Henri, the star-man, moreover, has just married the actress Léocadie, not for the sake of paradox, but in all seriousness. When his turn comes, he rushes on to the stage shouting out that he found his wife, Léocadie, with her lover the duke, and killed her. Such a calamity being not apparently primâ facie improbable, even the manager is almost as alarmed as the audience, till he realises that the whole thing is but an histrionic tour de force. And then, as the play progresses, the atmosphere becomes more and more lurid with impending gloom. Jest and reality intermingle in the subtlest of ironies. It is part of the entertainment that the ragamuffins should lavish on their patrons the freest of insults. But is there not a paradox within the paradox, when one remembers that the Bastille has fallen that very day? The various types, moreover, of an aristocracy exhibiting the levity of people who are shortly going to be hanged are delightfully portrayed—the viveur, "for whom every day is lost in which he has not captured a woman or killed a man," the pretty young noble whose corrupt flirtation is so deftly adumbrated, and the lascivious grande dame, who, in spite of her husband's anxiety, is very far from shocked at these spectacular novelties. And then Henri snaps up the truth from the demeanour of the manager and his colleagues. The Duke comes on to the stage and the actor then gives yet another representation of the avenging husband—and this time he surpasses himself, for he is but acting the truth.
Less sensational, but of equal psychological grimness, is the play The Mate, which is in the same series as the Green Cockatoo. The theme is the pathetic irony of the illusion of a middle-aged professor, who gives an almost paternal benediction to what he fondly imagines to be the grand passion of his young and temperamental wife. When, consequently, his wife dies suddenly, the husband is prepared quite honestly to condole with the lover, for after all has he not a right to be pitied even more than himself? When, therefore, he learns from his young colleague that he has just become engaged to another girl with whom he has been in love for some time his righteous indignation is unbounded.
"I would have raised you from the ground if you had been broken by grief. I would have gone with you to her grave, if the woman who is lying over there had been your love; but you have turned her into your wanton, and you have filled this house with lies and foulness right up to the roof till it makes me sick—and that's why—that's why, yes, that's why I'm going to kick you out."
But there is an anti-climax within an anti-climax, for the man learns from a mutual woman friend of the dead woman and of himself, that the imagined grande passion had been even from the standpoint of the lady nothing more or less than a miserable trumpery adventure.
Reverting now to Schnitzler's longer plays, some mention should be made of Komtesse Mizzi, Der Junge Medardus, and, above all, Das Weites Land.
Komtesse Mizzi, entitled, appropriately enough, "A Family Day" is in form a one-acter, though of sufficient length and substance to have obtained separate publication. There is little, if any, action. The play is based on character, dialogue, and situation. Yet it possesses distinct psychological titillation in its presentation of a daughter who takes a filial interest in her father's "actress-mistress," and who is sensible enough, aristocrat though she is, to meet the lady herself with all friendliness, and chat with her as woman to woman without the slightest affectation. This feminine freemasonry, however, is perhaps explained by the fact that the countess herself has lived her own life, to such good effect that she is the mother of a grown-up boy by her father's best friend, Prince Egon. When, consequently, the prince introduces the boy as his own natural child by an unknown mother, the atmosphere becomes somewhat rare. At first highly irritated, she treats with frigid indifference the frank exuberant youth, who divines the truth with instinctive intuition, only, however, shortly afterwards to consent to marry the prince, and thus become the official stepmother of her own long-lost child. The racy worldly optimism of this play is particularly characteristic of the essentially benevolent malice of the Schnitzlerian cynicism.
