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: