Hermann Bahr, the noted playwright and critic, tried one day to explain the spirit of certain Viennese architecture to a German friend, who persisted in saying: “Yes, yes, but always there remains something that I find curiously foreign.” At that moment an old-fashioned Spanish state carriage was coming along the street, probably on its way to or from the imperial palace. The German could hardly believe his eyes and expressed in strong terms his wonderment at finding such a relic surviving in an ultra-modern town like Vienna.

“You forget that our history is partly Spanish,” Bahr retorted. “And nothing could serve better than that old carriage to explain what you cannot grasp in our art and poetry.”

A similar idea has been charmingly expressed by Hugo von Hofmannsthal in the poem he wrote in 1892 when he was still using the pseudonym of “Loris” as introduction to “Anatol.” I am now adding a translation of that poem to my own introduction, because I think it will be of help in reading the plays of this volume. The scene painted by Hofmannsthal might, on the whole, be used as a setting for “Countess Mizzie.” For a more detailed version of that scene he refers us to “Canaletto’s Vienna” that is, to the group of thirteen Viennese views which were painted about 1760 by the Venetian Bernardo Belotto (who, like his more famous uncle and model, Antonio Canale, was generally called Canaletto), and which are now hanging in one of the galleries of the Kunsthistorische Hofmuseum at Vienna. The spirit of those pictures may be described, I am told, as one of stately grace. They are full of Latin joy in life and beauty. They speak of an existence constantly softened by concern for the amenities of life. It is just what survives of their atmosphere that frequently makes foreigners speak of Vienna with a tender devotion not even surpassed by that bestowed on Paris or Rome.

An attempt to understand the atmosphere and spirit of modern Vienna will carry us far toward a correct appreciation of Schnitzler’s art. And it is not enough to say that Vienna is one of the oldest cities in Europe. It is not even enough to say that it preserves more of the past than Paris or London, for instance. What we must always bear in mind is its position as the meeting place not only of South and North but also of past and present. In some ways it is a melting-pot on a larger scale than New York even. Racially and lingually, it belongs to the North. Historically and psychologically, it belongs to the South. Economically and politically, it lives very much in the present. Socially and esthetically, it has always been strongly swayed by tradition. The anti-Semitic movement, which formed such a characteristic feature of Viennese life during the last few decades, must be regarded as the last stand of vanishing social traditions against a growing pressure of economical requirements.

Like all cities sharply divided within itself and living above a volcano of half-suppressed passions, Vienna tends to seek in abandoned gayety, in a frank surrender to the senses, that forgetfulness without which suicide would seem the only remaining alternative. Emotions kept constantly at the boiling-point must have an outlet, lest they burst their container. Add to this sub-conscious or unconscious craving for a neutral outlet, the traditional pressure of the Latin inheritance, and we have the greater part of the causes that explain Schnitzler’s preoccupation with the themes of love and death. For Schnitzler is first of all Viennese.

Arthur Schnitzler was born at Vienna on May 15, 1862. His father was Professor Johann Schnitzler, a renowned Jewish throat specialist. I am told that Professor Bernhardi in the play of the same name must be regarded as a pretty faithful portrait of the elder Schnitzler, who, besides his large and important practice, had many other interests, including an extensive medical authorship and the editing of the Wiener klinische Rundschau. It is also to be noticed that Professor Bernhardi has among his assistants a son, who divides his time between medicine and the composition of waltz music.

The younger Schnitzler studied medicine at the Vienna University, as did also his brother, and obtained his M.D. in 1885. During the next two years he was attached to the resident staff of one of the big hospitals. It was also the period that saw the beginning of his authorship. While contributing medical reviews to his father’s journal, he was also publishing poems and prose sketches in various literary periodicals. Most of his contributions from this time appeared in a publication named “An der schoenen blauen Donau” (By the Beautiful Blue Danube), now long defunct.

He was also continuing his studies, which almost from the start seem to have turned toward the psychic side of the medical science. The new methods of hypnotism and suggestion interested him greatly, and in 1889 he published a monograph on “Functional Aphonia and its Treatment by Hypnotism and Suggestion.” In 1888 he made a study trip to England, during which he wrote a series of “London Letters” on medical subjects for his father’s journal. On his return he settled down as a practicing physician, but continued to act as his father’s assistant. And as late as 1891-95 we find him named as his father’s collaborator on a large medical work entitled “Clinical Atlas of Laryngology and Rhinology.”

There are many signs to indicate uncertainty as to his true calling during those early years. The ensuing inner conflict was probably sharpened by some pressure exercised by his father, who seems to have been anxious that he should turn his energies undividedly to medicine. To a practical and outwardly successful man like the elder Schnitzler, his own profession must have appeared by far the more important and promising. While there is no reason to believe that his attitude in this matter was aggressive, it must have been keenly felt and, to some extent at least, resented by the son. One of the dominant notes of the latter’s work is the mutual lack of understanding between successive generations, and this lack tends with significant frequency to assume the form of a father’s opposition to a son’s choice of profession.

