the principal characters of the play typifying the
artistic temperament, with its unhuman disregards of the relationships
that have primary importance to other men. Its gross egoism, as
exemplified by _Julian_, is the object of passionate derision. And yet
it is a man of that kind, _Sala_, who recognizes and points out the
truer path, when he say: "To love is to live for somebody else."

The play has no thesis, as I have already said. It is not poised on the
point of a single idea. Numerous subordinate themes are woven into the
main one, giving the texture of the whole a richness resembling that of
life itself. Woman's craving for experience and self-determination is
one such theme, which we shall find again in "Intermezzo," where it
practically becomes the dominant one.

Another one is that fascinated stare at death which is so
characteristic of Latin and Slav writers--of men like Zola, Maupassant,
and Tolstoy--while it is significantly absent in the great Scandinavian
and Anglo-Saxon poets. "Is there ever a blissful moment in any decent
man's life, when he can think of anything but death in his innermost
soul?" says _Sala_. The same thought is expressed in varying forms by
one after another of Schnitzler's characters. "All sorrow is a lie as
long as the open grave is not your own," cries the dying _Catharine_ in
"The Call of Life." It is in this connection particularly that we of
the North must bear in mind Schnitzler's Viennese background and the
Latin traditions forming such a conspicuous part of it. The Latin
peoples have shown that they can die as bravely as the men of any other
race or clime, but their attitude toward death in general is widely
different from the attitude illustrated by Ibsen or Strindberg, for
instance. A certain gloom, having kinship with death, seems ingrained
in the Northern temperament, put there probably by the pressure of the
Northern winter. The man of the sunlit South, on the other hand, seems
always to retain the child's simple horror at the thought that darkness
must follow light. We had better not regard it as cowardice under any
circumstances, and cowardice it can certainly not be called in the
characters of Schnitzler. But the resignation in which he finds his
only antidote, and which seems to represent his nearest approach to a
formulated philosophy, cannot be expected to satisfy us. One of his own
countrymen, Hermann Bahr, has protested sharply against its
insufficiency as a sou