urs" (_Liebelei_) may be regarded as a cross, or a compromise,
between "Anatol" and "A Piece of Fiction." The crudeness of speech
marking the latter play has given room to a very incisive dialogue,
that carries the action forward with unfailing precision. Some of the
temporarily dropped charm has been recovered, and the gain in sincerity
has been preserved. "Amours" seems to be the first one of a series of
plays dealing with the reverse of the gay picture presented in
"Anatol." A young man is having a love affair with two women at the
same time, one of them married, the other one a young girl with scant
knowledge of the world. Yet she knows enough to know what she is doing,
and she has sufficient strength of mind to rise above a sense of guilt,
though she is more prone to be the victim of fear. Then the married
woman's husband challenges the young man, who is killed. And the girl
takes her own life, not because her lover is dead, not because of
anything she has done, but because his death for the sake of another
woman renders her own faith in him meaningless.

"Outside the Game Laws" (_Freiwild_) is another step ahead--the first
play, I think, where the real Arthur Schnitzler, the author of "The
Lonely Way" and "Countess Mizzie," reveals himself. It has a thesis,
but this is implied rather than obtruded. In style and character-drawing
it is realistic in the best sense. It shows already the typical
Schnitzlerian tendency of dealing with serious questions--with questions
of life and death--in a casual fashion, as if they were but problems of
which road to follow or which shop to enter. It has one fault that must
appear as such everywhere, namely, a division of purpose. When the play
starts, one imagines that those "outside the game laws" are the women of
the stage, who are presented as the legitimate prey of any man caring to
hunt them. As the play goes on, that starting point is almost lost sight
of, and it becomes more and more plain that those "outside the game
laws" are sensible, decent men who refuse to submit to the silly
dictates of the dueling code. But what I have thus named a fault is
mostly theoretical, and does not mar the effective appeal of the play.
What must appear as a more serious shortcoming from an American
viewpoint is the local nature of the evil attacked, which lessens the
universal validity of the work.

"Change Partners!" (_Reigen_) was produced about the same time as
"Outside the Game Laws," but