Underthe influence of that gentle optimism which once upon a time suffused the world with a warm twilight glow, I used to believe that in the very long run truth would out, and that accordingly history was an exact science. Conceding cheerfully that a veracious history of our own period or of other periods close behind it was impossible, I yet took it for granted that, given time enough, falsehoods and misconceptions would be weeded out and documented objective truth established. This condition, I assumed, had already been perfectly achieved in the history of the various western nations up to about the period of the French Revolution, which still lay in a sort of gradually clearing penumbra.
Now that the attractive twilight glow has given place to a bleak grey light (whether or not of dawn I have no idea, but, if so, of a singularly unpleasant November dawn), I have begun to question, among other things, that comfortable belief. And, questioned, it seems to me to reveal at once certain lacunae and incongruities that make it appear extremely dubious and lead me to wonder that I ever accepted it so unthinkingly.
For example, while, judging from the past, anything like a definitive history of the late war will probably not be written for two hundred years or so, from tendencies apparent even to-day it is already possible to predict that such a history will deal with the struggle coolly as the result of clear-cut national rivalries, largely economic. Thus history has explained earlier wars, and thus it is, as yet gropingly, preparing to explain this one.
Now any man who at maturity lived through the period from 1914 to 1918 must be aware that such an explanation, however fully documented, will not be a complete and truthful explanation of the war. In retrospect the war will seem, from its results, to have been an inevitable, coldly logical affair; but the fact remains that it was not that, as we who witnessed it know. To begin with, many hundreds of thousands of young men went willingly into the war, though aware that they were going to almost certain death. That is simply not done in behalf of an economic conflict. A considerable proportion of those young men went to war because they believed with all their heart that they were to fight for an ideal. That final history will doubtless ignore their emotional attitude. To-day, when it is not yet possible to ignore the attitude, the tendency among interpreters of the war is to discount it as of no importance, to brush all these dead thousands aside as deluded—mere tools of the real forces that brought on the war. But unless one is to adopt the absurd belief thateconomic laws, nationalistic rivalries and so forth, are objective things with a life of their own, instead of what they obviously are—expressions of the minds of men assembled in groups, it is clear that if these thousands of young men were deluded they must have been deluded by some person or group of persons.
But if one thing should be apparent by now to any one who lived through those four trying years, it is that the war had no villain or villains responsible for it. There were, indeed, fierce economic and other rivalries between the groups of men called nations, but no one, literally no one, intended or devised that catastrophe. The peoples blundered into war. It was a vast, senseless, chaotic mêlée. History may, and doubtless will, write it down as something clear and logical; in truth it was neither one nor the other. People rather fortuitously but none the less rigidly assembled in groups were at odds with people assembled in other similar groups, about trade, world markets, the congestion of population, and the like; but they were far less clearly so than history is going to give them credit for being, and their being so was only half the story. The other half was emotion. Neither, given the bewilderment over the war, when it came, of positively every one save the regular army officer (whose mind, if you can call it that, is not subject to bewilderment), can I believe that within each comprehensive national group smaller groups of people pulled strings and, callously exploiting the majority, deliberatelybrought on the war for their own advantage. The result may prove to be the same as though they had done that, but they simply did not. They were as bewildered and upset and emotional as the others. History, I begin to perceive, cares really only for results—with, perhaps, neat, post-factum causes; and that is why I grow sceptical of it, since a result without its causes—all of them—is not truth and lacks significance.
Presumably, then (still judging by the past), what we are going to have a couple of centuries hence is a cold, neat, logical, definitive history of the World War, with, running along beside it, a body of literature patriotically chronicling, exalting and deforming its episodes of heroism. And never the twain shall meet, any more than East and West, Highbrow and Lowbrow, mind and matter. And which of the two will be the falser it is hard to say. The former will not explain truly why people made the war, and the latter willnottell what they truly felt. Each will fail even in its own chosen province. A novel likeWar and Peacemay be written that will come amazingly close to the real truth, but the historians will sniff at it because some of its facts are inaccurate and because it is a novel, and the addicts of the patriotic literature will detest and condemn it because it does not picture their ancestors as heroes, but as bewildered mediocre individuals like themselves.
