GENIA. He was not my lover. I'm sorry to say he was not my lover. Is that enough for you!
Or take again the passage between Friedrich and Genia after Friedrich has just fought a fatal duel with the twenty-five year old naval officer, Otto.
GENIA. But why? If you cared the least bit about me—if it had been a case of hate—if it had been jealousy—love—
FRED. No—I feel at any rate damned little of all that. But no man likes to be made an ass of.
In his new asexual play, Professor Bernhardi, Schnitzler strikes out an entirely new line, leaves that light, airy sphere which he had made so peculiarly his own, and embarks into the grim realms of pure problem. The play is an avowed and deliberate tract in the manner of Granville Barker, Galsworthy, or Brieux. Yet however devoid it may be of those qualities which one is accustomed to label Schnitzlerian, it is the most earnest, the most ethical, the most convincing of all his plays.
Put shortly, the piece deals with an "affaire Dreyfus" in the medical profession. Professor Bernhardi, a great Jewish doctor, has in the face of numerous obstacles succeeded in building up the prosperity of a new hospital, the Elisabethinum, treating mainly Catholic patients, but supported mainly by Jewish funds. A substantial percentage of the staff are Jewish, and it is instructive to observe how almost instinctively the Jews and Catholics range themselves into two camps. In the first act a Catholic girl is dying of septic poisoning as the result of some outside doctor's clumsy attempt to help her to escape the consequences of her own indiscretion. The patient herself, however, in a state of blissful delirium, confident of recovery, and expecting the speedy advent of her lover, is deriving the maximum of enjoyment out of the few minutes she has yet to live. Under these circumstances there arrives a Catholic priest, sent for, not by the girl but by a nurse, with the object of administering the last sacrament. Out of sheer humanity and medical conscientiousness, Professor Bernhardi is reluctant to have his patient's last hours marred by the realisation of her death and the shattering of her happy dream. The Catholic priest is insistent. The Professor is politely firm. There is an animated dialogue in the course of which the Professor touches the priest very lightly on the shoulder, though there is nothing in the nature of an assault. In the meanwhile the patient dies comfortably. The Clerical and Anti-semitic parties exploit the incident with inaccurate though artistic journalistic embellishments. There is a tremendous uproar. The Governors of the hospital threaten to resign. Under pressure from his friends, the Professor is willing to tender, not indeed an abject apology, but a polite explanation. The Clerical party thereupon blackmail him by threatening to raise the question in Parliament, if he does not secure the election to a vacant post on the hospital staff of a Catholic candidate who is on the one hand the protégé of the cousin of their leader, and on the other hand incompetent. Refusing to be a party to the job, Bernhardi secures the election to the post of a man who is both competent and a Jew. Bernhardi, moreover, relies on the personal assurance of Flint, the Minister for Education and Public Worship, that he will help him by his support in Parliament. When, however, matters came to a head, Flint, scenting in the middle of his speech with the divine flair of the true politician the actual state of public opinion, throws Bernhardi to the wolves and himself suggests a prosecution for sacrilege. The Executive Board of the hospital are divided as to what course they shall pursue. Shall they pass a vote of confidence in their chief, or, on the other hand, suspend him until the determination of the proceedings. By a fine stroke of irony Bernhardi realises that he will be in a minority through the vote of the very Jew through the conscientious insistence on whose election to the Board he had lost the proffered opportunity of bribing the Clericals and squaring the whole matter. He consequently resigns from the Board. The trial takes place. The priest himself denies that there was any assault. Bernhardi, however, is defended by a converted Jew, who, sinking the advocate in the Catholic, conducts the case so lukewarmly that Bernhardi is convicted on the perjured evidence of a vindictive colleague and a hysterical lay sister. During the trial the priest is convinced that Bernhardi was morally right in the course which he adopted, but, as he feels subsequently driven as a matter of conscience to inform him, refrained out of sheer religious duty from telling the truth. Bernhardi serves his term and becomes, much to his disgust, a political hero and a popular martyr. The hysterical lay sister eventually confesses her perjury and Bernhardi is finally righted, though the final note in the play is that Bernhardi was really rather a fool to have involved himself in such grave consequences for the mere sake of a quixotic principle. Some portion possibly of the effect produced by this play depends on the full appreciation of its personal allusions and some knowledge of the circumstances on which it was substantially founded. Nevertheless, present symptoms would appear to indicate that this play will have especial interest, not only to Jews and Anti-Semites, but to impartial students of ethics and sociology. Though, moreover, "pure problem" and studded with long didactical speeches, the dramatic interest is well sustained, at any rate up to the fourth Act, while the different characters are distinguished with the sharpest precision. We would refer in particular to Flint, that delightfully bland opportunist, that benevolently unscrupulous politician, that perfectly conscientious hypocrite who honestly believes that there is a higher and larger duty both in politics and in life than the observance of one's own principles and the keeping of one's given word.
