The long line of his dramas, novels, and novelettes—for he tried to express himself in all these forms—all speak of love and death. For the pathetic element soon creeps into Anatol’s frivolousness. The presentiment of the transitory dwells in his creation—the end of love, the end of enjoyment and of passion, the end of life itself. But this permanent thought of death, not searching beyond the limits of this earth, gives a new intensity to the enjoyment of this life while it lasts. This feeling for life, for the simple joy of breathing, of seeing the spring once more, is one of Schnitzler’s most elementary conceptions. You may look at any of his plays and find this true—the call of Life, expressed with the utmost intensity. A young girl hears the call of life—she is fettered to the bedside of her ill father who never lets her out of his sight. She must stay with him—always—without the smallest pleasure, and suddenly she hears that the man she loves, a young officer whom she has seen only once, when she has danced in his arms a whole night long, must away to the war never to return. She can stand it no longer; she gives her father poison, the whole sleeping potion, and rushes away to him who is her only thought. And now events go in a mad rush; she in his room, unknown to himself, hidden behind a curtain, she sees the woman he loves, the beautiful wife of his colonel, come to him. She wants him to stay away from the war, save his life for her sake, and then suddenly the colonel stands between the two and shoots down his wife. The officer he leaves to judge himself. Over the corpse of the other woman the girl rushes into the arms of the man, who can belong to her for the few hours left to him. And after all these breathless events, she remains alone, bewildered, as if after a heavy dream. She lives on and cannot understand that there is still room for her in the world, with all her crime and grief and joy. But a wise and kind friend explains the connection and wins her over to life once more. These are his words—the drama’s conclusion: “You live, Marie, and it was. Since that night too and that morning, the days and nights go on for you. You walk through field and meadow. You pluck the wayside flowers and you talk with me here under the bright, friendly, midday sky. And this is living—not less than it was on that night when your darkened youth beckoned you toward gloomy adventures, which still today appear to you to be the last word of your being. And who knows, if later, much later, on a day like today, the call of the living will not cry within you much deeper, and purer, than on that day in which you have lived through things which are called by such terrible and glowing names as murder and love.”
The whole play seems to be written for the sake of the last beautiful words. It is Schnitzler’s greatest art to lift us to a sphere where everything seemingly important is solved, where tragedy and melancholy and sadness melt together into a wonderful serenity. His technique is full of subtlety; every little word and gesture has its place, its importance; we feel the weight of the smallest happening, the reality of a seemingly unmeaning fact, the deep consequence of a hasty word.
The milieu was nearly always Vienna. Here his over-cultivated, refined men were at home, here his soft and loving women. All the several circles, aristocrats, artists, physicians, business men, furnished material for his work; and even more than the people, the town itself grew to life. The elegant vivaciousness of the inner city, where the fashionable society meets at certain hours and fashionable little shops line the streets, the lonely little streets of the suburb, the wonderful charm of the Wiener Wald embracing the town with its soft rounded lines—all this rich flowering beauty that had surrounded him from childhood he gathered in his work. Perhaps more forcibly than any one else he brought Vienna’s charm to our consciousness. And so he returned to Vienna what he had received from her.
Only two of his plays are outside the Viennese milieu—The Green Cockatoo, a grotesque that puts us marvelously well in the Parisian atmosphere shortly before the outbreak of the French Revolution; and Beatrice’s Veil, a Renaissance drama which tempted almost every artist in those days. This epoch’s refinement, the powerful personalities peopling it, the intensity concentrated on the enjoyment of their life—in all this they saw something akin to their own life’s ideal.
Schnitzler’s plays have nothing of the fresco; they are more like Manet’s small landscapes with their richness of color and their soft contours diffused in light.
He made one attempt at a drama in big, unusually big, dimensions. It takes about six hours to perform on the stage, longer than the second part of Goethe’s Faust; it is a historic play of the Napoleonic time called The Young Medardus, but the Emperor himself remains in the background and only his shadow lies on the events. These take place in Vienna at the time that Napoleon had reached Austria on his triumphal march and resided for the time in Schonbrun, the Hapsburg’s castle near Vienna. The Viennese people as a mass are characterized—these people so easily moved, so easily influenced, growing enthusiastic now for Napoleon, now in a hasty patriotic emotion for their own Emperor, principally wanting one thing: to see some exciting spectacle, to hear news, to speak over interesting happenings. The broadest part of the drama is occupied by a love episode between the hero Medardus—a cousin, if not a brother of Anatol, only about a hundred years back—and the beautiful, proud, cold Duchess of Valois, who is in Vienna to intrigue against Napoleon, claiming the right to the French throne for herself and her own family. The work is full of beautiful and interesting episodes, but there is not enough architectonic power to join them together to a unity.
It is too early to view Schnitzler in a historic way—he is fifty years old and in the middle of his work; certainly he signified much for his own generation, for they felt themselves understood by him and he influenced and even formed their attitude and feeling. Whether his figures have enough of the timelessness, of the deep, full-rounded humanity which will give them power to speak to future generations I do not know. In a mood of paradoxical humor, Schnitzler himself criticised his own creation more severely than any critic could. We see a marionettes’ theater on the stage; the public there, eager for the play; the marionettes appear—all Schnitzler’s own figures: the complicated hero, the sweet girl, the demonic woman, and so on. The poet is there, full of excitement. The marionettes are to give his new play, but there is a rebellion. The marionettes want to do what pleases them, live their own life. In the midst of confusion, a mysterious man appears on the stage with a long naked sword in his hand; he cuts through the threads; the marionettes fall in a heap. The poet asks, half grateful, half bewildered, “Who are you?” But the unknown man cannot tell him; he is an enigma to himself. He wanders through the world and his sword makes it apparent who only is a doll, who a man. Schnitzler doomed his figures with more severity to the fate of dolls than is due them.
The second Viennese writer whose name became known beyond the town’s limits is Hugo von Hofmannsthal. He is a very different person from Schnitzler; both have the sensitive, refined, exclusively aesthetic valuation of things in common. But what was expressed more naively in Schnitzler came to be a program with Hofmannsthal. He joined a group of men with a strict “Art for Art’s sake” program, exclusive and intended only for the few. The principal of this group was Stefan George, a lyric poet who had fashioned the German language into poems of such beauty of form as to rival the poetry of the French lyricists, like Baudelaire or Verlaine. It was an art that irritated people somewhat, like that of the Cubists and Futurists. It was extremely hard to understand; the sense organs were mixed up, as he spoke of sounding colors, fragrant tones, and colored sounds. Hofmannsthal, with a great feeling for language and form, grew to be his follower.
These poets called themselves Neo-Romanticists, because their art was crowded full of symbols. The older Ibsen, with his symbolic world, Maeterlinck, with his mysterious little plays, were their models; with these the great artists of form, Swinburne and d’Annunzio. It was an eclectic, much-traveled type, assimilating old and modern cultures equally well.
Hugo von Hofmannsthal is characteristic of the type of the aesthete, with a rather priestly, exclusive bearing still found today frequently in Germany. These were no more the old Bohemians with a preference for a deranged toilette and way of living, but elegant young gentlemen who liked to appear in frock coats with ties and waistcoats fabulously gay of color. Also, in their surroundings their liking went to the utmost refinement and luxury. They loved the dignified, the sensational, the sonorous. Hugo von Hofmannsthal certainly blessed his parents for giving him a well-sounding, sonorous name.