Dear Gustav—I have a great piece of news to tell you. My wife returned to me yesterday, and at my earnest solicitation. I thought I could no longer live with her, but I find it equally impossible to live without her. I have just discovered that she too was very unhappy during the time of our separation, but she would never have acknowledged it, for her’s is the stronger character of the two. I do not know how to explain the miracle, but we love each other more dearly than ever. We are celebrating a new honeymoon. The great questions of life drove us apart, but is it only the little ones which have reunited us? Would you suppose that one could find a half-desiccated heart in the pocket of an old fur coat? The stately edifice of my worldly knowledge totters on its foundations, dear Gustav. I have a great deal to unlearn.
Max.
THE DEAD ARE SILENT
BY ARTHUR SCHNITZLER
This Viennese dramatist, whose status as an author is still in the balance, was born in 1862. He studied medicine at the University of Vienna and afterward assisted his father at the Vienna General Polytechnic. At his father’s death, in 1893, he gave up medicine as a profession and began his literary career with a volume of poems.
Schnitzler has the dramatic feeling in all that he writes—from his earliest poems, through his short stories, to his dramas proper, one of the most popular of which, “The Green Parrot,” was acted in French with great success at the Théâtre Antoine in Paris in 1907. Of his novels, one of the latest is “Lieutenant Gustl,” published in 1900. His talent, however, is not yet formed—it is in a tentative state, grotesque, realistic, sentimental—but it will not remain so long, if it can produce many more such admirable stories as “The Dead Are Silent.”
THE DEAD ARE SILENT
BY ARTHUR SCHNITZLER