their plain houses. Here, after entering on mouldy, broken, worn out steps, one is surprised by large beautiful rooms, with dark, noble pictures, graceful percelains, heavy carpets and curtains, solid, spacious, luxurious Biedermeier furniture, and—frequently—Makart bouquets in the corners, behind a bust or a console. (The Makart bouquet also appears here and there in his works of "all modern conveniences.") The cool scent of churches, abandoned spots filled with the rustling of a fountain, angular courts where the windows are overgrown with fuchsia, flights of wooden stairs in the open, gateways entwined with ivy, carpets and washing hung on the landings, in the middle a green pump with a groaning handle, a few dusty oleander bushes, solitary gardens which have the effect of a song by Schubert, at once delightful and unhappy, serious little houses where the sweet blond heads of girls frequently appear at the windows, and . . . But surely these are not scenes from Schnitzler; his for the most part are much more elegant and more mundane—none of your high society elegance, however, but the authentic product of old cultures—and especially more modern . . . and yet when one considers his works one does not see first of all the actual milieu, but that distinctly Viennese atmosphere which, like a sublimated music, is so remarkably and charmingly the property of this city, its people, and its houses. Such is the setting for these marionette plays and mysteries of the soul, but it is not disproportionately prominent. For it is not the essential matter—although in a certain sense the setting must "take part"; above this there is the piece itself wherein every element of the external is almost negligible. Only the inner processes are important: the wounding, healing or dying of sensation, the dark corners of the soul, the interludes and modulations, the spiritual fluctuations, the sensing of the ineffable. That Arthur Schnitzler is one of the few who know how to say this unsayable, or at least to make us feel its presence, that he is a giver of light and has told his contemporaries for the first time many conclusive facts about themselves . . . this is his significance in the literature of our days. From this standpoint his motives and materials become almost of secondary importance; they could be overlooked. But I do not overlook them. By no means. For there are good things, documents—frequently on the ars poetica, as a revolt against the theatre in a play written for the theatre, and again, a surrender to its irresistible snares; there are exceptionally neat ma-
