Now this is all very unsatisfactory, not really worked out, and in that single sense ‘young.’ Whatever significance was intended remains obscure, because, I am convinced, it was obscure to the author. There is an abundance, a super-abundance, of ideas--enough, it must be admitted, to justify in part those critics who already twenty years ago found Pirandello ‘too cerebral.’ But my own objection is not that Mattia Pascal reasons about himself exceedingly at every moment, nor even that I cannot discern significance beneath the story, can only feel that it might have held some profound significance. A study of a man who reasons exceedingly is a quite legitimate subject for a novel, and it is not essential that a study of character should pretend to be anything more. My objection is that, even granting the contradictions that go to make up any individual, Mattia Pascal does not hold together. He is shown us at the beginning as an impetuous young man of considerable force of character; yet, when freed from his unpleasant surroundings, and, by a run of luck at Monte Carlo, the possessor of 82,000 lire, he sets out to live frugally on this sum for the rest of his life, doing nothing at all. Would he really have behaved in this way? The explanation, that he could never have a _stato civile_, is weak. He was not so possessed of love for his own country as to have to live there. He could have gone anywhere else, almost (this being before the war), and have been taken at his word. Indeed, before his stroke of luck, he had seriously thought of emigrating to America. Neither was he a sick soul burdened by life and glad to be free from it. He was merely, quite justifiably, burdened by the conditions of his own personal environment. He might well, being curious and cynical, have done for a short time what he did; but two months of it would have bored into action the Mattia Pascal we had met. Again, he is hard to the point of callousness, if not of brutality; that we see at once. Nevertheless, in his way, he did love the girl he married, and that he was not incapable of intense emotion we see from his grief at the death of his child. Then, allowing for all possible contradictions, is it conceivable that he could have so gaily let his wife imagine him dead and, if not grieve for him, at least remain in misery, while here was he with 82,000 lire in his pocket? He might have done it--but so blithely? Again, we are shown him really in love with the gentle and pathetic Adriana. Yet he can simulate a second suicide and leave _her_, at any rate, to an agony of grief. Why? Because as Adriano Meis he has no real existence, is but a shadow. He has no _stato civile_, and can’t marry her; while, if he is Mattia Pascal, he can’t marry her, since he has a wife already. Nonsense! He could have told Adriana the truth, broken the whole tenuous chain of reasoning, and let her decide whether she would escape abroad with him and marry him as Adriano Meis.