[In the following review, the critic extols the collection Better Think Twice about It.]

Thirteen stories from Signor Pirandello's vast output of tales are included in [Better Think Twice about It]. Almost all of them are scenes of Sicilian life, humorous or tragic; and one would have been glad to see some of the other stories, which are equally characteristic and contain many germs of Signor Pirandello's later plays. Nevertheless, this small selection illustrates his mastery of the short story, the queer twist of his humour and the grimness of his tragedy.

Except for the immortal "La Giara," it is not likely that any of these stories are well known in England: in its English dress, however, that comic tale of the avaricious farmer and the old jar-mender who riveted himself up in the oil-jar does not preserve its raciness quite so well as the two tales of husbands and wives, "The Call to Duty" and "The Quick and the Dead." Both are contes drolatiques discreetly told, but the latter is more than a mere anecdote. It tells how a skipper came into port to find a crowd awaiting him with the news that his first wife, who had been reported drowned three years before at Tunis, had come home alive. In the interval the skipper had married her sister, who was about to bear him a child. The skipper is a pious and God-fearing man and he faces the problem with all the dignified seriousness of a Southern race, while the two women behave like sisters, not like rivals. The solution that he finds and the effect of it on the townspeople is deliciously told. Pirandello gives a far more varied picture of the Sicilian temperament than does Verga in his great tragic stories, although Verga could not have found a more tragic theme than that of "The Other Son." Here, as in "The Captive," the foundation of the tragedy is the cruelty of brigands: but, whereas in the first the horror is unmitigated, in the second there is a humorous sadness that only a Sicilian and a philosopher could have attained. The brilliant little story that gives the volume its title tells how an old professor who has married a young wife, provided her with a young lover and recognized the child, comes to reprove the young lover who is thinking of deserting his old love and marrying another. The professor's impassioned appeal to the young man's good sense has in it that paradoxical justice that may well be called Pirandellian.

It is to be hoped that the reception of this volume will encourage the translators to produce another; for it is impossible properly to appreciate the Pirandello of the plays without understanding the masterly narrator of the stories and the background of simple, passionate, comic and often paradoxical island life that they illustrate. Moreover, whereas the characters of his later plays are little better than abstractions, those of his stories are very much flesh and blood.