This conflict cannot have lasted very long, however, for the younger Schnitzler proved quickly successful in his purely literary efforts. The “Anatol” sketches attracted a great deal of attention even while appearing separately in periodicals, and with their publication in book form, which occurred almost simultaneously with the first performance of “A Piece of Fiction” at a Viennese theater, their author was hailed as one of the most promising among the younger men. From that time he has been adding steadily to his output and his reputation. When his collected works were issued in 1912, these included four volumes of plays and three volumes of novels and stories. Since then he has finished another play and two volumes of prose sketches.

It is rare to find an author turning with such regularity from the epic to the dramatic form and back again. And it is still more rare to find him so thoroughly at home and successful in both fields. In Schnitzler’s case these two parallel veins have mutually supported and developed each other. Time and again he has treated the same theme first in one form and then in another. And not infrequently he has introduced characters from his plays into his stories, and vice versa. A careful study of his other works would undoubtedly assist toward a better understanding of his plays, but I do not regard such a study essential for the purpose. It is my belief that Schnitzler has given himself most fully and most typically in his dramatic authorship, and it is to this side of his creative production I must confine myself here.

“Anatol” is nothing but seven sketches in dramatic form, each sketch picturing a new love affair of the kind supposed to be especially characteristic of Viennese life. The man remains the same in all these light adventures. The woman is always a different one. The story is of the kind always accompanying such circumstances one of waxing or waning attraction, of suspicion and jealousy, of incrimination and recrimination, of intrigue and counter-intrigue. The atmosphere is realistic, but the actuality implied is sharply limited and largely superficial. There is little attempt at getting down to the roots of things. There is absolutely no tendency or thesis. The story is told for the sake of the story, and its chief redeeming quality lies in the grace and charm and verve with which it is told. These were qualities that immediately won the public’s favor when “Anatol” first appeared. And to some extent it must be counted unfortunate that the impression made by those qualities was so deep and so lasting. There has been a strong tendency observable, both within and outside the author’s native country, to regard him particularly as the creator of Anatol, and to question, if not to resent, his inevitable and unmistakable growth beyond that pleasing, but not very significant starting point.

And yet his next dramatic production, which was also his first serious effort as a playwright, ought to have proved sufficient warning that he was moved by something more than a desire to amuse. “A Piece of Fiction” (Das Maerchen) must be counted a failure and, in some ways, a step backward. But its very failure is a promise of greater things to come. It lacks the grace and facility of “Anatol.” Worse still, it lacks the good-humor and subtle irony of those first sketches. Instead it has purpose and a serious outlook on life. The “piece of fiction” refers to the “fallen” woman to the alleged impossibility for any decent man to give his whole trust to a woman who has once strayed from the straight path. Fedor Denner denounces this attitude in the presence of a young girl who loves him and is loved by him, but who belongs to the category of women under discussion. When he learns her history, he struggles vainly to resist the feelings of distrust and jealousy which he had declared absurd a little while earlier. And the two are forced at last to walk their different ways. Unfortunately the dialogue is heavy and stilted. The play is a tract rather than a piece of art, and the tirades of Fedor are equally unconvincing when he speaks for or against that “fiction” which is killing both his own and the girl’s hope of happiness in mutual love. Yet the play marks a step forward in outlook and spirit.

Schnitzler’s interest in hypnotism, which had asserted itself in the first scene of “Anatol,” appears again in the little verse-play, “Paracelsus,” which followed. But this time he used it to more purpose. By the help of it, a woman’s innermost soul is laid bare, and some very interesting light is shed on the workings of the human mind in general.

“Amours” (Liebelei) may be regarded as a cross, or a compromise, between “Anatol” and “A Piece of Fiction.” The crudeness of speech marking the latter play has given room to a very incisive dialogue, that carries the action forward with unfailing precision. Some of the temporarily dropped charm has been recovered, and the gain in sincerity has been preserved. “Amours” seems to be the first one of a series of plays dealing with the reverse of the gay picture presented in “Anatol.” A young man is having a love affair with two women at the same time, one of them married, the other one a young girl with scant knowledge of the world. Yet she knows enough to know what she is doing, and she has sufficient strength of mind to rise above a sense of guilt, though she is more prone to be the victim of fear. Then the married woman’s husband challenges the young man, who is killed. And the girl takes her own life, not because her lover is dead, not because of anything she has done, but because his death for the sake of another woman renders her own faith in him meaningless.

