And also what is one to think of a 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. And _their_ home was not that one, but the one _their_ parents 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 that _L’uomo, la bestia e la virtù_ is 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 exposition of 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 in _Come 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 painful _Vestire gli ignudi_ (called, heaven knows why, a comedy!) and of what is perhaps Pirandello’s masterpiece, _Enrico IV_.