It is only of late that I have begun to distrust history, but this patriotic literature I have, ever since I was old enough to think, disliked andfound depressing. Depressing because it is so sweet, wide-eyed and simple, giving always somehow the effect of being written in words of one syllable; because it attributes to the men whose deeds it recounts the minds of children—not real children, at that; and because it would reduce the obscurely motivated happenings of this rich, confused, infinitely interesting world to the insipid level of a Sunday-School story or a play by Schiller. However, it is not very important. Despite its use of real names, people can hardly accept it as real—that is, as in any way related to their own lives. And I should not have devoted even a paragraph to it but for one thing that it does, from which comes its only strength and in which lies its only danger. This is: to attempt to exploit legend.
A legend, like a gigantic shadow with blurred edges, forms about every man who has been of great importance in his day. For that matter, a legend forms about every significant period in history, too. There is a Greek legend and an Italian Renaissance legend, just as there is a Socrates legend and a Leonardo legend. But the personal legend is the less vague and the more important. When a man’s influence on his fellows is impressive, and often when it is not, a legend grows up about him, even during his lifetime. There was certainly a Roosevelt legend long before Roosevelt’s death, and there is already a Coolidge legend to-day. For the most part these legends eventually fade, flicker and go out (there was even a Blaine legend onceupon a time), but when a man’s existence has modified that of millions and left an impress on events, his legend grows and solidifies, rather than diminishes, as the years pass. Until finally it becomes so strong that it alone has life; you cannot possibly get at the vanished individual for the impenetrable legend surrounding his memory.
‘Surrounding his memory’ is perfectly accurate; for the legend is not equivalent to the memory. It is, indeed, something quite different, as some of those who knew the dead hero intimately often struggle in vain to show us. Yet in their struggle there is a kind of perplexity; even these intimates become submerged by the legend, and get it all mixed up with their personal memories, so strong it is. The best example of which is to be found in the reminiscences of old men who actually knew Lincoln, since rarely about any one so recently dead has a permanent legend formed so compactly. It is as impossible to know what Lincoln truly was as to know what Washington or Napoleon was. No amount of newly unearthed documents can alter the legend or shake it.
For this is the strength of legend: that it is not thought, but feeling. When I know a man well I do not think of him as having dark hair, a straight nose, rather small eyes, and a stoop. His presence or the mention of his name produces in me a certain sensation that, so far as I am concerned,isthe man. My like or dislike for him, my opinion of his character, may beaffected by what others tell me about him; but that sensation nothing can alter. It is of precisely the same kind as the sensation given me by a certain odour or a certain melody. It is unmistakable.
Something like this, legend gives. One says Lincoln, and a feeling, a sensation, springs up in the mind.
This emotion, this legend, the patriotic Sunday-Schoolish brand of literature attempts to exploit, and history attempts to ignore.
The former effort is, I have suggested, not without danger. (To what? Oh, I suppose, to truth, to sanity of mind). It would employ a strong, universally felt emotion for the purposes of a chronicle as falsely innocent as a fairy-tale. One might compare the effect of such exploitation to that of a moving-picture in colours. The colour values are all wrong, not thus do grass and a red gown look in sunlight; but there the grass actually is, waving, and through it in her false red gown actually walks the heroine. It is confusing. Even so, I do not think the danger very serious for any one with enough of a mind to be worth saving. The point of all this twaddle, plausible as the stuff may at first appear, is too naïve, too utterly unlike any conceivable expression of the reader’s own psychology.
The deliberate and persistent attempt of history to ignore legend is another and graver matter.
That the attempt should be made is perhaps natural. Legend is pure feeling, and historians distrust feeling, noting contemptuously howunfounded it usually is and how wide of the mark its conclusions more often than not appear to them, whose business it is to examine facts. Also, their minds being trained to weigh and measure, they are not interested in anything that cannot be weighed and measured.
