Chapter VI: Part 6

Scene V, after a short philosophic exposition by Melchior of the universality of egoism, contains an episode between himself and Wendla, when at her own request he hits and beats her, so that, forsooth, she may realise the sufferings of a friend of hers similarly handled by her parents. After we have paid a visit to Melchior's study, where Melchior and Moritz are reading _Faust_ together, we are transported once again to the house of Wendla and her mother. This scene is the most pathetic in the first act. The old fairy tales about the stork cease to obtain credence, but the birthright of knowledge claimed by the child is refused by the mother.

"Why can't you tell me, Mother dear--see, I kneel at
your feet and lay my head upon your lap--you put your
skirt over my head and tell me, and tell me as if you
were alone in the room. I promise not to move--I promise
not to shriek."

Could the dim forebodings of innocence, the harrowing consciousness of mystery, be more poignantly delineated?

In the third act, events move apace. A poetic nemesis befalls the prudish mother, for the child surrenders all unwitting to the ardour of Melchior. Spring has indeed awakened. Moritz, however, has been unsuccessful at school; he wanders into the forest to make the end. Four pages of soliloquy; a dramatic device, no doubt, but none the less indicative of the exaggerated introspective pedantry of the average German schoolboy. "I wander to the altar like the youth in old Etruria, whose death-rattle purchased deliverance for his brothers in the coming year." Then, when his thoughts are at their darkest, a pretty little artist's model comes tripping along barefoot; gay and sparkling is her careless life. "Come home with me." But the schoolboy has his lessons to do, and he hies himself to his final task. Act III.--Apprehensive of a suicide epidemic, the masters hold a meeting in which the question of whether the window shall be open or shut is apparently of as much importance as the expulsion of Melchior. Then comes the funeral of Moritz; the father repudiates the paternity of so prodigal a son, while the classical professor sapiently remarks, "If he had only learnt his history of Greek literature, he would have had no occasion to hang himself." Melchior, however, is still at large, and after a harrowing dialogue between his father and mother, is packed off to a reformatory.

But the transformation scene goes merrily on, and we behold first the reformatory, from which Melchior effects an escape, and then Wendla's sick-room. Amid the most trenchant satire on the pompous fashionable doctor, it becomes apparent that the child has brought home to her mother the full wages of innocence.

FRAU BERGMANN. You have a child.

WENDLA. But that is not possible, Mother. I am not
married. Oh, Mother, why did you not tell me everything?

The finale of the play is laid in the churchyard, over whose wall there clambers the escaped Melchior; he walks past the tombstone of Wendla, dead from her mother's heroic efforts to save her reputation; after an interview with Moritz, out for a nocturnal stroll, with his head tucked under his arm, he meets a mysterious stranger, who launches him in the world.

Such is a synopsis of a play produced in Germany amid the wildest acclamation and disparagement. Its success is largely due to the fact that it is pregnant with a problem which, in Germany, at any rate, is of peculiar moment. "Is such a subject capable of artistic treatment?" demands the man of the old school. If, however, the treatment is somewhat more drastic than in Longfellow's

"Standing with reluctant feet
Where the brook and river meet,"

the subject is the same, the reason for the difference being that German blood flows with a swifter current and a fuller volume than the thin New England trickle of the early nineteenth century. As a sheer piece of psychology, the work is as great as James's _The Awkward Age_, if one may compare a Vulcanic forge with a Daedalean web. That, indeed, the theme is unfit for tragic treatment, let those maintain whose ideally balanced temperaments have never experienced the throes and travails that attend the birth of manhood or womanhood.

