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.