go back to reality. Almost at once, however, he recoiled; life had passed him by; his sweetheart had married his rival; there was no place for him in the world. The world, in fact, had become unreal. He had, therefore, deliberately chosen to remain within the limits of the fiction which for twelve years had been his sole reality, to continue in the world of the Emperor Henry IV.— a mad world, but no madder than the world outside. For the last eight years he has played with all who approached him-compelling them to share his madness, almost to credit his fiction.

The sudden intrusion of his old companions brings back to his mind the reality of his youth, the reality of twenty years ago, troubles his pretence and induces him in a moment of excitement to confess his imposture to his immediate companions. But he confesses it in such terms that we are led to doubt which is nearer to reality-the medieval court, where for twenty years a logical and coherent fiction has compelled the respect even of those who doubted it, or the world outside where living beings, claiming reality, are involuntarily under the dominion of ideas and emotions which lack even the dignity and authenticity of the history which he has chosen to re-enact.

Driving in this idea by dramatic means, as Pirandello never fails to do, our author shows us the madman, even after he has confessed that his madness is now a comedy, forcing his attendants once again to their knees before the emperor by the sheer persuasion of his assumed personality. They know now that he is not Henry IV.; but they are still his subjects, and he is able to taunt them with being the slaves of something which they know to be an illusion.

In thus subjecting themselves to a dead fiction, do they not show their resemblance to ordinary men and women? The whole of life runs the burden of this remarkable scene, is overwhelmed beneath the weight of words and the tyranny of the dead.

You cannot seriously believe [says the madman] that Henry IV. still lives. Nevertheless, I speak as Henry IV., and you who are living obey me. Does it seem to you a jest that the dead can thus continue to dominate present life? If it be a jest, it is one that is played continually in the world of the living. Suppose that you leave this house and go out into the world. There you will find yourself at the dawn of another day, with time spreading before you. You say to yourself that you are going to create and determine what that day shall bring forth. But what of all the traditions by which you are bound, and all the habits by which you are controlled ? You begin to speak to one another, but it is only to repeat phrases which are invariably repeated. You believe that you are actually living your life, but you are merely living over again the life of the dead (literally remasticating the life of the dead).

This idea is further developed at the close of the second act,

which concludes with a fine passage designed to bring into relief the certainty and constant truth of history as compared with the unreality and confusion of present-day existence. Henry has confessed himself to his attendants. He now, however, assumes once more his historic character, and he urges them to take upon themselves once more the rôles which they have assumed in order that they may continue to live within the historic fiction from the midst of which they may perceive men of their own day a prey to anxiety and agitation as to what is going to happen to them in the immediate future.

You [he says] remain beside me within the tranquillity of history, wherein nothing can be any further subject to change, admiring how effects immediately follow their causes in perfect logic, contemplating an exact and coherent presentation of all the facts.

It is now midnight, and there comes knocking at the door Giovanni, the monk, who, according to the habit of the comedy, comes at the close of each day to chronicle the deeds of the emperor. Henry returns to his throne, and one of his attendants observes to another that all must still go forward as though it were really true. Henry replies that this must indeed be so, adding that it is only when men act as though the comedy they play is really true that the truth is not a jest and a delusion.

He continues to claim throughout the play that there is more reality in his masquerade than in the world outside. He argues that at the very least it may be regarded as a conscious caricature of the masquerade in which all men are for ever taking part. His masquerade is deliberate, whereas other men are involuntary puppets, not even aware of their pretences but confusing them with their real personality. The passage concludes with the following description:

I am reminded of a priest whom I once saw sleeping in the sun on a day in November, his arms stretched along the back of the bench in a public garden. He was wholly given up to an enjoyment of the warm sunshine, which for him, a man of the north, must have seemed to be almost like summer. He had lost all idea of what he really was, and, in fact, had ceased to be a priest. He did not even know where he was. He was dreaming and no one would ever know what he was dreaming. A small boy passed by who had plucked a flower with its stalk, and in passing the small boy tickled the neck of the priest, who was thus sunk in slumber. I saw him open his laughing eyes, and the whole of his mouth was spread in the happy laughter of his dream. He had forgotten everything, but I assure you that in the twinkling of an eye he immediately resumed the severity of mien which was required of him by the robe he wore, and that his eyes recovered the seriousness, the gravity which you have already noted in mine.

