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?
Whatever thought they touch they clarify, and it is not true that they
do not themselves originate and think creatively. It is only that to
people who think muddily obscurity seems profound and simplicity
superficial.
They have a fine respect for the individual. Nowhere else is the
individual quite so free as in France--free within very broad limits as
to behaviour, almost totally free as to thought. The French are
infinitely less subject to the tyranny of majority opinion than, for
example, the Americans or the Germans. Their minds are not standardized.
‘Equality’ and ‘Fraternity’ may have gone by the board, abandoned as
impracticable ideals, but ‘Liberty’ still means something true in
France: liberty for the individual.
They live soberly, disliking excess, spending less than they earn,
saving for their children, whom they do not, like the Italians, treat as
adorable playthings and cover with kisses and spoil, but educate
sensibly as human beings.
For them marriage is not a reckless juvenile adventure in romance, but a
partnership full of grave responsibilities, of which the woman must bear
her part, as well as the man his; with the result that perhaps nowhere
else does marriage work so well, so fairly, as in France.
And as with marriage, so with the whole of life. The French do not set
for themselves Utopian ideals impossible of realization, the gulf
between which and the actual facts of existence can but end in
disillusioned despair, but reasonable ideals, difficult, indeed, of
attainment, yet not beyond the conceivable reach of struggling mortals.
And yet, and yet ... there is in the French a recurrent touch of madness
that keeps all this from becoming grey and monotonous. The sense of
drama is a clarion call to them. At almost any time they will sacrifice
much that they hold dear for a ringing phrase, a _beau geste_; and they
have more than once staked everything--their patient savings, their
lives, their very national existence--on a noble idea, no whit less
noble if later it proved to be false.
* * * * *
And then again I think of the French like this:
They are small and mean and petty. Those periods of exaltation are but
rare raving moments; in all the long hours of their lives the French are
hard and selfish.
Their love of money is a cold terrible passion; acquisition is not for
them, as for Americans, a romance involving recklessness, imagination,
and some other of the virtues to be found in higher adventures, but a
cold, steady, ignoble thing rendering them capable of any baseness, any
cruelty. The Americans gamble for high stakes boyishly, risk everything,
and desire money for the power it brings; the French run no risks, play
safe, and desire money from an ignominious fear of poverty. Their fixed
universal longing is to become _rentiers_. No French government either
dares or desires to tax income adequately. Nor are they generous with
money, like the Americans or like the Italians, though they are rich and
the Italians poor. A French girl may have every quality to fit her to
become an exemplary wife and mother, but unless she has a _dot_ she must
die a spinster.
And as in their love of money, so in a multitude of other ways are the
French small and sordid of spirit.
They are without generosity. They never give something for nothing. And
therefore they are incapable of gratitude.
They will not concede superiority of whatsoever sort to another race,
and when, as at the Olympic Games, this is demonstrated beyond question,
they grow peevish and ill-mannered.
They are narrow. Once having made up their minds they never change them.
Alone among the nations to-day, they will not admit that the Treaty of
Versailles was other than righteous or that the Allies had any share of
responsibility for the war.
They detest Americans because America is rich, Italians because the
Italian race is strong and prolific, the English because England would
leave Germany a nation, and all these and all the others because they
are not French.
They are infinitely more insular than the English. All that they touch
they Frenchify. Read any French romance of ancient Athens or Alexandria,
and you feel yourself at once dishearteningly on the Boulevards. They
know little, and care less, about contemporary life in any other
country than their own. They are smug.
Their press is corrupt to--and beyond--the point of blackmail, and, by
comparison with theirs, American politics are lily-white.
One Frenchman in every five is a government employee. Nowhere else does
there exist so limp, obstructive and deadening a bureaucracy.
In the long run, I find something cheap in their love of thrilling
phrase, of effect, of dramatic climax, because to it they sacrifice
truth. There was something cheap in Victor Hugo, who could write of
Napoleon: ‘This man had become too great. He inconvenienced God.’ There
was something cheap in Napoleon himself. There is a strain of cheapness
in Anatole France.
And, at all times, all of them, all Frenchmen, talk about France.
Englishmen do not perpetually talk about England, nor Americans about
America, but Frenchmen are for ever talking about France. ‘_La France
qui marche à la tête de la civilisation ... la France qui a fait tant de
sacrifices ... la France! la France!_’ It is unendurable.
* * * * *
I do not like to think in either of these two ways about the French;
there is too much passion, too much prejudice, in both estimates. I
would like to think of them as I have no difficulty in thinking of the
English or the Italians ... as individuals, good and bad, very mixed.
But I cannot, no matter how many individual Frenchman I meet; for they
will not let me. The truth, I say to myself, should lie somewhere about
half-way between; but, instead, I swing helplessly from one of these two
exasperating estimates to the other and back again, until, in a pet, I
give up for a time thinking about the French at all.