“Outside the Game Laws” (Freiwild) is another step ahead the first play, I think, where the real Arthur Schnitzler, the author of “The Lonely Way” and “Countess Mizzie,” reveals himself. It has a thesis, but this is implied rather than obtruded. In style and character-drawing it is realistic in the best sense. It shows already the typical Schnitzlerian tendency of dealing with serious questions with questions of life and death in a casual fashion, as if they were but problems of which road to follow or which shop to enter. It has one fault that must appear as such everywhere, namely, a division of purpose. When the play starts, one imagines that those “outside the game laws” are the women of the stage, who are presented as the legitimate prey of any man caring to hunt them. As the play goes on, that starting point is almost lost sight of, and it becomes more and more plain that those “outside the game laws” are sensible, decent men who refuse to submit to the silly dictates of the dueling code. But what I have thus named a fault is mostly theoretical, and does not mar the effective appeal of the play. What must appear as a more serious shortcoming from an American viewpoint is the local nature of the evil attacked, which lessens the universal validity of the work.

“Change Partners!” (Reigen) was produced about the same time as “Outside the Game Laws,” but was not printed until 1900, and then only privately. Yet those ten dialogues provoked from the first a storm which seriously threatened Schnitzler’s growing reputation and popularity. When Vienna finds a work immoral, one may look for something dreadful. And the work in question attempts a degree of naturalism rarely equaled in France even. Yet those dialogues are anything but immoral in spirit. They introduce ten men and as many women. The man of one scene reappears with a new woman in the next, and then that woman figures as the partner of a new man in the third scene. The story is always the same (except in the final dialogue): desire, satisfaction, indifference. The idea underlying this “ring dance,” as the title means literally, is the same one that recurs under a much more attractive aspect in “Countess Mizzie.” It is the linking together of the entire social organism by man’s natural cravings. And as a document bearing on the psychology of sex “Change Partners!” has not many equals.

In “The Legacy” (Das Vermaechtnis) we meet with a forcible presentation and searching discussion of the world’s attitude toward those ties that have been established without social sanction. A young man is brought home dying, having been thrown from his horse. He compels his parents to send for his mistress and their little boy, and he hands both over to the care of his family. That is his “legacy.” The family tries hard to rise to this unexpected situation and fails miserably largely, it must be confessed, thanks to the caddish attitude of a self-made physician who wants to marry the dead man’s sister. The second act ends with the death of the little boy; the third, with the disappearance and probable suicide of his mother. The dead man’s sister cries out: “Everything that was his is sacred to us, but the one living being who meant more to him than all of us is driven out of our home.” The one ray of light offered is that the sister sees through the man who has been courting her and sends him packing. It is noticeable in this play, as in others written by Schnitzler, that the attitude of the women is more sensible and tolerant than that of the men.

The physician is one of the few members of that profession whom the author has painted in an unfavorable light. There is hardly one full-length play of his in which at least one representative of the medical profession does not appear. And almost invariably they seem destined to act as the particular mouthpieces of the author. In a play like “The Lonely Way,” for instance, the life shown is the life lived by men and women observed by Schnitzler. The opinions expressed are the opinions of that sort of men and women under the given circumstances. The author neither approves nor disapproves when he makes each character speak in accordance with his own nature. But like most creative artists, he has felt the need of stating his own view of the surrounding throng. This he seems usually to do through the mouth of men like Dr. Reumann in the play just mentioned, or Dr. Mauer in “The Vast Country.” And the attitude of those men shows a strange mingling of disapproval and forbearance, which undoubtedly comes very near being Schnitzler’s own.

The little one-act play “The Life Partner” (Die Gefaehrtin) is significant mainly as a study for bigger canvases developing the same theme: the veil that hides the true life of man and woman alike from the partner. And the play should really be named “The Life Partner That Was Not.” Another one-act play, “The Green Cockatoo,” is laid at Paris. Its action takes place on the evening of July 14, 1789 the fall of the Bastille and the birth of the Revolution. It presents a wonderful picture of social life at the time of the average human being’s unconsciousness of the great events taking place right under his nose.

“The Veil of Beatrice,” a verse play in five acts, takes us to Bologna in the year 1500, when Cesare Borgia was preparing to invest the city in order to oust its tyrant, Giovanni Bentivoglio (named Lionardo in the play), and add it to the Papal possessions. All the acts take place in one night. The fundamental theme is one dear to Schnitzler the flaming up of passion under the shadow of impending death. The whole city, with the duke leading, surrenders to this outburst, the spirit of which finds its symbol in a ravishingly beautiful girl, Beatrice Nardi, who seems fated to spread desire and death wherever she appears. With her own death at dawn, the city seems to wake as from a nightmare to face the enemy already at the gates. The play holds much that is beautiful and much that is disappointing. To me its chief importance lies in the fact that it marks a breaking-point between the period when Schnitzler was trying to write “with a purpose,” and that later and greater period when he has learned how to treat life sincerely and seriously without other purpose than to present it as it is. That was his starting point in “Anatol,” but then he was not yet ready for the realism that must be counted the highest of all: the realism that has no tendency and preaches no lesson, but from which we draw our own lessons as we draw them from life itself in moments of unusual lucidity.

