SHAW AND PIRANDELLO
599
figure of a man or a woman, however special or strongly marked,
for the mere pleasure of representing it," he writes; "to tell a story
(gay or sad) for the mere pleasure of telling it; to describe a land–
scape for the mere pleasure of describing it." When the story of the
characters first occurred to him, it was in this realistic form; and
as such it did not seem to him to be, as yet, the material of art, which
must be "more philosophical than history." He was, in fact, through
with modern realism: the literal scene, the actual individuals, and
the sensational events of individual lives, no longer seemed to have
any form or meaning. But when he sensed the analogy between his
problem as an artist, and the problems of
his
tormented characters
who were also seeking form and meaning, he had the clue to his new
theatrical form, and to the peculiar sense of human action (as itself
theatrical) which this form was to realize. His inspiration was to
stop the film of his characters' lives; to play over and over again
some crucial episode in this sequence; to dispute its form and meaning
on the public stage. By this means he found a mode of action which
he, and the actors, and the characters, and the audience could all
share by analogy, and which could thus be the clue to formal rela–
tionships and a temporal order. And he lifted the action, as it were,
from the realm of fact and sensation, of eavesdropping and the curious
intrigue, to the more disinterested realm of contemplation. "Always
on opening the book we shall find the living Francesca confessing her
sweet sin to Dante," Pirandello explains; "and if we return a hundred
thousand times in succession to reread that passage, a hundred thou–
sand times in succession Francesca will utter her words, never repeat–
ing them mechanically, but speaking them every time for the first time
with such a living and unforeseen passion that Dante, each time, will
swoon when he hears them. Everything that lives, by the very fact
that it lives, has form, and by that same fact must die; except the
work of art, which precisely lives forever, in so far as it is form."
Francesca's life, as developing potentiality,
is
stopped at the moment
when her peculiar destiny is realized. And it is the crucial moments in
the tangled lives of his characters- the moment in Pace's dress-shop,
the pistol-shot in the garden-which must be played over with the
vitality of improvisation, "as though for the first time," yet because
they are played
over,
lifted to the realm of contemplation-it is these
moments which the characters must interrogate in the light of the
