An Austrian dance of death. For this race, if it has not completely succumbed to these recent years of madness and degradation, has sought refuge in exclusiveness and retirement; it is not equipped for resistance, not vulgar and brutal enough to exist in this ruined humanity of humanity's ruin. They are men who have more brain than biceps, more nerves than heart, with a perfect grace of bearing, and of so fine a charm in their manner and their wit that one finds them the best of company. The people of Arthur Schnitzler.
At least, those of the first importance, those in the foreground. Those farther back are more robust, contented bourgeois natures, artists at tennis, eccentrics, strivers, episodists of life, often hardly more than foils and glosses, or even theses. But though the poet has frequently put them in his work to attain some contrast, for the characterization of a social sphere, or as one of the cogs in his plot-processes, they, too, stand out with such pronounced vividness that they really become part of our lives. Thenceforth they belong to our "personal acquaintances"; we think of them and can speak of them as though they were actually alive. There are not many writers whose characters, quite apart from what they have to say to us, fill space with such substantiality and such a convincing sense of life, and live their present so forcefully before us, or with us. Not merely within the frame. Their past and their future is perfectly plain to us, without any direct statements having been made on these points. One often gets the impression that they lead their own lives above and beyond the will of their creator, and not always as he had intended. (Schnitzler himself has expressed this feeling in his wonderfully clever grotesquerie, Vom Grossen Wurstel.) But they are always rich with reality, not inventions of the closet, living beings of the most pronounced definiteness of character, and with every contradiction, lacuna, and quirk of the human soul.
His landscape: Vienna and the Vienna Forest; I had almost said the Vienna of Hero and Leander, there is such a waft of innocent passion and tender sensuality in this atmosphere. Moreover, there are only parts of Vienna which live in Schnitzler's work: the green suburbs, the slopes of the Kahlenberg, the vineyards of Grinzing, the woods of the Sofienalpe, and the silent Sommenheidenweg leading from the old yellowish villas across the hills into lovely lonely places. Otherwise only the "inner Vienna" is the scene of Schnitzler's works; not the workers' quarter and the business section, the noisy markets and the banks, but the old distinguished streets with