Schnitzler, moreover, is not only a dramatist, but a writer of short stories and novels, which stand on practically as high a level as his plays. Like De Maupassant, Schnitzler has only one real motif. Unlike De Maupassant, however, it is the psychological complications in which he is chiefly interested. In further contrast, his short stories lack that inevitable precision of climax which is the chief mark of the French author. Yet perhaps it is for this very reason that, with their picturesque atmosphere and pathetic simplicity, they obtain an added reality. In the almost clinical minuteness of his psychology, explicable from the fact that he was once a doctor, he is reminiscent of Mr. Henry James, of a Mr. James, however, who writes without preciosity about individuals linked with ordinary human beings by very much more than just some shred of normality. Among his earlier short stories we would mention in particular Die Frau der Weisen, Das neue Lied, and the hypnotic fantasia at the beginning of Dämmerseelen.
The more recent series, Masken und Wunder, also possesses a well-merited claim to recognition for its series of studies, some modern, some symbolical, yet all written with that almost intangible softness, combined at the same time with a certain neat strength, which is the essential mark of Schnitzler's literary style. One of the most striking is the telepathic romance, Redegonda's Diary; but in our view the best short story in the whole book is that Maupassantian Death of the Bachelor where the three intimate friends of a dead man are summoned to his bedside, only to find their friend dead and to read in a letter addressed to them all, of the three separate yet identical domestic reasons which were responsible for their participation in this superb piece of posthumous buffoonery.
Far more significant than any of his short stories is Schnitzler's comparatively recent novel, Der Weg ins Freie (The Road to the Open), a novel which both by its actual success and its intrinsic merit, stands out conspicuously among modern German literature. This book is an admirable example of what one can perhaps call the "slice of life" novel. Actual plot in the stereotyped sense of the term it has none. Georg von Wergenthin, a young aristocratic Viennese dilettante, has, in the course of an active emotional life, a fairly serious liaison with Anna Rosner, a music-mistress belonging to a good Jewish set. The child to which Anna and Georg had both been looking forward, though in somewhat varying degrees, dies. Georg accepts a post of conductor in a German town. Anna reassumes the normal tenor of her spinster life. Finis. Neither conventional marriage nor even more conventional suicide, but just life, a slice of sheer probable real convincing life. But the book is far more than the history of Anna, and far more than the history of Georg, even though it would appear at first sight that the enumeration of Georg's emotions tends somewhat to swamp the four hundred and sixty pages of this novel which yet reads so shortly. For Georg's soul is a mirror which reflects not only itself but a considerable number of the more interesting characters of a specific modern Viennese set. And the lives of Anna and Georg touch the lives of numerous other persons, persons too who, at any rate, give the impression of being no mere characters in novels, but of having been honourably plagiarised, and without suffering either caricature or idealisation in the process, from the pages of the book of life itself. And all these various lives are followed up and adumbrated and described at greater or lesser detail. Of course they have nothing to do with the story of Georg von Wergenthin. But they play an important part in the life of Georg von Wergenthin, just as he plays a more or less important part in their existence. And though of course Georg is the nominal hero of the book, it is the modern Jewish set with, of course, its Gentile appanages which constitutes the real subject-matter. And how vivid and interesting on their merits are all these characters—old Ehrenberg, the Jewish millionaire, with his delightful habit of talking Yiddish before smart company, specially to annoy his snobbish son Oskar; Oskar himself, who, on being caught by his father in the flagrant act of posing as a Catholic in front of a church and given a box on the ears by way of reproof, makes an abortive attempt to commit hara-kiri with a revolver; Else Ehrenberg, the temperamental, but unmarried sister of Oskar; Heinrich Bermann, the brilliant self-centred author, with his grand passion for his faithless actress in the foreign town; Leo Golowski, the enthusiastic Zionist; Therese Golowski, the Socialist agitatress, with her temporary trip with that fascinating hussar-officer, Demeter Stanzides; Winternitz, the poet, with his not very soigné hands and his naïf mania for reciting his own erotic verses; Dr. Stauber, the benevolent modern of the last generation; Anna herself, with her soft wistfulness and her essential dignity; Sissy Wyner, with her high wanton spirits and pretty English accent; and of course Georg himself, Georg the aristocrat, Georg the grand amoureux, Georg the composer, Georg the dilettante, Georg the drifter, Georg the ineffectual.
In the technique of this novel Schnitzler marks what we suggest to be a new departure, by the insertion of substantial slabs of past life into the analysis of his hero's thoughts, a process which by a tremendous economy of space and time thus describes simultaneously the inner workings of Georg's mind, and simultaneously narrates important pieces of antecedent history which have no place in the official action of the novel.
Some tribute, also, must be paid to the style, which is at times soft and sweet, at times light and crisp, yet always lucid, always individual, and always possessed of that gracefulness which is so rare a quality in German prose literature.