All the same, they are wrong. Whether or not legend is something we should be better without, it exists. You cannot ignore something that is. And legend exists as solidly as the Battle of Waterloo. You cannot get through it or around it or behind it, and therefore you cannot dismiss it.
I admit that if I were an historian I should probably want to. Not only should I be disdainful (as I am, even without being an historian) of the tawdry foundationless legends spawning all about me, with their cheap slogans (‘Keep Cool with Cal!’), and apt to forget that the death-rate among legends is higher than that among Jews in Poland, but I should feel despairingly that to let oneself in for legend, to concede the necessity of considering feeling, would make the writing of history an enterprise too gigantic to be possible; and so, very likely, it is.
Nevertheless, history written, as it is, without knowledge and due consideration of emotion begins to appear to me a colossal falsehood. Men’s acts are three-fourths the product of emotions, and, no matter how false the emotions may have been, without intimate acquaintance with them you cannot rightly understand men’s behaviour. As for dismissing legend, the attemptwould be insolent if it were not so hopeless. Legend has swayed more minds than has fact. Indeed, half the time it is legend that produces facts. The Napoleonic legend has had a hundred times more effect in shaping actual events than ever, for all his greatness, had Napoleon himself (who, moreover, exploited his own legend consummately). Dismiss it? ‘Wake Duncan with thy knocking!’
How legends arise would be a curious and fascinating study, very far from being so simple as one may at first fancy, with his attention focussed on the standardization of thought achieved by the daily press; for legends sprang up equally, and endured, long before printing was invented. But this is a side issue that the unfortunate historian may leave to some one else. Legend itself, once it is firmly established, he has no right to disregard. It is too important—I mean, actually important in its practical results.
To get an idea ofhowimportant, observe what happens when a legend blows up. A perfect example of that phenomenon occurred not long since. With the discovery of the semi-official murder of Matteotti in Rome, and the revelations that followed, the Mussolini legend exploded and was gone, utterly. It had to go. Either Signor Mussolini was himself among the criminals or he was helpless against the machinations of a corrupt and evil clique. In either case, the legend of the ‘Duce,’ the super-man, the benevolent tyrant, wisely, righteously and firmly governingItaly for her own good, became untenable. There remained only Mussolini, the man. And, with the collapse of that legend, the whole strength, other than physical, of Fascismo evaporated. Yet it was only a silly little legend that, even left undisturbed, could not have lasted fifteen years.
In the last sentence you may discover an indication that, for my part, I distinguish between the value of ephemeral legends and that of legends which endure. So, in truth, I do. If the Mussolini legend and the Coolidge legend appear to me absurd aberrations that we should have been better without, tried and established legends, like the Lincoln or the Washington legend, seem to me of great value; I am not at all upset by the impossibility of getting through or behind them. They are, I fancy, of more importance than the men about whom they grew up. Not Lincoln himself, but that glowing Lincoln legend, sways multitudes, and sets, above all the cheap facts of actual politics, a standard of what, at his best, a President of the United States may and should be. There really is, incongruously and almost incredibly, a rough fundamental idealism displayed by a good many men in American public life, and, better, demanded of them by the mass of American citizens, that is largely due to the solid permanence of that legend. Not for anything would I see the legend vanish; which is fortunate, since it never will.
If I am right in this, that in the long run it is not a man but his legend that affects events andthe natures of other men for good or evil, then it is of no importance that we cannot penetrate through it to the man himself and learn whether or not his legend falsifies his character. Nevertheless, the problem is a fascinating one, partly because it is insoluble, but chiefly, I fancy, because hidden in its depths lies that eternal question: ‘What is truth?’
My own undocumented theory is that an enduring legend does not falsify the individual about whom it has formed. When a man falls in love with a woman he has an exalted perception of her as something rare and wonderful, yet perfectly definite, concrete, individual. From no one else could he receive that particular sensation. When he was in love before, he received one, equally sharp, from another woman; but it was not this sensation. If it were, I should agree with those who consider the poor creature merely deluded. Since it is not, I am inclined to believe that he has obtained a fleeting glimpse of truth. Not the average daily truth about the person worshipped, but an unrealized and unrealizable yet more significant truth—a vision of what that person might become at her best and truest. Presently the emotion fades and is gone, either utterly or to return but faintly for an instant now and then, ever so rarely; but it was surely, in its moment, too sharp and clear a fact to have been without significance. It was actually, I fancy, a sort of intensification of the personality glimpsed, together with a stripping away of everything unessential.