Some reference should be made to Wedekind's less important works--to the somewhat inferior farce, _Der Liebestrank_; to the highly serious _So ist das Leben_, a work whose psychology and symbolism are analogous to Ibsen's _Volksfiend_[3]; to the amusing, but not particularly significant _Marquis von Keith_, with its mixture of the problem, the extravaganza, and the character study, and its delightful comedy passage, when a boy wins his way with his father by blackmailing him with suicide; to _Minnehaha_, the prose-poem, compounded of the spirits of the classics and the coulisses; to the satiric grotesque, _Oaha_, an elaborate skit on the celebrated Munich journal with its chronic confiscations by the police and its special "prison-editor"; and to _Hidalla_, that rollicking burlesque tragedy of Free Love and Eugenics. On a higher plane, however, are the volume of short stories, _Feuerwerk_, and the collection of poems entitled _Die Vier Jahrzeiten_. Like Guy de Maupassant, Wedekind treats only the one subject. His technique, however, is different, and while the Frenchman crowns each tale with a climax, the German clothes it with an atmosphere. _Feuerwerk,_ moreover, is worth reading, if only for the style, with its noble simplicity and its majestic roll. The masterpiece of the series is _Der Greise Freier_, where, set in the background of an Italian honeymoon, lies painted the grey romance of a young girl realising her love in the very arms of death. Matchless, again, as a mock heroic _tour de force_ is _Rabbi von Ezra_, a philosophic sermon by an aged Hebrew, delivered in the grandiose style of the prophets, on his comparative experiences with the wife of his bosom and the strange woman. The poems, also, are, with a few exceptions, innumerable variations of the eternal theme. With all its fantastic bizarrerie, reminiscent of Baudelaire, Poe, or Verlaine, the mood is throughout more masculine, not to say more brutal. No lover has yet set his enamoured features to a grin of such tigerish ferocity; no writer of songs has yet refined melodious lyrics with such Nietzschean gusto, such Satanic exultation. _Keuscheit_, in particular, is truly the apotheosis of the super-brutal. In a more normal vein, making quite a new departure in the art of light verse, is the charming poem beginning:

"Ich habe meine Tante geschlachtet,
Meine Tante war alt und schwach."

Of course it is inevitable that, like the Secessionist painters, seeking, as he does, such drastic effects by such drastic means, when he falls, he should fall with overwhelming heaviness. Occasionally, instead of being powerful, he is merely crude. At his best, however, his poems exhibit the swing and ripple of the authentic lyric. Typical of him at his best are _Heimweh_ and _Der Blinde Knabe_. Yet now and again the cry of the sufferer pierces the cynic's mask.

"Ich stehe schuldlos vor meinem Verstand,
Und fühle des Schicksals zermalmende Hand."

Among Wedekind's more recent works we would mention _Zensur_ and _Schloss von Wetterstein_ and, far more particularly, _Musik_ and _Franziska_.

_Zensur_, with its sub-title _a Theodicy_, is an _apologia pro vitâ suâ_, arising more particularly out of the fact that the play, _Die Büchse von Pandora_, was actually censored even in Munich. The protagonist of this work, _Walter Buridan_, is without disguise Frank Wedekind, for the postulate of the Wedekindian personality, as a fundamental element in contemporary national culture, is as important in Germany as was some years ago the postulate of the Shavian personality in England. And, indeed, with all his clownings and buffooneries, Wedekind is frequently as serious as Mr. Shaw himself. It will therefore be appreciated that the passage which we are now going to quote out of the dialogue between Buridan and the Court official is meant deliberately, not as a mere piece of impudence but in all earnestness.

BURIDAN. But can you adduce anything out of my writings
which hasn't for its ultimate object to glorify and
represent artistically that eternal justice before which
we all bend the knee with all humility?

DR. PRANTL. What do you mean by eternal justice?

BURIDAN. I understand by eternal justice the same thing
as that which John the Evangelist called the Logos. I
understand by it the same thing as that which the whole
of Christendom worships as the Holy Ghost. In no one
of my works have I put forward the good as bad or the
bad as good. I have never falsified the consequences
which accrue to a man as the result of his actions. I
have simply portrayed those consequences in all their
inexorable necessity.

In a somewhat different vein is the weird trilogy, _In Allen Satteln Gerecht_ (_Ready for Everything_), _Mit Allen Hüden Gehetzt_ (_Up to Everything_), and _In Allen Wassern Gewaschen_, which have been recently published together, under the title of _Schloss von Wetterstein._ In these three plays the lascivious and the intellectual, the monstrous and the real, the comic and the tragic, are linked together in a union which, though to some extent burlesque, is on the whole successful. The dialogue, in particular, in this hybrid of tragedy and extravaganza, with its ingenious twists, its lusty thwackings, its shrewd, violent thrusts, not merely home, but, as it were, right through the body, is in its own way packed with genius. Effie, in particular, with her insatiable appetite in the erotic sphere, is the greatest _enfant terrible_ in the whole of modern European literature. And truly tragic is her dismay when she discovers that that _Unersättlichkeit in Liebe_, on which she has built her whole philosophy of life, is simply to be attributed to chronic indigestion, and that the instantaneous effect which she produces upon males is simply due to a diseased liver.

