"Feel I that without thee I cannot live
And have desire for death, I come again
To take thee with me."
In the second act, Beatrice is on the point of marrying her legitimate
suitor, Vittorino, and escaping from the town, when the Duke appears
and proposes to exercise the _jus ultimæ nodis_. Owing to the
remonstrances of her brother Francesco, he generously offers to
relinquish his intentions. Beatrice is bidden to go on her way, but
stands riveted to the spot by a fatalistic impulse to realise her
dream. And what is more, she insists on being the wife of the Duke.
Her wish is granted. The nuptials are celebrated by a gigantic _fête_
in the palace, whose doors are thrown open to rich and poor. Beatrice,
however, with the placid _naïveté_ of her will-less temperament, flies
to Filippo.
"What boots it,
Were I this eve an empress to whom worlds
Bowed, or the callat of a fool? For I
Am with thee now to die by thine own side."
Filippo pretends to poison both her and himself, and on her discovering
the ruse, commits suicide in earnest. Beatrice rushes back to the
palace, but discovering that she has left behind that priceless veil
which was the wedding-gift of her husband, leads back the Duke to the
chamber of love and death. The living is confronted with the dead
rival, and the indignant Francesco slays his sister.
The power of this tragedy, however, lies not so much in the actual
plot or even in the marvellous delineation of Beatrice, gracefully and
innocently childish in the very irresponsibility of her fated sin,
as in the rich tints of the picture and the gorgeous frame in which
the picture is set. All the multicoloured elements of the Renaissance
take their place in the vivid scheme--poets, sculptors, courtiers,
courtesans, soldiers, and populace. Annihilation and vitality grow each
more grandiose from their mutual juxtaposition, and the red blood of
life flows but the quicker and the warmer beneath the black shadow of
doom. Few more eloquent tragedies have been written on the great twin
themes: "In the midst of life we are in death; in the midst of death we
are in life."
Reverting back to prose, we come to _Der Einsame Weg_ (_The Lonely
Way_, 1903). If, however, the tendency to import the methods of
the short story and the long novel were apparent in _Liebelei_ and
_Vermächtniss_, it is even more marked in this play. A son, finding
a sire in the shape of the middle-aged lover of his now dead mother,
repudiates the natural for the putative father; a neurotic and
over-sexed young girl, finding that her lover, unknown to himself, is
suffering from an incurable disease, dies by her own act. These are the
two _motifs_, knit together by no shred of logical connection, which
form the threads on which the drama is hung. Yet, if here we have
Schnitzler at his worst, the many excellences even of this play attest
by implication the merits of Schnitzler at his best. The scene between
father and son is a sheer masterpiece. How delicately does the father
intimate that "mothers also have their destinies like other women." And
how complete is his rejection.
JULIAN. It is now absolutely impossible for you to
forget that you are my son.
FELIX. Your son--it is nothing but a word--it is a mere
empty sound--I know it, but I don't realise it.
JULIAN. Felix!
FELIX. You are further away from me since I know it.
Interesting, again, is the Nietzschean sanction for intrigue: "One has
the right to exploit to the completest extent all one's life with all
the ecstasy and all the shame which is involved."
Far superior, however, to _Der Einsame Weg_, with its heavy Ibsenite
atmosphere, is _Zwischenspiel_ (1905), where that problem of the
quadrangle, compared to which that of the triangle is from the more
advanced standpoint but _vieux jeu_, is treated with the most delicate
and biting raillery. Victor Amadeus, the pianist, and his wife
Cecilie, the singer, love each other with as much genuine constancy
as can be expected from normal persons of the artistic temperament.
Victor Amadeus, however, philanders with a countess, and his wife
with a prince. Mutual jealousy! Too civilised, however, to interfere
by any display of primitive emotion with the sacred love of the
new modernity, they grant each other, on general principles, _carte
blanche_. And so, at the end of Act I, they separate for their mutual
holiday. Henceforward the husband and wife are to be the most Platonic
of comrades. The necessities of their professional engagements,
however, bring about their meeting in their old home. But the
affair with the countess is dead, and the affair with the prince has
apparently not yet matured. Then do Victor Amadeus and Cecilie forget
the ultra-modern theories which they are bound in duty to exemplify,
and only realise that they are man and woman. Bursting with his new
humanity, Victor Amadeus begins in the third act to be quite jealous
of the prince. His astonishment can consequently be imagined when his
Serene Highness presents himself to ask the husband formally for the
hand of the wife. On the situation being explained to him, the prince
gracefully retires, gallant gentleman that he is. But the reunited pair
cannot live happily ever after. Cecilie, it is true, had been faithful,
but faithful, she explains, by the narrowest of margins. She cannot
guarantee the future; and does not history repeat itself? True, they
had loved each other, but what love can be proof against the theories
of the newer sexual ethics?
"If we had only before," says Cecilie, "shrieked into each other's
faces our rage, our bitterness, our despair, instead of posing as
superior people who never lost their heads, then we should have been
true to ourselves--and that we never were."