Obnoxiously overdressed as nationality is to-day, one cannot simply
dismiss it, deny its existence or even, I suppose, its importance. The
things that men do and think and feel are the same everywhere, but in
each of certain circles made up of language, climate and, in some slight
degree, race, the angle of approach to these things is, roughly, unified
and somewhat different from that in the other circles. That a man is a
man is far more significant than that he is a Swede or an Englishman;
still, in saying that he is a Swede or an Englishman you _have_ said
something significant about him, you have suggested certain probable
variations (though even then you must be very careful; a Swedish poet
is, in most ways, likely to resemble an English poet more closely than
he resembles a Swedish butcher).
It is difficult and quite fruitless to determine whether in the past
these differences of nationality have been more beneficial than harmful
or _vice versa_. They have been the cause of infinite bloodshed and
misery, but we are also the richer for inheriting, say, both Dutch
painting and Spanish painting. Presumably they are still of some value.
No great poet could write in Esperanto, and German music is composed in
German idiom.
But it is, I think, fair to say that the value of nationality is at the
origin, the bottom. Nationality is like the essential underground roots
of a tree; the tree itself springs up into the universal air. Thus, in
all countries national prejudices are strongest among the uneducated and
the half-educated; whereas the more men become truly cultivated, the
less marked in them become their national differences. There are no
barriers between an intelligent educated American and an intelligent
educated Englishman or Italian; merely subtle distinctions in point of
view that add to the richness of their mutual relationship. Their
nationality is behind them, not with them. Men of genuine cultivation
grow impatient at all this flaunting of nationalism. They find
themselves too similar to men of other countries to believe any longer
in the grosser national generalizations. Indeed, they distrust
generalizations of any sort, and grow more and more inclined to take
everything, fact by fact, as they find it. Thus, as the mature man whose
development has not halted feels an increasing desire to get away from
himself, so, too, does he feel an increasing desire to get away from his
nationality--not, like the petty Anglomaniac or Francophile, into some
other, but into a broader human fellowship. Neither desire can ever be
completely realized, but each is noble--a craving to shake off fetters
of the mind. Perhaps the two desires are really one. When emancipated
men of this sort witness the disagreeable act of some foreigner, it is
to them simply a disagreeable act committed by an individual of faulty
breeding. They do not say, with a shrug: ‘Characteristically Italian,
that, eh?’ or, ‘A Boche is always a Boche.’
That, I fear, is precisely what, with fewer exceptions than among any
other western people, a Frenchman would say--or, at any rate, feel. It
appears, for some reason, extremely difficult for him to emerge from
being a Frenchman into being a man. Perhaps the desire is not very
strong. Far more than the Englishman, whose sense of racial superiority
is currently supposed to be enormous (and is, of course, among the
half-educated, but I am not considering them here), the Frenchman leans
on his nationality for support, assumes its heritage of greatness as his
own. So far as I am aware, no Frenchman has ever written anything
similar to the famous song in _Pinafore_--‘For he himself has said it,
and it’s greatly to his credit, that he is an Englishman, that he
i-i-i-i-i-i-is an Eng-lish-man.’
Doubtless there is some measure of compensation for this willing
narrowness of outlook, even though to-day one can hardly believe in
Emerson’s neat pattern of balance, life appearing to us too confused and
rich. Something of the French sureness, something of the French clarity,
probably derives from the Frenchman’s persistent cultivation of his own
garden and refusal to allow himself to be intrigued by the vast variety
of exotic plants to be found elsewhere. He does know his own garden
better than any of the rest of us know ours. And it is true that wide
acquaintance with the varying minds of many different groups often leads
to sterility, a poised inaction.
Often, but not always. Here it seems to me that the French sacrifice a
possible rare greatness to a moderate average of success. One admires
French achievement for being so French, and yet, even while admiring, is
faintly dissatisfied that it is not something other than that, and
greater. One wearies of so much perfection. It does not seem an adequate
interpretation of a chaotic world. French art is noble; yet it has never
produced a Tolstoy, a Wagner, a Shakespeare, or a Michelangelo. It is
not universal enough; it is too French. At an earlier day, when it was
still but half formed, it came perhaps closest to such heroic stature in
Rabelais.
Probably more than any other one factor, it is their language that cuts
the French off from other peoples and renders them so circumscribed. For
it is, when spoken, very different from other languages. The whole
system of voice production is different. A foreigner with no knowledge
of any language save his own might mistake Spanish for Italian or
Italian for Spanish, but he could not possibly mistake either for
French. Its system of prosody is so different from that of other
related languages that foreign poetry simply cannot be even
approximately translated into French poetry. You can translate
Shakespeare into German or into Italian and hear some echo of the
original sonority--not into French. It is curious that the spoken
language should have developed into this unique isolated instrument,
since written French is extremely like any of the other Latin languages;
but so it is.