“Hours of Life” (Lebendige Stunden), which has given its name to a volume of four one-act plays, may be described as a mental duel between two sharply opposed temperaments the practical and the imaginative. An elderly woman, long an invalid, has just died, and a letter to the man who has loved and supported her during her final years reveals the fact that she has taken her own life because she feared that the thought of her was preventing her son, a poet, from working. The duel is between that son and the man who has befriended his mother. The play constitutes a scathing arraignment of the artistic temperament. Bernard Shaw himself has never penned a more bitter one. “Even if you were the world’s greatest genius,” the old man cries to the young one, “all your scribbling would be worthless in comparison with a single one of those hours of real life that saw your mother seated in that chair, talking to us, or merely listening, perhaps.”

The most important of those four one-act plays, however, is “End of the Carnival” (Die letzten Masken). An old journalist, a might-have-been, dying in a hospital, sends for a life-long friend, a successful poet, whom he hates because of his success. All he thinks of is revenge, of getting even, and he means to achieve this end by disclosing to the poet the faithlessness of his wife. Once she had been the mistress of the dying man, and that seems to him his one triumph in life. But when the poet arrives and begins to talk of the commonplaces of daily life, of petty gossip, petty intrigues, and petty jealousies, then the dying man suddenly sees the futility of the whole thing. To him, who has one foot across the final threshold, it means nothing, and he lets his friend depart without having told him anything. There is a curious recurrence of the same basic idea in “Professor Bernhardi,” where the central figure acquires a similar sense of our ordinary life’s futility by spending two months in jail.

To what extent Schnitzler has studied and been impressed by Nietzsche I don’t know, but the thought underlying “The Lady With the Dagger” is distinctly Nietzschean. It implies not only a sense of our having lived before, of having previously stood in the same relationship to the people now surrounding us, but of being compelled to repeat our past experience, even if a sudden flash of illumination out of the buried past should reveal to us its predestined fatal termination. This idea meets us again in the first act of “The Lonely Way.” The fourth of those one-act plays, “Literature,” is what Schnitzler has named it a farce but delightfully clever and satirical.

Those four plays, and the group of three others published under the common title of “Puppets” (Marionetten), are, next to “Anatol,” the best known works of Schnitzler’s outside of Austria and Germany. They deserve their wide reputation, too, for there is nothing quite like them in the modern drama. Yet I think they have been over-estimated in comparison with the rest of Schnitzler’s production. “The Puppet Player,” “The Gallant Cassian” and “The Greatest Show of All” (Zum grossen Wurstel) have charm and brightness and wit. But in regard to actual significance they cannot compare with plays like “The Lonely Way,” for instance.

The three plays comprised in the volume named “Puppets” constitute three more exemplifications of the artistic temperament, which again fares badly at the hands of their author. And yet he has more than one telling word to say in defense of that very temperament. That these plays, like “Hours of Life” and “Literature,” are expressive of the inner conflict raging for years within the playwright’s own soul, I take for granted. And they seem to reflect moments when Schnitzler felt that, in choosing poetry rather than medicine for his life work, he had sacrificed the better choice. And yet they do not show any regrets, but rather a slightly ironical self-pity. A note of irony runs through everything that Schnitzler has written, constituting one of the main attractions of his art, and it is the more acceptable because the point of it so often turns against the writer himself.

“The Puppet Player” is a poet who has ceased writing in order to use human beings for his material. He thinks that he is playing with their destinies as if they were so many puppets. And the little drama shows how his accidental interference has created fates stronger and happier than his own fates lying wholly outside his power. The play suffers from a tendency to exaggerated subtlety which is one of Schnitzler’s principal dangers, though it rarely asserts itself to such an extent that the enjoyment of his work is spoiled by it.

His self-irony reaches its climax in the one-act play which I have been forced to name “The Greatest Show of All” because the original title (Zum grossen Wurstel) becomes meaningless in English. There he proceeds with reckless abandon to ridicule his own work as well as the inflated importance of all imaginative creation. But to even up the score, he includes the public, as representative of ordinary humanity, among the objects of his sarcasms. And in the end all of us poets, players, and spectators are exposed as mere puppets. The same thought recurs to some extent in “The Gallant Cassian,” which is otherwise a piece of sheer fun the slightest of Schnitzler’s dramatic productions, perhaps, but not without the accustomed Schnitzlerian sting.

When, after reading all the preceding plays, one reaches “The Lonely Way” (Der einsame Weg), it is hard to escape an impression of everything else having been nothing but a preparation. It is beyond all doubt Schnitzler’s greatest and most powerful creation so far, representing a tremendous leap forward both in form and spirit. It has less passion than “The Call of Life,” less subtlety than “Intermezzo,” less tolerance than “Countess Mizzie.” Instead it combines in perfect balance all the best qualities of those three plays each dominant feature reduced a little to give the others scope as well. It is a wonderful specimen of what might be called the new realism of that realism which is paying more attention to spiritual than to material actualities. Yet it is by no means lacking in the more superficial verisimilitude either. Its character-drawing and its whole atmosphere are startlingly faithful to life, even though the life portrayed may represent a clearly defined and limited phase of universal human existence.

The keynote of the play lies in Sala’s words to Julian in the closing scene of the fourth act: “The process of aging must needs be a lonely one to our kind.” That’s the main theme not a thesis to be proved. This loneliness to which Sala refers, is common to all people, but it is more particularly the share of those who, like himself and Julian, have treasured their “freedom” above everything else and who, for that reason, have eschewed the human ties which to a man like Wegrath represent life’s greatest good and deepest meaning. Again we find the principal characters of the play typifying the artistic temperament, with its unhuman disregards of the relationships that have primary importance to other men. Its gross egoism, as exemplified by Julian, is the object of passionate derision. And yet it is a man of that kind, Sala, who recognizes and points out the truer path, when he say: “To love is to live for somebody else.”

The play has no thesis, as I have already said. It is not poised on the point of a single idea. Numerous subordinate themes are woven into the main one, giving the texture of the whole a richness resembling that of life itself. Woman’s craving for experience and self-determination is one such theme, which we shall find again in “Intermezzo,” where it practically becomes the dominant one.

Another one is that fascinated stare at death which is so characteristic of Latin and Slav writers of men like Zola, Maupassant, and Tolstoy while it is significantly absent in the great Scandinavian and Anglo-Saxon poets. “Is there ever a blissful moment in any decent man’s life, when he can think of anything but death in his innermost soul?” says Sala. The same thought is expressed in varying forms by one after another of Schnitzler’s characters. “All sorrow is a lie as long as the open grave is not your own,” cries the dying Catharine in “The Call of Life.” It is in this connection particularly that we of the North must bear in mind Schnitzler’s Viennese background and the Latin traditions forming such a conspicuous part of it. The Latin peoples have shown that they can die as bravely as the men of any other race or clime, but their attitude toward death in general is widely different from the attitude illustrated by Ibsen or Strindberg, for instance. A certain gloom, having kinship with death, seems ingrained in the Northern temperament, put there probably by the pressure of the Northern winter. The man of the sunlit South, on the other hand, seems always to retain the child’s simple horror at the thought that darkness must follow light. We had better not regard it as cowardice under any circumstances, and cowardice it can certainly not be called in the characters of Schnitzler. But the resignation in which he finds his only antidote, and which seems to represent his nearest approach to a formulated philosophy, cannot be expected to satisfy us. One of his own countrymen, Hermann Bahr, has protested sharply against its insufficiency as a soul-sustaining faith, and in that protest I feel inclined to concur.

With “The Lonely Way” begins a series of plays representing not only Schnitzler’s highest achievements so far, but a new note in the modern drama. To a greater extent than any other modern plays not even excepting those of Ibsen they must be defined as psychological. The dramas of Strindberg come nearest in this respect, but they, too, lag behind in soul-revealing quality. Plots are almost lacking in the Schnitzler productions during his later period. Things happen, to be sure, and these happenings are violent enough at times, but they do not constitute a sharply selected sequence of events leading up to a desired and foreshadowed end. In the further development of this period, even clearly defined themes are lost sight of, and the course of the play takes on an almost accidental aspect. This is puzzling, of course, and it must be especially provoking to those who expect each piece of art to have its narrow little lesson neatly tacked on in a spot where it cannot be missed. It implies a manner that exacts more alertness and greater insight on the part of the reader. But for that very reason these later plays of Schnitzler should prove stimulating to those who do not suffer from mental laziness or exhaustion.

“Intermezzo” (Zwischenspiel) might be interpreted as an attack on those new marital conventions which abolish the old-fashioned demand for mutual faithfulness and substitute mutual frankness. It would be more correct, however, to characterize it as a discussion of what constitutes true honesty in the ever delicate relationship between husband and wife. It shows, too, the growth of a woman’s soul, once she has been forced to stand on her own feet. Viewed from this point, the play might very well be classified as feministic. It would be easy, for one thing, to read into it a plea for a single moral standard. But its ultimate bearing goes far beyond such a narrow construction. Here as elsewhere, Schnitzler shows himself more sympathetic toward the female than toward the male outlook on life, and the creator of Cecilia Adams-Ortenburg may well be proclaimed one of the foremost living painters of the woman soul.