And so that parting, taking place, as it does, when all barriers but
their two selves have disappeared, rings down the curtain on this most
brilliant of satires on the ultra-modern.
On almost as high a level is _Freiwild_[1], a piece which gains an
added interest from the fact that it has not only been censored because
an army officer is given a box on the ears, but that the actors on one
occasion refused to play it till solemnly assured by the author that
the apparent realism of the portrayal of the _procurer-impresario_
was, after all, merely poetic licence. The play is a vehement satire
on the duel. In a scene marvellous in its ingenious stagecraft
and airy atmosphere, we are shown the picturesque gardens of an
Austrian pleasure resort. Close by is the local theatre, where
musical comedy is performed for the entertainment of officers. One
of the actresses, however, Anna, shocks all orthodox traditions by
refusing to participate in that social life which, according to the
manager, is the sacred duty of the efficient chorus girl. For Anna,
Paul Rohring, an analytical painter, entertains feelings which are
quixotic, and Karinski, a heavy bully of a fire-eater, feelings typical
of a less exalted Don. But the overtures of Karinski are rebuffed
ignominiously. Rohring[2] cannot repress the smile of sarcastic
triumph. The discomfited lady-killer, aspersing the name of Anna
with an insolent _gaucherie_, has his ears boxed for his pains. The
inevitable challenge is brought to Rohring by one Poldi, the complete
exponent of punctilious aristocracy, the past-master in all the
intricacies of the _duelli codex_, the super-gentleman. But Rohring,
who is anxious to marry Anna and live a long and happy life, rejects
the inevitable challenge. Genuine consternation on the part of Poldi,
who explains that the unpurged shame of the box on the ears spells
ruin to Karinski's military career. Poldi proposes a compromise--the
solemn farce of a bloodless duel. Rohring, however, disdains playing
dummy parts in solemn farces. It is all madness. It is in vain that the
incarnation of military honour expostulates.
"For you it is madness, but others have grown up in this madness; what
is madness to you is for others the very element in which they live."
Finally, Rohring is given to understand that, unless he flees, the
outraged Karinski will shoot him at sight. But with a somewhat human
perversity our heroic painter refuses to run away. An encounter _à
l'Américaine_ takes place in the gardens, but Rohring, drawing just
a second too late, is shot dead. And now, as orthodox applause to the
red-handed, cold-blooded murderer, comes from the mouth of Karinski's
own friend in six words the indictment of the duel, irrevocably damning
in the cold subtlety of its satire: "And now you have won back your
honour."
If, however, in this play Schnitzler proved his ability to write a
problem drama which should be something more than a mere series of
isolated phases, we find again in his next play, _The Call of Life_, in
spite of its many excellences, the old taint of the one-acter.
The _motif_ of the play is the claim of the desire for life to ride
rough-shod over all other claims. A beautiful daughter is wasting the
best years of her life in the care of a querulous father, incurably
ill, but never dying. The little garrison town is agog with the
excitement of a newly declared war. This war, moreover, has a special
interest, in that the local regiment, the Blue Cuirassiers, had in
the last war, by ignominious flight, branded itself with shame.
Though this episode took place over thirty years ago and none of the
actual renegades are now in the regiment, the Blue Hussars, with that
inflated idea of honour only found in Teutonic countries, resolve
to purge the disgrace by dying gloriously in the front of the fray.
Among the officers is Lieutenant Max, who has cast on Marie, the
beautiful daughter, eyes of admiration. Irony, moreover, sharpens the
situation when the bedridden father, who was once a member of the Blue
Cuirassiers, explains he himself was responsible for the historic
flight.
"What was the good of it? Who would have thanked me?
They would have put me in a grave with a thousand others
and piled the earth on top, and that would have been the
end of it. And I wouldn't have it. I wanted to live--to
live like others. I wanted to have a wife and children
and live. And so I rushed from the field; and so it has
happened that the young men whom I don't know are going
to their death and that I still live on at seventy-nine
and will survive them all--all--all."
The old soldier, however, is unduly sanguine as to the protraction of
his life, for the same call of life which ordered him from the battle
orders his daughter to pour poison into the water for which he now
craves.
It is outside the purpose of this essay to argue the ethics of this
precipitation of the inevitable. Suffice it that it constitutes a most
efficient curtain--a curtain, however, so efficient that there seems no
compelling necessity for a continuation of the play. A continuation,
however, there is, and in the rooms of Max, which are visited at night
by Marie, who ensconces herself behind a curtain. She sees the major's
wife come to urge a vain prayer that he should desert the army and
elope with her. They are discovered by the major, who, shooting the
wife, spares the lover. It is, however, when the major leaves that we
understand the intense hypertrophy of life evoked by imminent death.
Marie, knowing all, yet presents herself. Max can only realise that
his life has but a few remaining hours, and that these remaining hours
stand now before him. Another curtain, strong, if slightly crude, yet
followed by a third act, which is nothing but an epilogue.