A somewhat similar intensification and stripping away it is at least possible that legend, an enduring legend, gives. Seizing on the individual’s essentially personal dreams, evil or good, divined beneath a few of his inadequate acts, and exaggerating, or perhaps only intensifying, them, legend gives us these as the man. Probably that was not the way the individual appeared to himself. Probably no other individual ever saw him like that, unless, for a moment, his passionate lover or his passionate enemy. Yet that, says legend confidently, is what he was.
Thereis in most contemporary Italian fiction a limpness, flaccidity—I hardly know what to call it—which at its least offensive expresses a feeble despair, and at its worst becomes a whine. It is not the expression of a rugged pessimism; there is nothing rugged about it. Rather, it reveals a lack of vitality, a thin-bloodedness, the spirit one is accustomed to think of as ‘womanish,’ though, as a matter of fact, the women writers of Italy appear less guilty in this respect than the men. Grazia Deledda and even Annie Vivanti show more virility than most of their confrères, and there is gusto in the slap-stick prose of Matilde Serao, despite its appalling sentimentality. But Marino Moretti, a fine and sensitive writer, is only too clear an exponent of the fault, Panzini himself often succumbs to it, and even the late Federico Tozzi, cut off by early death from what promised to be real achievement, was far from guiltless.
Clear as the fault appears to me, and arousing, as it does, an exasperated distaste, it is difficult for me to make it clear to any one else. This is because it is at bottom the result of an attitude of mind, a conventionally accepted attitude of mind, rather than anything more definite. Itis easy to lay an accusing finger on the concomitants, the specifically annoying tricks and habits that go with it (more obviously, of course, in third-rate writers, such as Teresah or Luciano Zuccoli): the tender mournful contemplation of something small and helpless, the employment of pity for its own sweet sake, the abuse of diminutives (‘he took her poor, emaciated, little hand in his’), etc., but the thing itself, the spirit behind all this, remains elusive, and will remain so until we have got at its source.
Whatever this may turn out to be, the characteristic is doubly obnoxious: it is obnoxious not only in itself, but also because it grossly misrepresents Italian life and the Italian spirit. It is true that there is a vast deal of sentimentality loose in Italy, always readily on tap, as it were, but this national sentimentality is a hearty thing, a wasted by-product of exuberant life, like the sticky yellow foam churned up by a tumultuous sea; not thin-blooded, careful, and mauve-coloured, like that of the printed page.
Italy is overflowing with life, perhaps even lawless with it; for the race is too much alive, individual by individual, to permit of successful organization, still less of being standardized either in behaviour or thought. The foreigner who has come to know Italy will have encountered various national traits that displease him as conflicting too much with those of his own country, but nowhere in the whole peninsula will he have found the grey devitalized dullness of Anglo-Saxon suburbia or the poetic musicallanguor popularly ascribed to the Italian race—why, I have no idea, unless because Neapolitans frequently sing at night and becausedolce far nienteis the one Italian phrase with which all foreigners are acquainted. Misled in advance by a prolific and incredibly wayward literature, the foreigner, like a reversed Columbus, expects to find Cathay and instead discovers the New World. There are in Italians old, old traits that suddenly crop out at unexpected moments, there are roots that go down into an unfathomable past, but the spirit of the race is young, vivid, almost raw. Foreigners unacquainted with Italy were surprised by the phenomenon of Fascismo. No one with any knowledge of Italy can have been surprised either by Fascismo or by the sturdy opposition to it.
