tains many facts that are corrupt but indirectly true, has it that Plato died with the farces of Sophron under his pillow. The virtuosity of this sceptical irony is the peculiarity and strength of Schnitzler's comedies. And if I may say so, those pieces of his seem to me the best wherein this irony is situated not merely in the dialogue—as in all his more serious works where the genre comes quite close to the comédie larmoyante—but where irony also dominates the very nature of the action, as in the historical farce of The Green Cockatoo, or in several other of his one-act plays.
Physician and son of a physician, and thus a sceptic by calling, he is a product of the upper bourgeoisie at the close of the nineteenth century, a sceptical, observant, and historically-minded period not lacking in internal affinities with French life and culture of the eighteenth century; it is to be expected, therefore, that this important and applauded dramatist should be a writer of distinguished short stories. Indeed, no two art forms have ever been closer to one another than the psychological play and the psychological story of the last generation. He is an unusual narrator; but it is not preëminently in the short form of which Maupassant and Kipling were masters, nor in the novel, but in the tale of medium length that he seems to me almost without a rival among his contemporaries. There is a peculiarly compelling force in the sheer narrative of these works. They hold the reader to the highest degree of suspense, and do this by an art which is rightly called sober, an epithet rarely applicable to a German author. But also in the case of his stories the strongest seem to me those in which his irony—with its constant touch of melancholy—is given a major importance, as in that charming mixture of the comic and the tragic which characterizes his Fate of the Baron von Leisenbohg.[1]
But I must revert from Schnitzler to my real subject, which is the Viennese theatre. I have said that Schnitzler's plays touch on only one phase of Vienna's theatrical life, the drama of conversation, and perhaps that is more European than specifically Viennese. Nor has he given us the entire range of Vienna’s peculiarly broad and complex social life. The aristocracy and the masses, even the lower middle class, are represented simply in occasional ironic types; the world of his plays is the circumscribed world of an educated, or more accurately, intellectual bourgeoisie. Out and out intellectuals, artists, musicians, doctors, amateurs of living, or well-to-do young
- ↑ A translation of this story will appear shortly in The Dial.