This somewhat exaggerated scorn, however, of such of the more
complicated effects of theatricalism as are manifested in the ingenious
concatenation of the plot, or the representation of sensational
incidents which have no justification but their own inherent dramatic
force, fails absolutely to affect Schnitzler's position as a writer of
one-act plays. Indeed, it is his subordination of plot to atmosphere
that constitutes in this sphere his paramount excellence. As, moreover,
Mr. Henry James in his _Embarrassments and Terminations_ wrote short
stories independent in themselves yet harmonising with some permeating
_motif_, so has Schnitzler in his _Anatol_, _Marionetten_, and
_Lebendigen Stunden_ given us symmetrical one-act sequences.
Let us deal first with the Anatol-Cyclus, a series of one-acters
portraying the amoristic vicissitudes of a _fin de siècle_
sentimentalist, flitting prettily from heart to heart, till he is
eventually encompassed by the matrimonial net. Little action weighs
down these delicate pieces. Anatol and the flame of the moment
participate in a dialogue, or Anatol appeals to the worldly wisdom of
his friend Max to rescue him from some dilemma in which he has been
landed by his own weakness or his own folly. That is all. Yet each
piece sheds a little more light upon the holy of holies of Anatol's
heart, and illumines with equal clarity and colour the charm and
individuality of each successive priestess of the temple. Though
no doubt the chief effect of the cycle lies in its accumulative
force, some idea of the general airiness and brilliance may perhaps
be obtained by a short sketch of two of the most striking. In _The
Question to Fate_ Anatol confides to Max his anxiety. Does the flame
of the moment burn true and for him alone? By hypnotism he proposes
to extract from his unconscious love that answer which will make him
either the happiest or the most miserable of mankind. Cora enters, and
is duly soothed into a hypnotic trance. Anatol, however, insists on
being left alone with her at this critical moment of his fate, so Max
retires into the adjoining room. And now, when the helpless girl is
ready to answer every question, and, what is more, to answer it with
automatic accuracy, and the book of truth lies ready in his trembling
hand, the seeker of knowledge has not the courage to know. Waking her
up with a kiss, he expresses complete reassurance to the re-entering
Max. Cora, however, manifests a perhaps intelligible anxiety as to the
nature of her answers.
In the _Farewell Supper_, the scene of which is laid in the _cabinet
particulier_ of a Viennese restaurant, Anatol describes to Max the
ineffable woes of being on with the new love before he is off with the
old. What a strain it is, moreover, to be compelled to eat two suppers
every night! However, he and Anna (the old love) had at the initiation
of their romance arranged to confide to each other the first symptom
of approaching _ennui_. To-night at this supper he will tactfully
intimate that she is no longer indispensable to his soul's happiness.
He implores Max to stay as the helpful buffer in an inevitable scene.
Enter Anna, fresh from the stage and hungry for oysters. The pangs of
starvation temporarily appeased, Anna announces that she has something
important to communicate. She has grown tired of Anatol and fallen in
love with another. She hopes he will not mind, but better she should
tell him now than when it was too late. Collapse of Max into uproarious
laughter. With pique mingling with his relief, Anatol rises to the
occasion, professing the righteous indignation of a wounded spirit. To
vindicate his _amour-propre_, he contemptuously informs her that he
too has fallen in love with another, but as far as he is concerned his
confession does come too late. "Only a man could be so brutal," retorts
Anna; "a woman would never be so tactless as to say anything so crude."
And so the comedy ends with the girl carrying off the remains of the
supper to her cavalier round the corner.
The whole cycle, however, should be read to appreciate the racy ripple
of the dialogue, the subtle malice of the characterisation, and the
general verve and irony of these most sparkling of comedies.
Perhaps at this moment it may be convenient just to mention the
audacious psychology of the super-Boccacian _Reigen_. English decorum,
no doubt, for-bids anything but the most casual allusion to this
sequence of duologues, where all the members of the social hierarchy
are linked together by participation in the same eternal plot.
Yet in its way, this book, written originally for a select circle
and subsequently published by universal request, is one of the most
refined feats of intellectualism which Schnitzler has ever performed.
For the delicacy of the style is in inverse ratio to the delicacy
of the subject-matter, and the various nuances of social technique
are described and differentiated with the masterly touch of combined
experience and intuition. Scarcely suited, no doubt, as a Sunday School
prize, the book will, none the less, well repay perusal by modern men
and women of the modern world.
The series _Marionetten_, to which allusion has already been made, has
for its _motif_ the ironic tragedy of those who essay to manipulate
the lives of others. The best of three plays is _The Puppet-player_.
To the happy fireside of Eduard and Anna there is introduced an old
friend, George Merklin, whom the husband had casually encountered.