More serious, though with the usual Wedekindian sardonic undercurrent, is _Musik_. This play consists of four "pictures" from the life of a young singing student, Klara Hûhnerwadel, studying her art in the household of a professor who is married to another woman. Events take their normal course, but there is a great uproar owing to the arrest and trial of the woman, through whose illegal assistance Klara had successfully escaped the natural corollary of her rash romanticism. Klara is consequently packed off across the frontier to avoid arrest herself. She returns, however, is duly arrested, and the second "picture" shows her in prison. In the third "picture," she is once more back at the professor's house, and once more does history repeat itself, though in this case the legal ordinances are not infringed. In the fourth "picture," Klara has given birth to a son, of whom she is devotedly fond. With true Wedekindian irony, however, the child dies on the stage. Such is the skeleton of the plot, squalid, though no doubt highly plausible. But the play must be read itself to appreciate the sheer force of its sinister realism. The characters in this piece are among the most convincing that ever walked the boards of a Wedekind play, painted too in colours far more sober than those fantastic luridities with which this author is accustomed to disport himself. It is, in fact, if we may draw a slightly startling analogy, a "slice of life" play of the Galsworthian genre. Before passing from _Musik_, we would like to quote the passage describing the child's death as typically characteristic of the author's brutal pathos.

ELSE. The bath will do him good (_with her bare arm in
the water_)--it's all cooking salt--the salt won't hurt
him, will it, doctor?

DR. SCHWARZKOPF (_by the cot, dully_). There is nothing
more to be done. The child is dead.

KLARA (_gives an agonised shriek_).

[_The_ Landlady _picks up the tub of water from the
floor and carries it out_.

In _Franziska_ (1912), Wedekind has given fresh rein to his fantastic exuberance. This weird drama deals with the experiences of an ultra-modern Mademoiselle de Maupin, who, having sold herself to the devil in the shape of an impresario, who holds her strictly to her bargain, proceeds to see life like a veritable twentieth-century female Faust. And life, forsooth, she sees with a vengeance, playing the smart "blood" in a gay _Weinstube_; marrying a rich heiress, so naïve and so unsophisticated as to put everything down to sheer frigidity on the part of her imagined husband; successfully masquerading in silk knee-breeches to a silly old monarch as a genuine spirit, only finally, like a contemporary

"In veterem Cæneus revoluta figuram,"

to subside both purified and enlightened byher kaleidoscopic experiences into the healthy bliss of the quasi-domestic life with a new, honest, and well-meaning lover.

The wild, rollicking humour of this play will perhaps appeal in vain to the more stolid of our English minds. Some help may perhaps be found for the due appreciation of this, and, indeed, of all Wedekind's plays, if it be borne in mind that for a modern woman to live her own life in Southern Germany (_sich auszuleben_, to employ the technical and official phrase) is not revolutionary but elementary, and is far more of a cliché than a new departure. Further, the play claims to be treated not by the standards of the ordinary drama, but as a problem farce, an Aristophanic modernity, a philosophic extravaganza, a dramatic anomaly, very much _sui generis_, and consequently requiring very special critical standards. Judging it by these standards, it is impossible not to be swept away by the high spirits of this strange piece of art. Who, too, can gainsay the practical up-to-dateness of a play where maidens insure against children, wives against infidelity, monarchs against madness? And who will not admire the almost morbid conscientiousness of Franziska, who, having had one lover of the name of Veit, and another lover of the name of Ralph, and becoming subsequently a mother, determines, out of comprehensive precaution and sheer sense of fairness, to call the little boy by the impartial designation of Veitralph? It is, however, only fair to state, as we have already hinted, that the play finishes up on a note of genuine pathos and semi-conjugal affection.