The man who, in “Anatol,” saw nothing but a rather weak-minded restlessness in woman’s inconstancy, recognizes in “Intermezzo” woman’s right to as complete a knowledge of life and its possibilities as any man may acquire. The same note is struck by Johanna in “The Lonely Way.” “I want a time to come when I must shudder at myself shudder as deeply as you can only when nothing has been left untried,” she says to Sala in the fourth act. This note sounds much more clearly one might say defiantly through the last two acts of “Intermezzo.” And when Amadeus, shrinking from its implications, cries to Cecilia that thereafter she will be guarded by his tenderness, she retorts impatiently: “But I don’t want to be guarded! I shall no longer permit you to guard me!” In strict keeping with it is also that Schnitzler here realizes and accepts woman’s capacity for and right to creative expression. It is from Cecilia’s lips that the suggestion comes to seek a remedy for life’s hurts in a passionate abandonment to work. In fact, the established attitudes of man and woman seem almost reversed in the cases of Amadeus and Cecilia.

Significant as this play is from any point viewed, I am inclined to treasure it most on account of the subtlety and delicacy of its dialogue. I don’t think any dramatist of modern times has surpassed Schnitzler in his ability to find expression for the most refined nuances of thought and feeling. To me, at least, it is a constant joy to watch the iridescence of his sentences, which gives to each of them not merely one, but innumerable meanings. And through so much of this particular play runs a spirit that can only be called playful a spirit which finds its most typical expression in the delightful figure of Albert Rhon, the poet who takes the place of the otherwise inevitable physician. I like to think of that figure as more or less embodying the author’s conception of himself. All the wit and sparkle with which we commonly credit the Gallic mind seems to me abundantly present in the scenes between Albert and Amadeus.

The poise and quiet characterizing “The Lonely Way” and “Intermezzo” appear lost to some extent in “The Call of Life” (Der Ruf des Leben), which, on the other hand, is one of the intensest plays written by Schnitzler. The white heat of its passion sears the mind at times, so that the reader feels like raising a shield between himself and the words. “It was as if I heard life itself calling to me outside my door,” Marie says in this play when trying to explain to Dr. Schindler why she had killed her father and gone to seek her lover. The play might as well have been named “The Will to Live,” provided we remember that mere existence can hardly be called life. Its basic thought has much in common with that of Frank Wedekind’s “Earth Spirit,” but Schnitzler spiritualizes what the German playwright has vulgarized. There is a lot of modern heresy in that thought a lot of revived and refined paganism that stands in sharp opposition to the spirit of Christianity as it has been interpreted hitherto. It might be summarized as a twentieth century version of Achilles’ declaration that he would rather be a live dog than the ruler of all the shades in Hades. “What a creature can I be,” cries Marie, “to emerge out of such an experience as out of a bad dream awake and living and wanting to live?” And the kind, wise, Schnitzlerian doctor’s answer is: “You are alive and the rest has been....” Life itself is its own warrant and explanation. Unimpaired life life with the power and will to go on living is the greatest boon and best remedy of any that can be offered.

The weak point of “The Call to Life” is Marie’s father, the old Moser one of the most repulsive figures ever seen on the stage. It may have been made what it is in order that the girl’s crime might not hopelessly prejudice the spectator at the start and thus render all the rest of the play futile. We must remember, too, that the monstrous egoism of Moser is not represented as a typical quality of that old age which feels itself robbed by the advance of triumphant youth. What Schnitzler shows is that egoism grows more repulsive as increasing age makes it less warranted. The middle act of the play, with its remarkable conversation between the Colonel and Max, brings us back to “Outside the Game Laws.” That earlier play was in its time declared the best existing stage presentation of the spirit engendered by the military life. But it has a close second in “The Call of Life.” To anyone having watched the manners of militarism in Europe, the words of the Colonel to Max will sound as an all-sufficient explanation: “No physicians have to spend thirty years at the side of beds containing puppets instead of human patients no lawyers have to practice on criminals made out of pasteboard and even the ministers are not infrequently preaching to people who actually believe in heaven and hell.”

If “The Lonely Way” be Schnitzler’s greatest play all around, and “Intermezzo” his subtlest, “Countess Mizzie” is the sweetest, the best tempered, the one that leaves the most agreeable taste in the mouth. It gives us a concrete embodiment of the tolerance toward all life that is merely suggested by the closing sentences of Dr. Schindler in the last act of “The Call of Life.” It brings back the gay spirit of “Anatol,” but with a rare maturity supporting it. The simple socio-biological philosophy of “Change Partners!” is restated without the needless naturalism of those early dialogues. The idea of “Countess Mizzie” is that, if we look deep enough, all social distinctions are lost in a universal human kinship. On the surface we appear like flowers neatly arranged in a bed, each kind in its separate and carefully labeled corner. Then Schnitzler begins to scrape off the screening earth, and underneath we find the roots of all those flowers intertwined and matted, so that it is impossible to tell which belong to the Count and which to Wasner, the coachman, which to Miss Lolo, the ballet-dancer, and which to the Countess.