Merklin is a picturesque, if battered, Bohemian who encircles himself
somewhat showily with a halo of alleged mysticism. The whole art of
the dramatist, however, in this little piece is devoted to creating
an atmosphere of light melancholy, in which the poetic isolation of
the second-rate genius, Merklin, stands in vivid contrast to the
prosaic happiness of his less gifted friend. The climax comes when it
transpires that Merklin had loved Anna in the past and had brought the
two together by way of a psychological experiment at a Bohemian supper.
"The little girl who was so nice to you simply did what
I wished. You two were the puppets in my hand. I pulled
the strings. It was arranged that she should pretend to
be in love with you. For you always roused my sympathy,
my dear Eduard; I wanted to awake in you the illusion
of happiness, so that you should be ready for true
happiness when you found it."
And so this shoddy superman goes out into this lonely world, having
played with the fates of others only to have played away his own life's
happiness.
Perhaps, however, Schnitzler's most characteristic series of one-acters
is the one headed _Lebendige Stunden_. Life should be weighed as
much by quality as by quantity. One man can traverse more life in a
few seconds than another in whole years. It is typical, however, of
Schnitzler's method that he essays not merely to lead up to a violent
climax by artifices of calculated stagecraft, but to set the vivid hour
in an harmonious and poetic frame. The most striking of the series is
the extraordinary fantasia, _The Woman with the Dagger_.
Leonhardt, a seriously romantic youth, in apparently the full flush of
his first grand passion, meets the wife of a dramatic author in the
Renaissance saloon of a picture gallery. Pre-eminent among the pictures
on the wall is that of a woman robed in white, holding a dagger in her
uplifted hand, and gazing at the floor as if there lay someone whom
she had murdered. It is then in this atmosphere that our gallant urges
his suit to the unresponsive Pauline, who coolly informs him that she
has confessed to her husband that she is in danger, and that they are
travelling away to-morrow. And then, as she is on the point of saying
farewell, she stands before the picture.
PAULINE (_looking closer_). Who lies there in the shadow?
LEONHARDT. Where?
PAULINE. Do you not see?
LEONHARDT. I see nothing.
PAULINE. It is you.
LEONHARDT. I? Pauline, what an extraordinary jest!
And then, as they look and look, they fall into an hypnotic trance and
the clock of the world goes back some five hundred years. Pauline has
become Paola, and Leonhardt, Lionardo, while the racy Viennese idiom is
turned to classical blank verse. It is early dawn in the studio of the
Master Remigio, and Remigio is away on his travels. Lionardo arrogates
the claims of love on the strength of the favours which he has just
enjoyed. Paola spurns him as the mere mechanical toy of her passion.
She loves and has always loved her husband. That this is no mere pose
is apparent from the fact that on the sudden entrance of the husband
she immediately elucidates the situation. Remigio, however, with a
sublime tolerance, perhaps more typical of the husband in Mr. Shaw's
_Irrational Knot_ than of a hot-blooded Italian, pardons Paola on the
general principles of twentieth-century philosophy. Lionardo, however,
piqued and insulted as being regarded as
"The glass, the poor mean glass
From which a child drank a forbidden draught,
The merest pitiful tool of a chance and fate,"
vows vengeance on Remigio. Paola anticipates this vengeance by killing
Lionardo on the spot with a dagger, thus exemplifying the pose of the
picture. Remigio rises to the occasion and seizes on this splendidly
tragic attitude to complete an unfinished portrait of this loyalest of
wives.
And then they awaken from their trance. But the magnet of destiny draws
them inexorably. Pauline grants the assignation, with an air, however,
of mystic fatality, which shows only too well with what precision the
present must once again mirror the past.
But perhaps the most sustained and elaborated specimen of our author's
method is the ironic tragedy of the French Revolution, _The Green
Cockatoo._ The "Green Cockatoo" is an underground tavern where
brilliant, if disreputable, actors give, for the edification of their
aristocratic audiences, impromptu representations of crime and vice.
Henri, the star-man, moreover, has just married the actress Léocadie,
not for the sake of paradox, but in all seriousness. When his turn
comes, he rushes on to the stage shouting out that he found his wife,
Léocadie, with her lover the duke, and killed her. Such a calamity
being not apparently _primâ facie_ improbable, even the manager is
almost as alarmed as the audience, till he realises that the whole
thing is but an histrionic _tour de force_. And then, as the play
progresses, the atmosphere becomes more and more lurid with impending
gloom. Jest and reality intermingle in the subtlest of ironies. It is
part of the entertainment that the ragamuffins should lavish on their
patrons the freest of insults. But is there not a paradox within the
paradox, when one remembers that the Bastille has fallen that very
day? The various types, moreover, of an aristocracy exhibiting the
levity of people who are shortly going to be hanged are delightfully
portrayed--the _viveur_, "for whom every day is lost in which he
has not captured a woman or killed a man," the pretty young noble
whose corrupt flirtation is so deftly adumbrated, and the lascivious
_grande dame_, who, in spite of her husband's anxiety, is very far
from shocked at these spectacular novelties. And then Henri snaps
up the truth from the demeanour of the manager and his colleagues.