What, then, is Wedekind's final claim? As a play-wright in the ordinary sense of the word, his pretensions are negligible. One of the most marked features, however, of the last decade and a half has been the evolution of fresh species in the genus drama. Thus, apart from the drama or play of action, with its orthodox _dénouement_ and climax, we have the "idea" play, as in Mr. Shaw; the "slice of life" play, as in Mr. Galsworthy; or the "æsthetic atmosphere" play, as in Maeterlinck. Whether we call such work drama, or quasi-drama, is as immaterial from the larger standpoint as the surname we choose to give to the individual who did, or who did not, write _Hamlet_. Even, however, with this extended classification, it is difficult to docket into any definite pigeon-hole so idiosyncratic a temperament. If we have to commit ourselves, we would say that the Wedekind play is the lyric play of irony--irony both comic and tragic. Even making all due allowances for defects, for the superfluous thickness with which sometimes he places his harsh and violent colours, or for occasional amorphous construction, as in _Frühlingserwachen_, as a master of irony he is indisputably a genius. No _sœva indignatio_, it is true, lends its ethical sanction, no Hellenic _εἰρονεία_ its delicate grace: it is for his own fiendish delectation that he plies his knout on that world of abnormalities called into existence for this express purpose, and writhing prettily in the most ingenious of dances. Yet with what art and dexterity does he operate, finding with unerring aim the raw place of his victims, and drawing from these apparent grotesques the blood of genuine humanity. Your specialist will no doubt diagnose him a decadent, yet he is tense with a frenzied virility. It is, as we have said before, the very exuberance and violence of his energy that leads him plumb the abyss. He has himself well expressed his whole outlook on life, and indeed the whole Nietzschean standpoint, in the following lines:

"For them your kind and gracious face,
For me the sword smiles sweet,
For me the savage bear's embrace,
For them old Bruin's meat.
The brutal foe's own strife I choose,
They the humanities of truce."

[Footnote 1: _Cf._ the lines of Ricarda Huch to life: "Denn du bist suss in deinen Bitternessen."]

[Footnote 2: It is curious to notice that almost identical words were used in _Irene Wycherley_.]

[Footnote 3: "Volksfiend" (sic); German is "Volksfeind", Norwegian is "Folkefiende"--transcriber's note--M.D.]

ARTHUR SCHNITZLER

"My dear friend, as far as that grotesque realism is
concerned, which considers it its duty to get along
without stage management or prompter, that realism in
which a fifth act frequently fails to be reached because
a tile has fallen upon the hero's head in the second
act--I am not interested. As for myself, I let the
curtain go up when it begins to be amusing, and I let it
go down at the moment which I consider fit."

In these words, touched with a delicate flippancy which is thoroughly characteristic, Arthur Schnitzler endeavours to summarise that technique which, though it has lifted him to the summit of the Austrian drama, is as yet comparatively unknown to the English public, if one excepts the recent performance by the Stage Society of _The Green Cockatoo_ and _Countess Mizzi_, and the production of _Anatol_ at the Palace Music Hall.

It is, in fact, because Schnitzler's plays combining, and on the whole combining efficiently, the psychological interest of pure "problem" with the emotional interest of pure "drama," afford specimens of a type novel to, at any rate, the majority of our theatre-goers, that they provoke something more than a cursory examination, not only of themselves, but of the standpoint and method of the man who wrote them. Above all is this the case in a country like England, where the problem play is hampered by so many handicaps. The exaggerated officialdom of our English propriety, beneficial though it may be from the moral aspect, produces artistically unfortunate results. Many first-class problem plays are exiled from the stage, but that is not where the mischief ends. Even when they are produced, it is only to be looked on with suspicion as eccentric symptoms of dangerous, not to say anarchistic tendencies. When, however, official and "respectable" dramatists (_i.e._ dramatists of the stamp of Mr. Pinero or of Mr. Sutro) produce so-called problem plays before official and "respectable" audiences (_i.e._ audiences of a calibre other than that of those who patronise the Little Theatre and Stage Society performances), it will be usually found (if, indeed, the play is not an innocuous family drama, or simply a comedy of intrigue, for in many cases the word "problem" has degenerated into a mere euphemism for some slight forgetfulness of the Seventh Commandment) that the dramatist has sacrificed the duty of working out his problems logically and artistically to the still more paramount duty of appeasing the moral consciousness of his audience.