It is impossible in a few brief quotations, and in the briefest possible summary of the play, to do more than indicate its general

spirit and intention. Nor is it possible by any means except those used in the theatre by Pirandello himself to give any idea of the intense reality and coherence of the plot, and the crystal clarity with which the subtlest of suggestions are conveyed. At every turn we find ourselves compelled to doubt the finality, the veracity, the completeness of the physical and mental accidents of everyday existence. For reality we must look beyond, and it is precisely here that Pirandello breaks entirely away from the theatre hitherto described as modern. His plays begin where Mr. Bernard Shaw and those of his contemporaries leave off. His predecessors dealt logically with intellectual conceptions and ideas. For Pirandello the whole apparatus of human logic is no more than a screen before the reality he seeks a screen which most men regard as a protection and a shelter.

Why [Henry inquires] do we fear the madman ? The madman inspires us with terror because he is not subject to ordinary human logic, and, therefore, threatens to overturn every established conception. There are certain men who, when they speak, threaten to break and destroy everything before them. The world says that such men are mad. Nevertheless, everyone listens to them with terror. You yourselves [he is speaking to his attendants] feel it at this moment when you look into my eyes, and you know that this terror may go to the limits of panic. It will give you the feeling that the solid earth is shifting under your feet, because you are dealing with someone who is shaking to their foundations everything which you have constructed within you and about you, threatening to destroy logic itself and the logic which is inherent in all which you have made.

Pirandello himself inspires something of this peculiar terror. His plays are a studied affront to the self-sufficiency of the material and the obvious. We are compelled to look through the shows of things. The commonplaces of ordinary life lose their pride of place. In the world outside they fill the air and satisfy the eyes, but Pirandello takes us in an instant, as it were, to the further side of life. He cannot show us what lies upon the further side, but he makes us realise that it exists—a realisation that for many generations had almost ceased to trouble us. He shows us, in two of his great plays, men and women who are seemingly less real than characters in a play, than the passionate obsessions of the madman, or than the tranquil figures of history. He suggests all this, not by making his men and women less real than his fictions, but by making his fictions more real than his men and women, a distinction which makes all the difference between genius and mediocrity. The old-time scorn of Mr. Bernard Shaw for folk who moan that life's but a walking shadow is unanswerable when directed against those whose moaning is merely the result of an incomplete sense of the value of life. Such an attitude is mere negation, an abdication of the human intellect, a shirking of the hard, clear thinking which is necessary to the limited but

useful operations of human logic. There is no such abnegation in Pirandello. He denies nothing. He looks at life, appreciates its diversity, keeps his mind clear and true in dealing with its normal manifestations. But he also looks behind for a deeper reality, and at once we enter, pitifully but with a sense that we are no longer being asked to live by bread alone, a world in which the immemorial riddle is asked, the riddle which has been put in a hundred ways by a hundred philosophers since thought began, the riddle which in its briefest and starkest form was put by the distinguished magistrate who, asking' What is truth?' neglected to stay for an answer.

VOL. XCVII-No. 580

JOHN PALMER.

30

SHEILA KAYE-SMITH AS A POET

A FRIEND of mine once said of critics, 'They pursue with their little watering pots the prairie fire of popularity.'

Whether the popularity of Miss Sheila Kaye-Smith (Mrs. Theodore Fry) as a novelist is or is not to be likened to a prairie fire I shall not here inquire. Of her popularity as a poet that, very positively, is not the case, for though the admirers of her novels are counted by hundreds of thousands, how many of those hundreds of thousands know her poems or know even that she has published two slender volumes of poetry? As both volumes are now entirely unobtainable, some examination of the contents, with selected quotations, may be of interest to the innumerable readers of Miss Kaye-Smith's novels. My small 'watering pot' shall be wielded, I should premise, neither in the hopeless task of attempting to extinguish the prairie fire of her popularity as a novelist nor for the friendlier purpose of irrigating the flower of her reputation as a poet. But in literature, as in life, we are apt to be more exacting in the standard we set others than in that which we set ourselves, and it is possible that I may, if unintentionally, incline the scale toward undue exaction rather than toward indiscriminating eulogy. In any case, I shall pay Miss KayeSmith the compliment of testing her work in poetry by a high standard.

Her two published volumes are Willow's Forge, and Other Poems (London: Erskine Macdonald, 1914), and Saints in Sussex (London: Elkin Mathews, 1923). The range of the poems is, as I shall show, wide, but not a few are religious, even ecclesiastical, in subject.

My first quotation, the opening poem of Saints in Sussex, raises the question why St. Andrew is the patron saint of Scotland, and why St. Dunstan, St. Wilfred, and St. Richard are patron saints of Sussex. Two references made by Miss Kaye-Smith require a word of explanation to readers unacquainted with more or less 'local' Sussex lore. That to 'Mayfield' is because St. Dunstan, who is said to have been skilful as a metal worker, is supposed to have built a church at Mayfield. The Long Man 'is, of course, the Long Man of Wilmington,' of which Mr. Kipling