The Duke comes on to the stage and the actor then gives yet another
representation of the avenging husband--and this time he surpasses
himself, for he is but acting the truth.
Less sensational, but of equal psychological grimness, is the play
_The Mate_, which is in the same series as the _Green Cockatoo_. The
theme is the pathetic irony of the illusion of a middle-aged professor,
who gives an almost paternal benediction to what he fondly imagines
to be the grand passion of his young and temperamental wife. When,
consequently, his wife dies suddenly, the husband is prepared quite
honestly to condole with the lover, for after all has he not a right to
be pitied even more than himself? When, therefore, he learns from his
young colleague that he has just become engaged to another girl with
whom he has been in love for some time his righteous indignation is
unbounded.
"I would have raised you from the ground if you had
been broken by grief. I would have gone with you to her
grave, if the woman who is lying over there had been
your love; but you have turned her into your wanton,
and you have filled this house with lies and foulness
right up to the roof till it makes me sick--and that's
why--that's why, yes, that's why I'm going to kick you
out."
But there is an anti-climax within an anti-climax, for the man learns
from a mutual woman friend of the dead woman and of himself, that the
imagined _grande passion_ had been even from the standpoint of the lady
nothing more or less than a miserable trumpery adventure.
Reverting now to Schnitzler's longer plays, some mention should be
made of _Komtesse Mizzi_, _Der Junge Medardus_, and, above all, _Das
Weites Land_.
_Komtesse Mizzi_, entitled, appropriately enough, "A Family Day" is in
form a one-acter, though of sufficient length and substance to have
obtained separate publication. There is little, if any, action. The
play is based on character, dialogue, and situation. Yet it possesses
distinct psychological titillation in its presentation of a daughter
who takes a filial interest in her father's "actress-mistress," and who
is sensible enough, aristocrat though she is, to meet the lady herself
with all friendliness, and chat with her as woman to woman without the
slightest affectation. This feminine freemasonry, however, is perhaps
explained by the fact that the countess herself has lived her own
life, to such good effect that she is the mother of a grown-up boy by
her father's best friend, Prince Egon. When, consequently, the prince
introduces the boy as his own natural child by an unknown mother, the
atmosphere becomes somewhat rare. At first highly irritated, she treats
with frigid indifference the frank exuberant youth, who divines the
truth with instinctive intuition, only, however, shortly afterwards to
consent to marry the prince, and thus become the official stepmother
of her own long-lost child. The racy worldly optimism of this play is
particularly characteristic of the essentially benevolent malice of the
Schnitzlerian cynicism.
Of a totally different order is _Der Junge Medardus_, a long play
of historical patriotism, specially written for the respectable and
official Burg Theater of Vienna. It might seem indeed at first sight
that Schnitzler, the refined, ultra-modern analyst, would be somewhat
out of his element amid all the blood and thunder of the Napoleonic
campaigns, which _primâ facie_ offer but small scope for psychological
subtleties. The _tour de force_ consequently becomes all the more
creditable when the author, in spite of all his trappings of patriotic
melodrama, manages successfully to execute his own favourite tricks.
The canvas on which this drama is portrayed is so vast as to render
any synopsis necessarily inadequate. The idyll, however, and double
suicide of the young French prince Franz and the bourgeois girl Agatha,
is one of the purest and sweetest love episodes which Schnitzler
has ever written. But it is Agatha's brother, the young, brave, and
picturesque Medardus, who provides the most precious examples of
recherche psychology. The suicide of the dead couple, Agatha and Franz,
had been occasioned by the refusal of Franz's family to consent to
the marriage. When, consequently, Franz's sister, Helene (a character
somewhat analogous to Mathilde de la Môle in Stendhal's _Le Rouge et le
Noir_) wishes to put flowers on the graves of the dead pair, Medardus
refuses to allow her. Helene has him challenged by her suitor, but
Medardus emerges triumphantly from the duel. Anxious to carry the
war into the enemy's camp, and to redress the balance of the family
account, he succeeds, by the dashing conquest of the most perilous
difficulties, in becoming the lover of Helene, with the eventual object
of rousing the whole household and flaunting to her own family the
haughty girl's dishonour. Helene, however, is erratic in her favours.
Medardus, like Julien, is scorched by his own fire. The ending,
moreover, of the play, though extremely effective theatrically, strikes
us from the psychological standpoint as distinctly false. Helene and
Medardus both plot to assassinate Napoleon. Hearing that Helene is
Napoleon's mistress, Medardus kills her instead of Napoleon. So far,
so good. But when our quixotic hero, when offered a free pardon on the
sole condition that he undertakes to make no further attempt against
Napoleon's life, obstinately refuses to give the required word, one can
only say that he is observing the etiquette neither of melodrama nor
even of life, but solely of patriotic tragedy.