Further, it is one of the precepts of our dramatic technique, most honoured in the observance, that the action should take place among people of high social position; as, however, it so happens that it is rather among the more intellectual and introspective of the middle classes that genuine problems tend to arise, the scope of the dramatist becomes automatically narrowed. Of course we have our dramatic left wing, Mr. Shaw, Mr. Galsworthy, Mr. Barker, our ultra-modern exponents of the drama of ideas and the drama of psychology. But here, again, our revolutionaries overshoot the mark in their reaction from the orthodox. Mr. Shaw will bombard us with ideas till we can hardly stand. When, however, we have recovered our balance, we observe that, however indisputable may be his pre-eminence as a thaumaturgic apostle of a successfully dechristianised Christianity, his characters are marked by comparatively few traits of individual psychology, and participate in comparatively little dramatic action. It is, indeed, with profound appreciation of his weakness that "talking" is set by Mr. Shaw as a final seal on the _Superman_. Mr. Galsworthy and Mr. Barker, it is true, do give us not only elaborate discussion of social problems (though not infrequently an airy discussion of things in general is dragged in forcibly with no, or little, reference to the action of the play), but also refined and delicate delineations of individual character. But with the possible exception of the grandiose and monstrous _Waste_ and the statuesque thesis and antithesis of the sociological _Strife_, their plays are not dramatic. To express it with almost childish implicity, their plays are not "exciting." With a few exceptions, they are charged with no atmosphere and abut at no climax.

Mere ideas, however, will not make the dramatic world go round, and mere psychology often only makes it go flat. Few words are mouthed with such fluent irresponsibility as "technique," but it may be said--and said, we think, truly, and without affectation--that no play can be a success without a certain minimum of "technique"; that is to say, either one continuous thread of dramatic interest on which successive acts are strung, or some particular arch-effect to which (especially if a one-acter) the whole play abuts, and to the atmosphere of which all the elements are harmoniously toned.

The vice of the English drama, then, is this: plays of good technical mechanism possess little or no "problem" interest; plays of "problem" or psychological interest possess little or no technical mechanism.

Let us, consequently, glancing first at his plays, and perhaps later at those short stories which stand in the most intimate relation to his one-acters, ascertain to what extent Schnitzler has solved successfully the great "problem of the problem."

_Liebelei_, which was produced first in 1895, is an excellent example both of Schnitzler's powers and of Schnitzler's limitations. The _motif_ of the play is the problem of the refined middle-class girl, who stands, if we may borrow the terminology of popular melodrama, at the cross-roads. Which turning is it better for her to take--the right turning, or the wrong turning?

Fritz, a sentimental young Viennese student, is discussing in his rooms the affairs of his heart with the saner and more practical Theodor. Fritz is melancholy. He has been sustaining a grand passion for a married woman, but the looming shadow of the husband obsesses him. Are his nerves playing him tricks, or has the husband ascertained?

Theodor advises him to sail in shallower and less troubled waters. "You must go for your happiness where I did--and found it, too--where there are no great scenes, no dangers, and no tragic developments, where the first steps are not particularly hard and the last, again, are not painful, where one receives the first kiss with a smile and parts finally with the softest feeling."

Scruples are out of place on the principle, "Better myself than someone else, and the someone else is as inevitable as Fate."

Theodor, moreover, has not only prescribed the cure, but has ordered the medicine. Enter Mizzi, the actual "happiness" of Theodor, and Christine, the prospective "happiness" of Fritz. Mizzi the practical prepares supper, while the sweet _naïveté_ of the genuinely unsophisticated Christine captivates the jaded soul of our _fin de siècle_ romantic. There ensues a scene of the most delicate gaiety and camaraderie. All is health and goodwill. Even Mizzi the prosaic shows her passion for the picturesque on learning that Fritz is in the Dragoons:

MIZZI. Are you in the yellow or the black?