“Young Medardus” is Schnitzler’s most ambitious attempt at historical playwriting. It seems to indicate that he belongs too wholly in the present age to succeed in that direction. The play takes us back to 1809, when Napoleon appeared a second time outside the gates of Vienna. The central character, Medardus Klaehr, is said to be historical. The re-created atmosphere of old Vienna is at once convincing and amusing. But the play is too sprawling, too scattered, to get firm hold on the reader. There are seventy-four specifically indicated characters, not to mention groups of dumb figures. And while the title page speaks of five acts and a prologue, there are in reality seventeen distinct scenes. Each scene may be dramatically valuable, but the constant passage from place to place, from one set of characters to another, has a confusing effect.

There is, too, a more deep-lying reason for the failure of the play as a whole, I think. The ironical outlook so dear to Schnitzler or rather, so inseparable from his temperament has betrayed him. Irony seems hopelessly out of place in a historical drama, where it tends to make us feel that the author does not believe in the actual existence of his own characters. I have a suspicion that “Young Medardus” takes the place within the production of Schnitzler that is held by “Peer Gynt” in the production of Ibsen that Medardus Klaehr is meant to satirize the Viennese character as Peer Gynt satirizes the Norwegian.

The keynote of the play may be found in the words of Etzelt, spoken as Medardus is about to be shot, after having refused to save his own life by a promise not to make any attempts against Napoleon’s: “God wanted to make a hero of him, and the course of events turned him into a fool.” The obvious interpretation is that the pettiness of Viennese conditions defeated the larger aspirations of the man, who would have proved true to his own possibilities in other surroundings. A more careful analysis of the plot shows, however, that what turns the ambitions of Medardus into dreams and words is his susceptibility to the charms of a woman. Once within the magic circle of her power, everything else the danger of his country, the death of his sister, his duty to avenge the death of his father becomes secondary to his passion. And each time he tries to rise above that passion, the reappearance of the woman is sufficient to deflect him from his purpose. It is as if Schnitzler wanted to suggest that the greatest weakness of the Viennese character lies in its sensuous concern with sex to the detriment of all other vital interests. To me it is a very remarkable thing to think that such a play was performed a large number of times at one of the foremost theaters in Vienna, and that, apparently, it received a very respectful hearing. I cannot but wonder what would happen here, if a play were put on the stage dealing in a similar spirit with the American character.

“The soul is a vast country, where many different things find place side by side,” says Dr. Theodor Reik in his interesting volume named “Arthur Schnitzler als Psycholog” (Minden, 1913). Thus he explains the meaning of the title given to “The Vast Country” (Das Weite Land). And I don’t think it is possible to get closer than that. Nowhere has Schnitzler been more casual in his use of what is commonly called plot. Nowhere has he scorned more completely to build his work around any particular “red thread.” Event follows event with seeming haphazardness. The only thing that keeps the play from falling apart is the logical development of each character. It is, in fact, principally, if not exclusively, a series of soul-studies. What happens serves merely as an excuse to reveal the reaction of a certain character to certain external pressures or internal promptings. But viewed in this light, the play has tremendous power and significance.

Dr. Reik’s book, to which I just referred, has been written to prove the direct connection between Schnitzler’s art and the new psychology established by Dr. Sigmund Freud of Vienna. That the playwright must have studied the Freudian theories seems more than probable. That they may have influenced him seems also probable. And that this influence may have helped him to a clearer grasp of more than one mystery within the human soul, I am willing to grant also. What I want to protest against, is the attempt to make him out an exponent of any particular scientific theory. He is an observer of all life. He is what Amadeus in “Intermezzo” ironically charges Albert Rhon with being: “a student of the human soul.” And he has undoubtedly availed himself of every new aid that might be offered for the analysis and interpretation of that soul. The importance of man’s sub-conscious life seems to have been clear to him in the early days of “Anatol,” and it seems to have grown on him as he matured. Another Freudian conception he has also made his own that of the close connection between man’s sexual life and vital phenomena not clearly designed for the expression of that life. But to return to the point I have already tried to make it would be dangerous and unjust to read any work of his as the dramatic effort of a scientific theorizer.