But of all the longer plays of Schnitzler, the best and most
distinctive in that erotic "General Post" entitled _Das Weite
Land_ (The Wide Country). This drama, which is the only full-dress
drawing-room comedy which Schnitzler has written, belongs to what we
have already designated as the "slice of life" school. It depends for
its convincingness neither on any particularly drastic situation nor
on the disproportionate merit of any individual act. The author simply
takes a group of representative modern people, rich, intellectual, and
energetic, and shows the respective crossings and intertwinings of
their various lives. The complexity of the intrigue is overwhelming,
not to say bewildering, for practically every character, from the
prolific Aigon to the virginal Erna, and from the active business man
Friedrich to his polyandrous wife Genia, is subject to one or more
erotic moods, with whose more or less simultaneous conjugation in the
past, present, and future tenses the play specifically deals. Though,
too, all the characters lead emotional lives, they deserve credit in
that they none of them wear their souls upon their sleeves, or carry
their temperaments in their pockets with the ostentatious affectation
of those Sudermannic personages who never for a moment lose the
consciousness that they are living in an atmosphere of "high problem."
For the people with whom we have now to deal are so occupied with the
concrete acts of their actual lives that they have little time to waste
in mere airy generalities. When consequently they do philosophise,
shortly, crisply, and in the light of personal experience, they are for
that very reason all the more convincing. The whole _motif_ of this
play, where the spirits of Congreve and Henry James seem to amalgamate
in so strange but yet so harmonious a compound, is well crystallised
in the following quotation: "Love and deception--faithfulness and
unfaithfulness--adoration for one woman and desire for another woman or
several others, yes, my good Hofreiter, the soul is a wide country."
As can be seen from these tolerant words, which have all the greater
force in that the man who speaks them is at any rate temporarily more
or less in love with his friend's wife, the mood in which the problem
of promiscuity is treated is less one of indignant satire than of
an ironic charity, which, while finding the complications at once
comic and tragic, yet assigns to every phase of love from the kiss
Friedrich gave to Erna three thousand metres above the sea, to Otto's
nocturnal escalades of Genia's room, its own specific emotional value,
even though the final verdict is to be found in the words of the
middle-aged Friedrich, refusing to elope with the twenty-year-old Erna:
"Everything's an illusion!"
From the point of view, also, of concentrated crispness of dialogue
and characterisation, Schnitzler has never achieved anything better
than this play. How telling in particular is the dialogue between
the mutually unfaithful spouses, Genia and Friedrich. The husband is
interrogating his wife about a young Russian virtuoso who had just
blown out his brains.
GENIA. He was not my lover. I'm sorry to say he was not
my lover. Is that enough for you!
Or take again the passage between Friedrich and Genia after Friedrich
has just fought a fatal duel with the twenty-five year old naval
officer, Otto.
GENIA. But why? If you cared the least bit about
me--if it had been a case of hate--if it had been
jealousy--love--
FRED. No--I feel at any rate damned little of all that.
But no man likes to be made an ass of.
In his new asexual play, _Professor Bernhardi_, Schnitzler strikes
out an entirely new line, leaves that light, airy sphere which he had
made so peculiarly his own, and embarks into the grim realms of pure
problem. The play is an avowed and deliberate tract in the manner of
Granville Barker, Galsworthy, or Brieux. Yet however devoid it may be
of those qualities which one is accustomed to label Schnitzlerian, it
is the most earnest, the most ethical, the most convincing of all his
plays.
Put shortly, the piece deals with an "affaire Dreyfus" in the medical
profession. Professor Bernhardi, a great Jewish doctor, has in the
face of numerous obstacles succeeded in building up the prosperity of
a new hospital, the Elisabethinum, treating mainly Catholic patients,
but supported mainly by Jewish funds. A substantial percentage of
the staff are Jewish, and it is instructive to observe how almost
instinctively the Jews and Catholics range themselves into two camps.
In the first act a Catholic girl is dying of septic poisoning as the
result of some outside doctor's clumsy attempt to help her to escape
the consequences of her own indiscretion. The patient herself, however,
in a state of blissful delirium, confident of recovery, and expecting
the speedy advent of her lover, is deriving the maximum of enjoyment
out of the few minutes she has yet to live. Under these circumstances
there arrives a Catholic priest, sent for, not by the girl but by a
nurse, with the object of administering the last sacrament. Out of
sheer humanity and medical conscientiousness, Professor Bernhardi is
reluctant to have his patient's last hours marred by the realisation of
her death and the shattering of her happy dream. The Catholic priest
is insistent. The Professor is politely firm. There is an animated
dialogue in the course of which the Professor touches the priest very
lightly on the shoulder, though there is nothing in the nature of an
assault. In the meanwhile the patient dies comfortably. The Clerical
and Anti-semitic parties exploit the incident with inaccurate though
artistic journalistic embellishments. There is a tremendous uproar.
The Governors of the hospital threaten to resign. Under pressure
from his friends, the Professor is willing to tender, not indeed an
abject apology, but a polite explanation. The Clerical party thereupon
blackmail him by threatening to raise the question in Parliament, if he
does not secure the election to a vacant post on the hospital staff of
a Catholic candidate who is on the one hand the protégé of the cousin
of their leader, and on the other hand incompetent. Refusing to be a
party to the job, Bernhardi secures the election to the post of a man
who is both competent and a Jew. Bernhardi, moreover, relies on the
personal assurance of Flint, the Minister for Education and Public
Worship, that he will help him by his support in Parliament. When,
however, matters came to a head, Flint, scenting in the middle of his
speech with the divine flair of the true politician the actual state
of public opinion, throws Bernhardi to the wolves and himself suggests
a prosecution for sacrilege. The Executive Board of the hospital are
divided as to what course they shall pursue. Shall they pass a vote of
confidence in their chief, or, on the other hand, suspend him until the
determination of the proceedings. By a fine stroke of irony Bernhardi
realises that he will be in a minority through the vote of the very
Jew through the conscientious insistence on whose election to the
Board he had lost the proffered opportunity of bribing the Clericals
and squaring the whole matter. He consequently resigns from the Board.
The trial takes place. The priest himself denies that there was any
assault. Bernhardi, however, is defended by a converted Jew, who,
sinking the advocate in the Catholic, conducts the case so lukewarmly
that Bernhardi is convicted on the perjured evidence of a vindictive
colleague and a hysterical lay sister. During the trial the priest
is convinced that Bernhardi was morally right in the course which he
adopted, but, as he feels subsequently driven as a matter of conscience
to inform him, refrained out of sheer religious duty from telling the
truth. Bernhardi serves his term and becomes, much to his disgust,
a political hero and a popular martyr. The hysterical lay sister
eventually confesses her perjury and Bernhardi is finally righted,
though the final note in the play is that Bernhardi was really rather
a fool to have involved himself in such grave consequences for the
mere sake of a quixotic principle. Some portion possibly of the effect
produced by this play depends on the full appreciation of its personal
allusions and some knowledge of the circumstances on which it was
substantially founded. Nevertheless, present symptoms would appear to
indicate that this play will have especial interest, not only to Jews
and Anti-Semites, but to impartial students of ethics and sociology.
Though, moreover, "pure problem" and studded with long didactical
speeches, the dramatic interest is well sustained, at any rate up
to the fourth Act, while the different characters are distinguished
with the sharpest precision. We would refer in particular to Flint,
that delightfully bland opportunist, that benevolently unscrupulous
politician, that perfectly conscientious hypocrite who honestly
believes that there is a higher and larger duty both in politics and
in life than the observance of one's own principles and the keeping of
one's given word.
Schnitzler, moreover, is not only a dramatist, but a writer of short
stories and novels, which stand on practically as high a level as
his plays. Like De Maupassant, Schnitzler has only one real _motif_.
Unlike De Maupassant, however, it is the psychological complications in
which he is chiefly interested. In further contrast, his short stories
lack that inevitable precision of climax which is the chief mark of
the French author. Yet perhaps it is for this very reason that, with
their picturesque atmosphere and pathetic simplicity, they obtain an
added reality. In the almost clinical minuteness of his psychology,
explicable from the fact that he was once a doctor, he is reminiscent
of Mr. Henry James, of a Mr. James, however, who writes without
preciosity about individuals linked with ordinary human beings by very
much more than just some shred of normality. Among his earlier short
stories we would mention in particular _Die Frau der Weisen, Das neue
Lied_, and the hypnotic fantasia at the beginning of _Dämmerseelen_.
The more recent series, _Masken und Wunder_, also possesses a
well-merited claim to recognition for its series of studies, some
modern, some symbolical, yet all written with that almost intangible
softness, combined at the same time with a certain neat strength,
which is the essential mark of Schnitzler's literary style. One of the
most striking is the telepathic romance, _Redegonda's Diary_; but in
our view the best short story in the whole book is that Maupassantian
_Death of the Bachelor_ where the three intimate friends of a dead man
are summoned to his bedside, only to find their friend dead and to read
in a letter addressed to them all, of the three separate yet identical
domestic reasons which were responsible for their participation in this
superb piece of posthumous buffoonery.
Far more significant than any of his short stories is Schnitzler's
comparatively recent novel, _Der Weg ins Freie_ (The Road to the Open),
a novel which both by its actual success and its intrinsic merit,
stands out conspicuously among modern German literature. This book is
an admirable example of what one can perhaps call the "slice of life"
novel. Actual plot in the stereotyped sense of the term it has none.
Georg von Wergenthin, a young aristocratic Viennese dilettante, has,
in the course of an active emotional life, a fairly serious _liaison_
with Anna Rosner, a music-mistress belonging to a good Jewish set.