Nothing, in short, can be falser than the conception of Italy as a country of dreamers and idealists. On the contrary, the people, by and large, are matter-of-fact, hard-headed and practical; they like American bathrooms, central heating and the early operas of Verdi; I often wonder that no American business-man has had the acumen to open a branch five-and-ten-cent store in Italy. A full-blooded corkscrew at two lire, a hearty can-opener at one lira, would sell and sell and sell. Italians of my acquaintance fairly pore over the advertisements in theSaturday Evening Post; they would love the Sears-Roebuck catalogue.
Then, in the name of consistency, why this mournful emasculated prose?
Well, it is a long story. I think at bottom it goes back to the schools. At Harvard I went through a number of courses in English composition, in each of which I had to write a one-page theme every day and a three-page theme once a fortnight. It took me years to recover from the discipline, and I have an almost guilty feeling that even now when I have learned to write in my own way a Harvard professor would still cover my pages with red marks; but at least we were urged to write simply. Our rhetorical passages were ruthlessly stricken out; we were held down, even contemptuously, to a positive bareness of expression. ‘Say what you have to say, if anything, in as few words as possible’ was the message (only the word would never have been allowed) dinned into our ears. I still think it an excellent training.
In Italian schools, beginning with the most elementary, training in composition is diametrically the opposite. There is a model (and such a florid model!) for everything. Shall a sunset be described? (‘No!’ they would have said in an American school). Manzoni (who is never forgotten for a moment) has done this in just the right way on page 9007 ofI Promessi Sposi. Base your description on his. Never, so far as I can learn, is the child told to describe, as well as he can, exactly and only what he sees. If Manzoni, however, were the only model, imitative Italian prose might be less rhetorical than it is and might contain some reflected vigour; but there are, to mention only two others, SilvioPellico (who had a love affair in prison with a spider) and De Amicis, who wrote some tolerable books but who also wroteCuore.Cuoreis given to every child as soon as the unfortunate creature is able to read, and as soon as he is able to write he is taught to copy its sentiments and style. There are more, and more nauseating, tears shed inCuorethan in all theElsiebooks put together. Compared with it,Immensee, which, I am told, no German can, or anyway could some years ago, read without weeping, is as stony as the dictionary. I know of no other book so obscene asCuore. No, I withdraw that statement. There is one worse book. It was written by some Englishwoman, is calledThe Story of Pigling Bland, and is about a dear little pig who fell in love with a dear little girl-pig, and gave her peppermints, and watched over her when she fell asleep; but I do not think that it is used as a text-book in English schools.
There are models even for letters to be written by a child to its parents. These are the sentiments the child should have; this is the way they should be expressed. I know a charming and intelligent woman who has a daughter of eighteen—like most Italian young girls, almost indistinguishable from American girls of her generation: hard,chic, slangy, fast, but without ever losing her head, not an ounce of tenderness in her. ‘See what a delightful letter Elena has written me from her school,’ said the mother proudly to me one day. I read theletter, aghast. ‘Beloved Mamma ... I think of you always, always ... I dream of the hour when we shall be reunited and I can press you again to my heart.’
Given this methodical corruption of minors, it is not strange that the prose style of the average mature Italian and of Italian journalism should be hopelessly verbose and weighted with rhetorical emotional platitudes that do not express the genuine feelings of the writer. For example, boxing matches have become very popular in Italy of late, and there is little perceptible difference between the Italian crowd at one of these and the crowd at an American fight. There is the same doggy masculine smell, the same blue haze of smoke drifting across the glare of the arc-lights above the ring, the same fierce excitement—nothing, in short, that could possibly have come out ofCuore. Such was the audience at a recent match in Milan when Bruno Frattini, the Italian champion, was defeated on points by Ted Lewis. But the newspaper account in theAmbrosianonext day! ‘Could it be that Bruno, our Bruno, was defeated? For a moment we were silent, dazed. Our eyes were full of tears.’ I wish I had kept that reporter’s story. It was worth translating in full—only it would have demanded ten pages.