FRITZ. I'm in the yellow.

MIZZI. (_dreamily_). In the yellow.

Could there be a more subtle probing into the soul of the novelette-reading shopgirl?

Then, at the zenith of the feast, when glasses are clinking and souls are flowing, enter the skeleton. The company is packed into the next room, and Fritz is left to arrange a duel with the man whom he has wronged. Exit the skeleton, re-enter the revellers; yet the shadow of the looming death casts a gloom even over the unconscious minds of the others. The girls bid a gay farewell to the young men, but the aftermath of the old love is already poisoning the sweets of the new.

The next scene is in the lodgings of Christine on the eve of that duel of which the love-stricken girl is in blissful ignorance. Christine, _bien entendu_, in contradistinction to the casual and heart-whole Mizzi, is taking her love-affair with the maximum of seriousness. Katherine, a benevolent busybody of a neighbour, puts Weiring, the musician father of Christine, on his guard. Weiring, however, having been the uncomplaisant brother of his sister, is determined, on the strength of his experience, to be the complaisant father of his daughter.

WEIRING. I became, Heaven knows, proud, and gloried in
my conduct--and then, little by little, the grey hairs
came and the wrinkles, and one day went by another
till her whole youth was gone--and gradually, so that
one could scarcely notice it, the young girl became an
old maid, and then I first began to suspect what I had
really done.

KATHERINE. But, Herr Weiring....

WEIRING. I can see how she often used to sit with me in
the evening by this lamp in this room, with her silent
smile, with a strange kind of devotion, as if she still
wished to thank me for something, and I--the one thing
I wanted most to do was to throw myself on my knees and
ask for her forgiveness for guarding her so well from
all dangers and from all happiness.

The act ends with a love-scene between Christine and Fritz, poignant in its irony. He is all-in-all to her, she is just something to him; but he goes off to fight a duel on account of another woman without so much as bidding her a real farewell.

In the third act the news of Fritz's death is broken to Christine, and here comes the most subtle and delicate touch of all. Poignant as is her grief at his death, her grief at the casual flippancy of his treatment is even more poignant. Our _fin de siècle_ Ophelia rushes madly out of the house to commit suicide in the nearest brook, or perhaps more probably under the nearest train, to point the philosophic moral, "_A bas la grande passion! Vive l'Amourette!_"

The play, however, should be read or seen to obtain an adequate appreciation of the precision with which each character is drawn, the spontaneity with which the dialogue flows, and the lyric pathos with which the whole is invested. The limitations, such as they are, simply lie in the fact that each act is self-complete in itself. However good they may be, three consecutive one-acters never made a drama. To compare great things with low, each act of a drama, like each instalment of a _feuilleton_, should leave, as it were, the hanging tag of some vital interrogation. The dramatic banquet should not only regale the mind of the spectator during, but titillate it with the aftermath between the acts.

As we shall see later, when he comes to dramatise on the larger scale, Schnitzler not infrequently exhibits the defects of those very qualities which make him so supreme in the sphere of the one-acter.

In _Märchen_ (the Fairy Tale), on the other hand, the problem is brought more officially into the foreground of the play, while each act is more closely connected with those which follow or precede it. Fedor Denner, a romantic young journalist (nearly all Schnitzler's young men are highly romantic), is in love with Fanny, a young actress on the threshold of theatrical success, and of those dangers which follow so closely in the wake of theatrical success. Fedor, moreover, is not only romantic, he is modern--ultra-modern. And so, in the inspiring atmosphere of Fanny's home circle, where the mother bustles about with the refreshments and the "good" piano-teacher of a sister discourses music for the edification of the journalists, painters, and students who frequent the house, he gives an impassioned little lecture on the "Fairy Tale of the Fallen Woman" and on the "washed-out views and dead-beat ideas" of which the fairy tale is composed. The little lecture, however, goes off just a little too successfully. In a climax, marvellous in its tacit concentration, Fanny takes an opportunity of kissing his hand. Fedor is revolted, however, by the revelation implied in this pathetic gratitude. He had contemplated marriage, but now----. For the time being he nurses in solitary misery all the pangs of retrospective jealousy. Then Fanny, unable to bear the separation, rushes headlong into his arms. Then comes the great act of the play. We are back once more in the house of Fanny's mother. The young actress, having scored a brilliant success on the Vienna stage, has been offered a splendid contract in St. Petersburg by Moritzki, the agent. If, however, she goes to St. Petersburg, she will have to face the pains and pleasures of life unsheltered by the respectability of a family. The problem is acute. Fanny, however, places the Fate of her life on the knees of--Fedor. And Fedor shuffles and vacillates.

