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: