Pirandello, the Mystery-Monger

The Noted Italian Playwright and His Psychological and Philosophic Methods

A. B. WALKLEY

NEXT to a good thumping lie, human nature loves a mystery. The truth, the naked truth, is so abhorrent to us that we want to cover it with fig-leaves or call in the police. The theatre has fed, and waxed fat, so long upon lies—such as, that all melodramatic heroines are chaste as ice, that all stock-brokers wear pearl pins in their cravats, and that all butlers speak with a Cockney accent—that when offered the bare truth, it "booes'' until it is black in the face. Gorged with lies, it now shows signs of turning, for a change, to mystery. Indeed, it was offered this fare some time before it began itself to turn to it. Nearly two score years ago the later plays of Ibsen showed the tendency of the "master" to become a mysteriarch. John Gabriel Bjorkman pu/./.led many earnest people of both hemispheres; When We Dead Awaken riddled them a riddle absolutely Sphingine. Then came Tchechov, with his Sea-Gull and his Cherry-Orchard, which excited, and still excite, our bobbed and shingled obscurantists of the theatre, who have succeeded the longhaired Ibscnites, to a very ecstasy of incomprehension. But already the vogue of Tchechov is beginning to wane. Playgoers are beginning, if not to understand him, at any rate to feel with him, which means that the glamour of his mystery has vanished. Fashion likes its mysteries fresh.

AND so a new man appears upon the theatrical horizon, with an entirely new set of mysteries, and has become fashionable in his turn. I mean, of course, the Italian, Luigi Pirandello. New he is, not merely in date, but in his subject-matter, which, in the pet phrase of William IV, is "quite another thing." According to the celebrated definition of M. Brunetiere, drama, as hitherto understood, has been a conflict of wills. There is always, to be sure, a will-conflict in Pirandello, but it is not that conflict that interests him so much as the contrast and clash of mentalities. At the core of every one of his plays you will find a study in morbid psychology, and surrounding that, supplying a hostile element, will be the ordinary psychology of the normal man. Fake the Sei Personaggi, the most famous, the best to my sense, and certainly the most characteristic of his plays. The six play-characters, come to an independent life of their own, and seeking to act out this drama on the stage, are morbidly psychological—for obviously the psychology of artistic "creation," the phantom of another man's imagination, is not normal—while the norm is supplied by the real flesh-and-blood actors upon whose stage they have intruded. And the author is perpetually breaking the dramatic continuity of his action by psychological reflections, simply because he cannot help himself, because such things are his obsession. Thus the father among the plav-characters, seeking a partner in the house "of accommodation", has met his own daughter. The daughter is horrified. This, if you please, is the father's comment:—

"For the drama lies all in this—in the conscience that 1 have, that each one of us has. We believe this conscience to be a single thing, but it is many-sided. There is one for this person, and another for that. Diverse consciences. So we have this illusion of being one person for all, of having a personality that is unique in all our acts. But it isn't true. Wc perceive this when, tragically perhaps, in something we do, wc are as it were, suspended. Caught up in the air on a kind of hook. There wc perceive that all of us was not in that act, and that it would be an atrocious injustice to judge us by that action alone, as if all our existence were summed up in that one deed. Now do you understand the perfidy of the girl: She surprised me in a place where she ought not to have known me, just as 1 could not exist for her; and she now seeks to attach to me a reality such as I could never suppose I should have to assume for her in a shameful and fleeting moment of inv life. I feel this above all else. And the drama, you will see, acquires a tremendous value from this point. . . ."

The sentence I have italicized really gives Pirandello away To him dramatic "value" means a nice little point of philosophical casuistry. As if the drama were not in the mutual situation of father and daughter (horrible enough), instead of in the father's resentment of an "injustice" resulting from an imperfect psychology!

You sec plainly however, in what the novelty of Pirandello's plays consists. They are plays incidentally, but only incidentally, about the usual dramatic will-conflicts, but quintessentially about internal consciences, mental states, psycho-pathological "cases". 'Flic psvchological probes into the human mind, makes its little discoveries there, and reports the result to a Philosophical Society or publishes it in a volume. Science marks an advance. Pirandello probes—and makes the result into a play. Science is popularized. And, it must be added, many guileless playgoers suffer from swelled head in consequence. They are people incapable of the mental application required by the treatise but seduced by the sugar-plum of drama into swallowing a decoction of psvchology. It is philosophy without tears. And that is the worst of the so-called "intellectual" theatre, the theatre "of ideas"; it is only demiscmi-intcllcctual. Literature, whose object is to please, is a poor handmaid to science, whose object is to know. You may pick up manv tit-bits of psychology from the novels of Hcnrv James, but after all, if you want a good square meal ofl the joint, you will have to go to William.

NVEVERTHELESS what we now call Pirandellism, valueless as it may be to the philosopher, is a new and ingenious toy for the playgoer. It "changes" him. It is amazing, as the novelties in art are amazing, from Scriabin's or Bartok's music to Picasso's or Gauguin's pictures. You may not be enthusiastic about the plays or the music or the pictures but as features in the great Circus procession of life you don't want to miss them. Further, in a Pirandello play you are not unpleasantly bemused by the incongruous jumble of the contents: actors with their painted faces, scenes of violence, the weeping and wailing of women, the ravings of madmen, are mixed up with philosophic of appearance and realitv, of the cosmic flux, of the subjectivity of truth, and goodness knows what. In sum, you feel, while sitting in your stall excited by a "storv" in progress on the stage, that you have somehow been helping to solve the "riddle of the universe." It is a delusion, of course, but a "distinguished" delusion, and by no means bad fun.

Undoubtedly, then, Pirandello has brought you something new, and the man who docs that in the theatre deserves the thanks of the community.

BUT I began by calling him a mysterymonger, and it is perhaps time 1 made good. What I mean is this. Not content with serving up to you philosophic or psychological theories and using them, dramatically, for what they will carry, Pirandello frequently uses them for more than they will carry, and, as I think, deliberately mystifies you, for the sake of "getting away with it" in the confusion. Or it may be that the mystifying process is not deliberately proposed by him, but the natural working of his mind, merely, do we say, "his way". Or, there may be a combination of the two—just as in spiritualistic seances the same medium notoriously will combine tricks with genuine manifestations— Pirandello may reply that you cannot have omelettes without breaking eggs and that the difficult ta k of working up philosophical material into a play must sometimes pay the penalty of a little plan in the finished article. Well, my point is that there is a flaw —or shall I say "snag":—in most of his plays, a bit of mental confusion or the withholding of information without which one might remain confused.

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The mystification in the Sei Pcrsonaggi, I suggest is more than incidental. It is fundamental. The play turns on the difference between an author's "creations" and his human beings, how the one set is more "real" than the other. The father explains :—

"Our reality doesn't change; it cannot change! It cannot be other than what it is, because it is already fixed forever. It is terrible. Ours is an immutable reality which should make you shudder when you approach, in it you are really conscious of the fact that your reality is a near transitory and fleeting illusion, taking this form today and that tomorrow, according to the conditions, according to your will, your sentiments, which in turn are controlled by an intellect which shows them to you today in one manner and tomorrow in who knows how?"

Philosophically, no doubt, quite true. But the father continues:— "When a character is born, he acquires at once such an independence, even of his own author, that he can be imagined by everybody even in many other situations where the author never dreamed of placing him; and so he acquires for himself a meaning which the author never thought of giving him."

But a character is not "born" in that sense, as an absolute, a fixed datum. He emerges from the situations, he is made out of his own actions. Everyone is able to imagine Mr. Micawber in the situation of Sheerforth or of Lissifer or of Ham Peggoty. But then he would no longer be Mr. Micawber. He would not be a character but another character. Pirandello cannot have it both ways. He cannot claim at once for a character "immutable" reality and acquired "independence". Neither can you conceive of an author's characters as "in the air", you can only conceive of them asin the author's story, to which they belong. To set the characters looking for their story, as Pirandello does, is to set the unborn looking for the lives they have not yet lived. The fact is the "six characters" with their "independence" of an author are just six human beings. I lie dramatists, by pretending that they are not, certainly amazes us, but no less certainly subjects us to mystification. And, when we discover how we have been hoodwinked, we may feel like echoing the manager's final "tag" at the curtain-fall—

"Pretence? Reality? To hell with it all!"

In another play, Cost e, recently performed in English, the mystification is gross, open, palpable. The husband and his mother-in-law tell different stories to account for their behaviour to the wife. The stories are flatly contradictory and each says the other is mad. The puzzle for the audience is to find the mad one. To clear up the matter, the wife herself is brought in and questioned. She enters heavily veiled (why?), tells the truth (if it is the truth) in an ambiguous form of words, and promptly exits before any one can cross-question her. Why this final mystification? For no earthly reason that I can discover except that Pirandello has grown so in love with his own puzzle that he cannot bear to solve it, and prefers to send his audience away still in the dark.

This, I submit to Signor Pirandello, is no way to behave.