men of somewhat indeterminate social setting with their wives or casual mistresses . . . such are the people who unveil for us by turns their inner life, their aspirations, egoisms, and resignations. And the language in which they do this, with a few humorous exceptions, is highly cultivated and delicately equipped; it has the brilliancy, the richness of clever formulae, which is the property of this distinct social group. Group . . . I could not speak of it as a clique, for this word has a depreciative connotation, while class or caste would be too broad; we are dealing with a distinct social nuance which is at the same time a mental nuance, and which will remain very characteristic of the time between 1890 and the great war. Later, perhaps, it will be called simply Schnitzler’s Vienna, just as a certain society at the time of Louis Philippe is Balzac's Paris, although this is not quite identical with its real existence.
But now I return to the broad main current of Viennese theatrical tradition. Its strength lay in the fact that it excluded no social element, and spread out a world in all colours of the rainbow. This is a world like Shakespeare's or Calderon's, containing the highest element, the king, or even beyond him to saints, angels, and fairies, along with burlesqued manual labourers, ass-drivers, cooks, and litter-bearers. I recall the essay on the theatre in which twenty or more years ago W. B. Yeats, together with Lady Gregory and J. M. Synge, laid out the field for the Irish National Dramatic Company. He was concerned above all with the idea of a theatre which would appeal to the uneducated, or in other words to those who would take in a drama by means of a sensuously receptive imagination, rather than by the intelligence. This makes me suddenly realize what a wealth we have had in our centuries of the people’s theatre.
"The audiences of Sophocles and of Shakespeare and of Calderon [Yeats says] were not unlike the audiences I have heard listening in Irish cabins to songs in Gaelic about 'an old poet telling his sins,' and about 'the five young men who were drowned last year' and about 'the lovers that were drowned going to America.' . . . We must [he goes on to say] make a theatre for ourselves and our friends, and for a few simple people who understand from sheer simplicity what we understand from scholarship and thought."
In Vienna there has never been an actual complete break between the theatre of the educated and the theatre of the uneducated; and