Of a totally different order is Der Junge Medardus, a long play of historical patriotism, specially written for the respectable and official Burg Theater of Vienna. It might seem indeed at first sight that Schnitzler, the refined, ultra-modern analyst, would be somewhat out of his element amid all the blood and thunder of the Napoleonic campaigns, which primâ facie offer but small scope for psychological subtleties. The tour de force consequently becomes all the more creditable when the author, in spite of all his trappings of patriotic melodrama, manages successfully to execute his own favourite tricks. The canvas on which this drama is portrayed is so vast as to render any synopsis necessarily inadequate. The idyll, however, and double suicide of the young French prince Franz and the bourgeois girl Agatha, is one of the purest and sweetest love episodes which Schnitzler has ever written. But it is Agatha's brother, the young, brave, and picturesque Medardus, who provides the most precious examples of recherche psychology. The suicide of the dead couple, Agatha and Franz, had been occasioned by the refusal of Franz's family to consent to the marriage. When, consequently, Franz's sister, Helene (a character somewhat analogous to Mathilde de la Môle in Stendhal's Le Rouge et le Noir) wishes to put flowers on the graves of the dead pair, Medardus refuses to allow her. Helene has him challenged by her suitor, but Medardus emerges triumphantly from the duel. Anxious to carry the war into the enemy's camp, and to redress the balance of the family account, he succeeds, by the dashing conquest of the most perilous difficulties, in becoming the lover of Helene, with the eventual object of rousing the whole household and flaunting to her own family the haughty girl's dishonour. Helene, however, is erratic in her favours. Medardus, like Julien, is scorched by his own fire. The ending, moreover, of the play, though extremely effective theatrically, strikes us from the psychological standpoint as distinctly false. Helene and Medardus both plot to assassinate Napoleon. Hearing that Helene is Napoleon's mistress, Medardus kills her instead of Napoleon. So far, so good. But when our quixotic hero, when offered a free pardon on the sole condition that he undertakes to make no further attempt against Napoleon's life, obstinately refuses to give the required word, one can only say that he is observing the etiquette neither of melodrama nor even of life, but solely of patriotic tragedy.
But of all the longer plays of Schnitzler, the best and most distinctive in that erotic "General Post" entitled Das Weite Land (The Wide Country). This drama, which is the only full-dress drawing-room comedy which Schnitzler has written, belongs to what we have already designated as the "slice of life" school. It depends for its convincingness neither on any particularly drastic situation nor on the disproportionate merit of any individual act. The author simply takes a group of representative modern people, rich, intellectual, and energetic, and shows the respective crossings and intertwinings of their various lives. The complexity of the intrigue is overwhelming, not to say bewildering, for practically every character, from the prolific Aigon to the virginal Erna, and from the active business man Friedrich to his polyandrous wife Genia, is subject to one or more erotic moods, with whose more or less simultaneous conjugation in the past, present, and future tenses the play specifically deals. Though, too, all the characters lead emotional lives, they deserve credit in that they none of them wear their souls upon their sleeves, or carry their temperaments in their pockets with the ostentatious affectation of those Sudermannic personages who never for a moment lose the consciousness that they are living in an atmosphere of "high problem." For the people with whom we have now to deal are so occupied with the concrete acts of their actual lives that they have little time to waste in mere airy generalities. When consequently they do philosophise, shortly, crisply, and in the light of personal experience, they are for that very reason all the more convincing. The whole motif of this play, where the spirits of Congreve and Henry James seem to amalgamate in so strange but yet so harmonious a compound, is well crystallised in the following quotation: "Love and deception—faithfulness and unfaithfulness—adoration for one woman and desire for another woman or several others, yes, my good Hofreiter, the soul is a wide country."
As can be seen from these tolerant words, which have all the greater force in that the man who speaks them is at any rate temporarily more or less in love with his friend's wife, the mood in which the problem of promiscuity is treated is less one of indignant satire than of an ironic charity, which, while finding the complications at once comic and tragic, yet assigns to every phase of love from the kiss Friedrich gave to Erna three thousand metres above the sea, to Otto's nocturnal escalades of Genia's room, its own specific emotional value, even though the final verdict is to be found in the words of the middle-aged Friedrich, refusing to elope with the twenty-year-old Erna: "Everything's an illusion!"
From the point of view, also, of concentrated crispness of dialogue and characterisation, Schnitzler has never achieved anything better than this play. How telling in particular is the dialogue between the mutually unfaithful spouses, Genia and Friedrich. The husband is interrogating his wife about a young Russian virtuoso who had just blown out his brains.