that it may come uncorrupted by the kind of education at present in vogue, and corrupted as little as possible by any education at all save that in life itself, which the ‘popolo’ already possesses. If such a revolution in literature ever does take place, it will be like that in the Middle Ages when writers forsook Latin for the vernacular. Nor does it seem to me improbable. The condition of the labouring class is considerably better than before the war; a little leisure may presently be achieved. And at the same time the old education is weakening, growing decrepit. Professors are dying out, or at any rate becoming scarcer, since their salaries are not high enough to support life in the social condition to which they are condemned. By its stiffening of standards the Riforma Gentile results in cutting down drastically the number of young men who can attend a university. And the salaries of teachers in the elementary schools are so inadequate to the present cost of living that the ranks must be filled from among the ‘popolo.’

Since the war the pace of life itself is swifter and fiercer than ever, while literature grows weaker, more anaemic. Presently the water will rise too high; surplus life will be too strong; with a rush it will flow over and submerge the old literature with a new rich wave.

It would be unfair not to add that for years the desire for such a renovation has been cherished by many Italians. What else but a reaction against the debility of Italian literature was, and still is, the whole Futurist movement? Consciously it was, among other things, a passionate protest against verbosity, rhetoric and sentimentalism; less consciously perhaps, with its demand for velocity, a protest against the separation of literature from life. And, though Futurism has not itself created any work of importance, it has had an important influence on Italian writers, an influence which perhaps did more than any other to overcome that of D’Annunzio. Even to-day Futurism is still to be reckoned with. But it, too, is a conscious movement, and thus tends, as Marinetti himself half admits, to become academic, to crystalline in the forms with which it reacted against other forms.

Once again, it is not to movements, but to individuals that one must look--to individuals who care nothing for groups and less than nothing for tendencies, either to follow or to combat them, but who carve out unaided their own conception of life. Of such was Giovanni Verga, who died a few years ago more than eighty years old, neglected and almost forgotten, but with a magnificent achievement behind him that throws a bleak pitiless light on the tawdriness of his contemporaries and successors. Now that he is dead, appreciation of what he accomplished is growing; people are reading him more. Imitation of Verga will not be Verga; you cannot create a race of giants without giant blood; but it cannot be quite profitless to turn at last to an author who built literature out of life.

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.

THE FRENCH

Sometimes I think of the French like this:

They are the only civilized grown-up people in the world. Even those who are ignorant or narrow have a mature attitude toward life, never a raw schoolboy attitude. They are logical in a world of insanity. For them not only do 2 plus 2 make 4, but 32 plus 32 make 64--not, as Blasco Ibañez said of the Russians, 4589. Their minds are orderly, swept and garnished, clear like their language, to hear which spoken by cultivated Frenchmen is an exquisite aesthetic pleasure, and to hear which falling precisely and crisply even from the lips of shopkeepers makes one sigh with relief at having come away from countries such as America or Italy, where common speech is a slovenly massacre, and where voices seem designed for the great open spaces.

Their prose is the marvel of the centuries. Its quality never stales. The mere flavour of the words on a page of Montaigne or of Anatole France is delicious. And no one who has learned that their poetry is not something to be compared with English poetry, but something of a different kind, will ever deem it thin. Racine thin? Alfred de Vigny thin?