eaves the most agreeable taste in the mouth. It
gives us a concrete embodiment of the tolerance toward all life that is
merely suggested by the closing sentences of _Dr. Schindler_ in the
last act of "The Call of Life." It brings back the gay spirit of
"Anatol," but with a rare maturity supporting it. The simple
socio-biological philosophy of "Change Partners!" is restated without
the needless naturalism of those early dialogues. The idea of "Countess
Mizzie" is that, if we look deep enough, all social distinctions are
lost in a universal human kinship. On the surface we appear like
flowers neatly arranged in a bed, each kind in its separate and
carefully labeled corner. Then Schnitzler begins to scrape off the
screening earth, and underneath we find the roots of all those flowers
intertwined and matted, so that it is impossible to tell which belong
to the _Count_ and which to _Wasner_, the coachman, which to _Miss
Lolo_, the ballet-dancer, and which to the _Countess_.

"Young Medardus" is Schnitzler's most ambitious attempt at historical
playwriting. It seems to indicate that he belongs too wholly in the
present age to succeed in that direction. The play takes us back to
1809, when Napoleon appeared a second time outside the gates of Vienna.
The central character, _Medardus Klaehr_, is said to be historical. The
re-created atmosphere of old Vienna is at once convincing and amusing.
But the play is too sprawling, too scattered, to get firm hold on the
reader. There are seventy-four specifically indicated characters, not
to mention groups of dumb figures. And while the title page speaks of
five acts and a prologue, there are in reality seventeen distinct
scenes. Each scene may be dramatically valuable, but the constant
passage from place to place, from one set of characters to another, has
a confusing effect.

There is, too, a more deep-lying reason for the failure of the play as
a whole, I think. The ironical outlook so dear to Schnitzler--or
rather, so inseparable from his temperament--has betrayed him. Irony
seems hopelessly out of place in a historical drama, where it tends to
make us feel that the author does not believe in the actual existence
of his own characters. I have a suspicion that "Young Medardus" takes
the place within the production of Schnitzler that is held by "Peer
Gynt" in the production of Ibsen--that _Medardus Klaehr_ is meant to
satirize the Viennese character as _Peer Gynt_ satirizes the Norwegi