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 virtù_ stands by itself. It is true that here you get, and with a vengeance, the idea expressed in that supplementary essay to the novel--about the _burattinaio_ who 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.