FANNY. Come, and you--what do you say yourself?

FEDOR. After you have received Herr Moritzki at the
house you can scarcely seriously mean to refuse him.

FANNY. Herr Denner, I consider you an exceptionally
shrewd man, I ask you for your advice.

FEDOR. Yes, I think ... I would accept.

Fanny. Good! [_To_ Moritzki.] Herr Moritzki.

Woman-like, however, having signed the contract, she craves time to reconsider. Fedor looks at it again.

FANNY. Fedor--you gave me the contract back.

FEDOR. Well, yes.

FANNY. You should have torn it up, dear. Why didn't you
do it?

FEDOR. You should not have signed it, Fanny.

FANNY. Fedor! It is unbearable--you're driving me out of
my senses.

FEDOR. But you yourself don't quite know your own mind.
There's something in you which craves for adventures.

FANNY. Fedor--if you would only put me to the test--I
will do anything you want--only tell me.

And then, eventually, Fedor owns up.

FEDOR. Would I not still have to kiss away from your
lips the kisses of other men?

And so Fanny forsakes the life of domesticity for the life of the actress.

The chief defect, however, in this play is that, in spite of all its dramatic compound of psychology, pathos, and problem, the problem is not fairly presented, in that Fanny, being of inferior social status to Fedor, the question of whether he shall marry her must inevitably be influenced by purely snobbish considerations. It is only when the woman is of equal, if not slightly superior, rank to the man that the real problem of her ante-nuptial chastity can be discussed with real sociological fairness.

In _Die Vermächtniss_ (produced in Berlin in 1898), the problem which our dramatist has made the centre of his play is the relation to the family of the mistress and child of the dead son of the house. The dashing young cavalry officer is brought home fatally wounded from a fall from his horse. Realising his approaching death, he informs his parents of his responsibilities. Death raises the home circle to a pitch of more than ordinary humanity. In spite of their poignant jealousy at the existence of other affections and another home life, they send for their son's household, and accede to his dying request to incorporate it into the family.

Act II shows the mistress installed in the bosom of her lover's family. Modernity, however, though satisfying to the heroic pose, has its penalties. Our ultra-modern family finds itself confronted with social ostracism. Still, they love their grandchild, and the mother of the grandchild is the price that they must pay. But the grandchild dies. The semi-official daughter-in-law consequently becomes a somewhat unprofitable luxury, and in the final act is given her _congé_. Even more than in _Liebelei_, however, the claim to merit lies almost exclusively in the precision with which each successive phase of the problem is portrayed. As a series of family pictures, the play succeeds, and succeeds brilliantly; as a drama of continuous interest, it fails, and fails hopelessly.

The next play of Schnitzler is _The Veil of Beatrice._ This "tragedy of sensualism" has qualities too arresting to be lightly disregarded. The dramatist has forsaken his problems to portray how the fatal temperament of a young girl of the Italian Renaissance works out its own destruction.

In the first act, we are shown the garden of Filippo, a poet of Bologna, which is on the eve of being plundered by the enemy. The heads on Bolognese shoulders are worth little purchase, and who leaves not the town to-night will never leave the town at all. The Duke invites Filippo to the palace to recite his poems. Filippo refuses, so that he may leave the city of doom with his beloved Beatrice, a daughter of the people. On learning, however, that Beatrice has dreamt of the Duke, he spurns her in an egoistic paroxysm of refined jealousy, typical in its subtlety more of the twentieth century than the Renaissance.

"So much I give thee, more than thou canst dream,
So much that to be worthy of my love,
Loathing should fasten on thee at the thought
This earth is trod by other men than I."

Beatrice leaves him with the vague intimation--

"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!