Here in this absurd instance, perhaps because it is so absurd, we somehow get a flash of insight into the origin of the problem. For even with a comment on school training I did not go deep enough. The real problem is to discover why mature, fairly intelligent Italians permit thatkind of training to continue, and approve of its results. This, I think, is the answer: to an Italian life is pragmatic, art academic. The Italian takes life as it comes, with no theories about it, with no belief in its having a meaning; but for the printed word he has hard and fast rules. He does not think of art as an interpretation of life; he thinks of it as something quite separate. (But if you ask me why this should be true, I confess that I am beyond my depth and do not know—unless it is simply that the average Italian is too sceptical and matter-of-fact to believe any interpretation of life possible). Nowhere—not even in the America of ten years ago, where the majority of people struggled, as they must always struggle everywhere, to make a difficult living, but read sunny fairytales by Myrtle Reed and Eleanor Porter—nowhere have life and art been kept so distinct as they are still kept in Italy. It is grateful (especially to a writer) to discover that in Italy more esteem is felt for an author than for a millionaire, but it is saddening to discover, a little more gradually, that this is not because the author is held to know more about life than the millionaire, but that, instead, he is worshipped as the priest of an esoteric cult with a well-established ritual.
Here, however, it becomes necessary to point out a significant contrast between the Italian and the American attitude toward the arts. However far from considering them an interpretation of life, Italians have for the arts neithercontempt nor kindly toleration, but a genuine reverent love. Literate Italians are passionately devoted to all the arts, and illiterate Italians to at least one—music. So that, in a sense, the arts do form an important part of virtually every Italian’s life—but a shut-off separate part. From this derives a tyranny over the arts, that could not possibly exist in America or England, where people do not feel strongly enough about them to desire to tyrannize over them. An American or an Englishman will listen timidly to music that he does not understand, or timidly read (or claim to have read) a book that he finds incomprehensible, or timidly and gravely walk through the halls of a picture show which, so far as he can see, reveals only insanity. For ‘people who know’ may presently announce that all these things are works of genius, and then where would he be if he had laughed at them or protested? And, anyway, what does it all matter? The Italian will throw aside the book with a curse, laugh with uproarious contempt at the pictures, and hiss the music into silence. He ‘knows what he likes.’ It is what he was brought up on; and that, and nothing else, is art. And it all matters to him very much indeed.
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. Anyone who has readRubèis aware that it is very far from being a masterpiece. That is not Signor Borgese’s fault. Whatishis 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 thePopolo d’Italia, theGiustizia,Cremona Nuova, and the GenoaLavoro).[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 thoughtmaybeflowing; 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 ofCuore, 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 theMiddle 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.
Pirandellohas 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 thingsare 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 ornovellista. 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 forthe 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 calledNiente(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 inSei 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’sWithout 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: ‘Nobooks!Nowomen!Nohouse! 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 storyis 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 certainlychanged 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 onediscerns 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’autoreis hardly less frankly concerned with it thanVestire gli ignudiorCome 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, nostato 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 statehalf-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 astato civile, is weak. He was not so possessed of love for his own country as to have to livethere. 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 leaveher, at any rate, to an agony of grief. Why? Because as Adriano Meis he has no real existence, is but a shadow. He has nostato 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 whethershe 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 virtùstands by itself. It is true that here you get, and with a vengeance, the ideaexpressed in that supplementary essay to the novel—about theburattinaiowho 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 ofa 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. Andtheirhome was not that one, but the onetheirparents 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 thatL’uomo, la bestia e la virtùis 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 expositionof 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 inCome 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 painfulVestire 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’autoreis revealed as not in the least atour de force, but as an allegorical expression of the passionately felt Idea. Pirandello never goes in fortours de force; he is too desperately in earnest.
Now this (I trust I have not done it too muchinjustice) 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, theburattinaio, 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 calledCome 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 villagepension, saves herlife 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 withher mother than without her? There is nothing noxious to the girl in Fulvia. Theyhavelived together for the past ten months. Then why? Because Pirandello will have it so for the sake of his thesis. Andwouldshe 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 toIl 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 itmatter?) 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 asCome 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 theburattinaio, 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 HenryIVof 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 HenryIV’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, ‘HenryIV’ (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 HenryIV, that there was no place left for him in the life of others, which had gone on without him, that the younggirl 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.