noeuvrings of the puppets, clever segments of life with the strangest points of intersection among the lines of fate; there is the wealth of a skilled narrator who both arranges and simplifies, even though he may seem to add complications again afterwards. I do not overlook any of this; by no means, and least of all in a critical summary. But it does not constitute the major portion of his value, although it is one of his potent charms.
His world: the wide land of the soil. Certainly not merely that world in which people are not bored, nor merely the monde—for this belongs to the periphery of his nature rather than to its centre. That, again, is not the important matter. Not the world of society, not these environs of the soul. The important matter is the man who passes through this world, the man who rests above it, the eye which focuses upon it, the hand which forms it, the agent which widens our knowledge of ourselves and makes us feel that here, in the portrayal of people who perhaps concern us very little, a world is being treated which may not be strictly ours—or is no longer ours—but which is our affair. And nothing but our affair. Mea res . . . that is what Schnitzler has done. He has widened our knowledge of ourselves. Even in scenes of the renaissance when he is having daggers drawn for us, and drinking done out of poisoned goblets, and human bodies mutilated. Even when a mediaeval doctor accomplishes marvels of hypnosis, or when play and reality, comic intrigue and bloody truth are intermingled, while the Revolution goes on and the Bastille is stormed. Our affair. That is his value. That he has brought the most hidden emotions to the light, elements which were not previously in our consciousness; and that he has done all this more delicately than it was ever done before. That he, even in apparently negligible subjects, has always released new visions, glimpses into the spiritual, into the eternally human, into the eternally animal. That he has given us revaluations, seen new details of importance, unmasked nullities, discovered new correlations of life, and displayed the delicate workings of fate's blunt comedies. That he needs no symbols to give a meaning to life; nor does he need "messages," although he does frequently concern himself with such things, and then often constructs rather than forms. Simplifier: inasmuch as he is a poet. And a man who speaks to us of today, even when he is speaking of people who belong to yesterday.