Schnitzler is of Jewish race. In Vienna that means a great deal more than in London, Stockholm or New York. It means an atmosphere of contempt, of suspicion, of hatred. It means frequently complete isolation, and always some isolation. It means a constant sense of conflict between oneself and one’s surroundings. All these things are reflected in the works of Schnitzler more particularly the sense of conflict and of isolation. Life itself is blamed for it most of the time, however, and it is only once in a great while that the specific and localized cause is referred to as in “Literature,” for instance. And even when Schnitzler undertakes, as he has done in his latest play, “Professor Bernhardi,” to deal directly with the situation of the Jew within a community with strong anti-Semitic tendencies, he does not appear able to keep his mind fixed on that particular issue. He starts to discuss it, and does so with a clearness and fairness that have not been equaled since the days of Lessing and then he drifts off in a new direction. The mutual opposition between Jews and Catholics becomes an opposition between the skeptical and the mystical temperaments. It is as if he wanted to say that all differences are unreal except those between individuals as such. And if that be his intention, he is right, I believe, and his play is the greater for bringing that thought home to us.

The play is a remarkable one in many respects. It deals largely with the internal affairs of a hospital. An overwhelming majority of the characters are physicians connected with the big hospital of which Professor Bernhardi is the head. They talk of nothing but what men of that profession in such a position would be likely to talk of. In other words, they are all the time “talking shop.” This goes on through five acts. Throughout the entire play there is not the slightest suggestion of what the Broadway manager and the periodical editor call a “love interest.” And yet the play holds you from beginning to end, and the dramatic tension could not be greater if its main theme were the unrequited love of the professor’s son instead of his own right to place his duties as a physician above all other considerations. To one who has grown soul-weary of the “triangle” and all other combinations for the exploiting of illicit or legitimized love, “Professor Bernhardi” should come as a great relief and a bright promise.

These are the main outlines of Schnitzler’s work as a dramatist. They indicate a constant, steady growth, coupled with increased realization of his own possibilities and powers as well as of his limitations. In all but a very few of his plays, he has confined himself to the life immediately surrounding him to the life of the Viennese middle class, and more particularly of the professional element to which he himself belongs. But on the basis of a wonderfully faithful portrayal of local characters and conditions, he has managed to rear a superstructure of emotional appeal and intellectual clarification that must render his work welcome to thinking men and women wherever it be introduced. And as he is still in the flower of his manhood, it seems reasonable to expect that still greater things may be forthcoming from his pen.

SCHNITZLER’S “ANATOL”

Spearhead fences, yew-tree hedges,
Coats of arms no more regilded,
Sphinxes gleaming through the thickets....
Creakingly the gates swing open.

With its tritons sunk in slumber,
And its fountains also sleeping,
Mildewed, lovely, and rococo,
Lo ... Vienna, Canaletto’s,
Dated Seventeen and Sixty.

Quiet pools of green-brown waters,
Smooth and framed in snow-white marble,
Show between their mirrored statues
Gold and silver fishes playing.
Slender stems of oleander
Cast their prim array of shadows
On the primly close-cropped greensward.
Overhead, the arching branches
Meet and twine to sheltering niches,
Where are grouped in loving couples
Stiff-limbed heroines and heroes....
Dolphins three pour splashing streamlets
In three shell-shaped marble basins.
Chestnut blossoms, richly fragrant,
Fall like flames and flutter downward
To be drowned within the basins....
Music, made by clarinettes and
Violins behind the yew-trees,
Seems to come from graceful cupids
Playing on the balustrade, or
Weaving flowers into garlands,
While beside them other flowers
Gayly stream from marble vases:
Jasmin, marigold, and elder....
On the balustrade sit also
Sweet coquettes among the cupids,
And some messeigneurs in purple.
At their feet, on pillows resting,
Or reclining on the greensward,
May be seen abbés and gallants.
From perfumed sedans are lifted
Other ladies by their lovers....
Rays of light sift through the leafage,
Shed on golden curls their luster,
Break in flames on gaudy cushions,
Gleam alike on grass and gravel,
Sparkle on the simple structure
We have raised to serve the moment.
Vines and creepers clamber upward,
Covering the slender woodwork,
While between them are suspended
Gorgeous tapestries and curtains:
Scenes Arcadian boldly woven,
Charmingly designed by Watteau....
In the place of stage, an arbor;
Summer sun in place of footlights;
Thus we rear Thalia’s temple
Where we play our private dramas,
Gentle, saddening, precocious....
Comedies that we have suffered;
Feelings drawn from past and present;
Evil masked in pretty phrases;
Soothing words and luring pictures;
Subtle stirrings, mere nuances,
Agonies, adventures, crises....

Some are listening, some are yawning,
Some are dreaming, some are laughing,
Some are sipping ices ... others
Whisper longings soft and languid....

Nodding in the breeze, carnations,
Long-stemmed white carnations, image
Butterflies that swarm in sunlight,
While a black and long-haired spaniel
Barks astonished at a peacock....

HUGO VON HOFMANNSTHAL,
(Edwin Bjoerkman.)