218
PARTISAN REVIEW
of fiction like Sancho Panza are immortal, is hardly more memor–
able than the other stage types composing his family. These are cer–
tainly not immortal figures; they hardly survive in our memory the
curtain's fall.
3
Pirandello's limitations in character creation may be laid up to
his skepticism about moral values and his disinclination to make
moral judgments.
It
is only by showing moral differences, as Aristo–
tle noted, that characters can be differentiated on the stage. But for
Pirandello, a moral crisis is always resolved into an intellectual cri–
sis, terminating in some paradox . Action in his plays is stripped of
all value terms and treated as a fact among facts. He seems not to
have noticed that the very reality of a deed is in some important
sense related to our judgment of its worth. In the saying "Murder
will out," the word "murder" stands for something other than the fact
that one person has been deprived oflife by another. For surely we
do not mean that every deed of this kind will necessarily become
known . By "Murder will out," we mean that every deed we judge
ethically (and emotionally) as "murder"
should
out, that we are not
willing to allow an evil intent bringing death with it to remain hid–
den forever. Now I am not saying that this conviction of ours is justi–
fied. It shows only that a moral judgment is imbedded in the very
word "murder," which is conveyed by Hamlet when he says:
Murder
Though it have no tongue will speak
With
most miraculous organ.
An act of killing, not judged ethically or emotionally , may have no
such miraculous organ and may not speak at all. The killing of Bel–
credi in Pirandello's
Henry IV
is not "murder" in this ethical sense,
and we are quite unmoved by the deed. We do not care about Bel–
credi and think the less of the false Henry IV for having killed him.
The contradiction between Pirandello's skeptical positivism and
what is morally required for serious drama is very evident here.
3.
It
is interesting too that, in arguing for the immortality of the great characters of
fiction , the Father, advised by Pirandello, chooses Sancho Panza, and not Don
Quixote, as an example. I would suggest that the Knight of the Mournful Counte–
nance seemed too great a figure for the Father (or his creator) to put on the same
scale with any of the Six Characters . This tells us that Pirandello was much wiser
than
the
dramatic critics who compared the protagonist of his
Henry IV
to Hamlet.
