VIENNA LETTER
July, 1922
THERE are a great many things which I should like to discuss with Dial readers in my Vienna Letter, for numerous subtle spiritual threads reach out from Vienna to the east and west. But perhaps I should speak first of the most important, of what I might call the main current of our artistic life . . . and that is undoubtedly the battle of this city, after the collapse of a thousand-year-old political situation, to maintain its rank as the artistic and intellectual capital of southeastern Europe. At the very moment of collapse Vienna took up this struggle with the deliberation of an endangered creature drawing on its last resources, and without a doubt it is being carried through to victory. Since the end of the eighteenth century—or even eighty years earlier—Vienna was supreme not only as the theatrical centre of Germany, but almost of Italy as well, owing to dynastic connexions. Its only rival as a theatrical city in the entire civilized world was Paris. When I speak of the theatre as the real strength of Vienna's artistic life—which is not to be identified entirely with the intellectual life, any more than literature or poetry is exclusively a matter of the stage—I do not thereby distinguish opera and lyric drama from the usual spoken play, nor do I make a division into superior and inferior plays. All such distinctions are artificial, and smack of histories of literature or treatises on aesthetics. Where a true sense of the theatre, a modicum of theatrical genius, has been distributed over an entire people as with the Austrians, the Celts, or the Greeks, these divisions fall away; for one form of the living theatre metamorphoses into another, one genre grows out of another. The Celtic stock has its genius rooted in the musical and the mystical, in its motivity by rhythm and mystery, in the yearning and the visionary; on the other hand Greek drama rests on a passionately inspired preference for the plastic, corporeal presentation of ideas, an architectural theatre; while with the Austrians there is a double root from which sprouts its whole theatrical existence: the gift for social life and for music. The Austrian has infinitely more social sense than the north German, more feeling for human relationships, an incomparably finer