The child to which Anna and Georg had both been looking forward,
though in somewhat varying degrees, dies. Georg accepts a post of
conductor in a German town. Anna reassumes the normal tenor of her
spinster life. Finis. Neither conventional marriage nor even more
conventional suicide, but just life, a slice of sheer probable real
convincing life. But the book is far more than the history of Anna,
and far more than the history of Georg, even though it would appear at
first sight that the enumeration of Georg's emotions tends somewhat
to swamp the four hundred and sixty pages of this novel which yet
reads so shortly. For Georg's soul is a mirror which reflects not only
itself but a considerable number of the more interesting characters
of a specific modern Viennese set. And the lives of Anna and Georg
touch the lives of numerous other persons, persons too who, at any
rate, give the impression of being no mere characters in novels, but
of having been honourably plagiarised, and without suffering either
caricature or idealisation in the process, from the pages of the
book of life itself. And all these various lives are followed up and
adumbrated and described at greater or lesser detail. Of course they
have nothing to do with the story of Georg von Wergenthin. But they
play an important part in the life of Georg von Wergenthin, just as he
plays a more or less important part in their existence. And though of
course Georg is the nominal hero of the book, it is the modern Jewish
set with, of course, its Gentile appanages which constitutes the real
subject-matter. And how vivid and interesting on their merits are all
these characters--old Ehrenberg, the Jewish millionaire, with his
delightful habit of talking Yiddish before smart company, specially
to annoy his snobbish son Oskar; Oskar himself, who, on being caught
by his father in the flagrant act of posing as a Catholic in front
of a church and given a box on the ears by way of reproof, makes an
abortive attempt to commit hara-kiri with a revolver; Else Ehrenberg,
the temperamental, but unmarried sister of Oskar; Heinrich Bermann, the
brilliant self-centred author, with his grand passion for his faithless
actress in the foreign town; Leo Golowski, the enthusiastic Zionist;
Therese Golowski, the Socialist agitatress, with her temporary trip
with that fascinating hussar-officer, Demeter Stanzides; Winternitz,
the poet, with his not very _soigné_ hands and his naïf mania for
reciting his own erotic verses; Dr. Stauber, the benevolent modern of
the last generation; Anna herself, with her soft wistfulness and her
essential dignity; Sissy Wyner, with her high wanton spirits and pretty
English accent; and of course Georg himself, Georg the aristocrat,
Georg the _grand amoureux_, Georg the composer, Georg the dilettante,
Georg the drifter, Georg the ineffectual.
In the technique of this novel Schnitzler marks what we suggest to be a
new departure, by the insertion of substantial slabs of past life into
the analysis of his hero's thoughts, a process which by a tremendous
economy of space and time thus describes simultaneously the inner
workings of Georg's mind, and simultaneously narrates important pieces
of antecedent history which have no place in the official action of the
novel.
Some tribute, also, must be paid to the style, which is at times
soft and sweet, at times light and crisp, yet always lucid, always
individual, and always possessed of that gracefulness which is so rare
a quality in German prose literature.
To revert to Schnitzler the dramatist, what are his chief claims, his
chief excellences, his chief defects? It seems to us that the essence
of his merit lies in the fact that, speaking broadly, he handles
problems neither as ends in themselves, as do the more advanced of our
own dramatists, nor yet, like Sudermann, as mere pegs on which to hang
violently theatrical stage effects. Some problem may constitute the
centre of most of his plays; yet, with a few exceptions, this problem
is not presented too nakedly or without sufficient relief. Each problem
is bathed in an artistic atmosphere, and each character in the picture
limned with the most subtle psychology. It is true that, as has already
been pointed out, many of the acts in his early longer dramas exhibit
too strong a tendency to form self-independent pictures; yet it is this
defect which forms the chief charm of his one-acters. It is true that
nearly all his characters are Bohemian--artists, flâneurs, actresses,
journalists, doctors, painters--yet each author creates, as of right,
the population of his own individual world; and is it not rather a
claim to glory to have attained such heights of dramatic celebrity
without having written more than one single play specifically devoted
to fashionable life? It is true that the ethics of these plays, with
their chronic and inevitable intrigues, may strike the English mind as
somewhat unusual; yet Schnitzler enjoys the reputation of being the
most brilliant and accurate portrayer of contemporary Viennese life.
It is, moreover, in the nature of all problem plays that they should
be pieces of special pleading, where the other side is allowed just so
much of a hearing as will not permit of its convincing. After all, from
the standpoint of dramatic art, that which counts is not the ethics,
but the presentation of the problem.
Yet, with all his subtlety and all his problems, he is never heavy.
Vienna stands intellectually nearer to Paris than to Berlin, so that
the Teutonic introspection and sentimentalism are touched with a Gallic
sprightliness and a Gallic grace. No dramatist has written tragedy with
so light a hand, or comedy with so ironically pathetic a smile, as has
Arthur Schnitzler.
[Footnote 1: "Der Freiwild" (sic); correct title is
"Freiwild"--transcriber's note (M.D.)]
[Footnote 2: "Rohring" is "Rönning" in the original play--transcriber's
note (M.D.)]