fied by a
partisan press, is serious. A great lady, an archduchess, refuses to
head the list of the Elizabethinum annual charity ball. She also snubs
the wife of an aristocratic doctor. The politicians make fuel for
their furnace, and presently the institution finds itself facing a
grave deficit, perhaps ruin, for the minister of instruction does not
favour further subventions, though he is a school friend of Bernhardi;
worse follows, the board of directors is split, some of its Jewish
members going so far as to say that Bernhardi should not have refused
the consolations of religion to the dying. Wasn't the Elizabethinum
Roman Catholic, after all?

There can be no doubt that the reason Arthur Schnitzler enjoyed
handling the difficulties of such a theme is because his father was a
well-known laryngologist of the University of Vienna, and he himself
studied medicine and was an assistant doctor from 1886 to 1888 in the
principal hospital of Vienna. With his father he helped to write a
book entitled: The Clinical Atlas of Laryngology (1895). Hence his
opportunity of studying the various types of Viennese professors in a
little world must have been excellent. The veracity of his characters
seems unimpeachable. There are all kinds of Jews--in Europe there is
no such false sensitiveness if a Jewish type is portrayed on the
boards, so long as it is not offensive; for example, there is the Jew
who believes himself the victim of anti-Semitism, and, while the
dramatist makes him "sympathetic," nevertheless he is funny with his
mania of persecution. Then there is Doctor Goldberg, the lawyer, the
counsel for Professor Bernhardi, in the prosecution case for insulting
religion. He sends his boy to a Catholic college, his wife has
Christian friends, and in his zeal not to seem friendly to Bernhardi,
he loses the case. There are several others, all carefully sketched
and with a certain wit that proves Schnitzler is as fair to his
coreligionists as to the Gentiles. Let me hasten to add that there is
nothing that would cause offence to either race throughout the piece.
Its banning in Austria is therefore a mystery to me, as it must have
been to the author.

What is more serious is the absence of marked dramatic movement in the
play. It reads much like a short story made long in its dramatic garb.
Fancy a play all men, chiefly bewhiskered; one woman in Act I, and
only for ten minutes; fairly long-winded arguments for and against the
eth