The Lonely Way—Intermezzo—Countess Mizzie. Arthur Schnitzler
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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 Klähr, 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 Klähr is meant to satirize the Viennese character as Peer Gynt satirizes the Norwegian.
The keynote of the play may be found in the words of Etzelt, spoken as Medardus is about to be shot, after having refused to save his own life by a promise not to make any attempts against Napoleon's: "God wanted to make a hero of him, and the course of events turned him into a fool." The obvious interpretation is that the pettiness of Viennese conditions defeated the larger aspirations of the man, who would have proved true to his own possibilities in other surroundings. A more careful analysis of the plot shows, however, that what turns the ambitions of Medardus into dreams and words is his susceptibility to the charms of a woman. Once within the magic circle of her power, everything else—the danger of his country, the death of his sister, his duty to avenge the death of his father—becomes secondary to his passion. And each time he tries to rise above that passion, the reappearance of the woman is sufficient to deflect him from his purpose. It is as if Schnitzler wanted to suggest that the greatest weakness of the Viennese character lies in its sensuous concern with sex to the detriment of all other vital interests. To me it is a very remarkable thing to think that such a play was performed a large number of times at one of the foremost theaters in Vienna, and that, apparently, it received a very respectful hearing. I cannot but wonder what would happen here, if a play were put on the stage dealing in a similar spirit with the American character.
"The soul is a vast country, where many different things find place side by side," says Dr. Theodor Reik in his interesting volume named "Arthur Schnitzler als Psycholog" (Minden, 1913). Thus he explains the meaning of the title given to "The Vast Country" (Das Weite Land). And I don't think it is possible to get closer than that. Nowhere has Schnitzler been more casual in his use of what is commonly called plot. Nowhere has he scorned more completely to build his work around any particular "red thread." Event follows event with seeming haphazardness. The only thing that keeps the play from falling apart is the logical development of each character. It is, in fact, principally, if not exclusively, a series of soul-studies. What happens serves merely as an excuse to reveal the reaction of a certain character to certain external pressures or internal promptings. But viewed in this light, the play has tremendous power and significance.
Dr. Reik's book, to which I just referred, has been written to prove the direct connection between Schnitzler's art and the new psychology established by Dr. Sigmund Freud of Vienna. That the playwright must have studied the Freudian theories seems more than probable. That they may have influenced him seems also probable. And that this influence may have helped him to a clearer grasp of more than one mystery within the human soul, I am willing to grant also. What I want to protest against, is the attempt to make him out an exponent of any particular scientific theory. He is an observer of all life. He is what Amadeus in "Intermezzo" ironically charges Albert Rhon with being: "a student of the human soul." And he has undoubtedly availed himself of every new aid that might be offered for the analysis and interpretation of that soul. The importance of man's sub-conscious life seems to have been clear to him in the early days of "Anatol," and it seems to have grown on him as he matured. Another Freudian conception he has also made his own—that of the close connection between man's sexual life and vital phenomena not clearly designed for the expression of that life. But—to return to the point I have already tried to make—it would be dangerous and unjust to read any work of his as the dramatic effort of a scientific theorizer.
Schnitzler is of Jewish race. In Vienna that means a great deal more than in London, Stockholm or New York. It means an atmosphere of contempt, of suspicion, of hatred. It means frequently complete isolation, and always some isolation. It means a constant sense of conflict between oneself and one's surroundings. All these things are reflected in the works of Schnitzler—more particularly the sense of conflict and of isolation. Life itself is blamed for it most of the time, however, and it is only once in a great while that the specific and localized cause is referred to—as in "Literature," for instance. And even when Schnitzler undertakes, as he has done in his latest play, "Professor Bernhardi," to deal directly with the situation of the Jew within a community with strong anti-Semitic tendencies, he does not appear able to keep his mind fixed on that particular issue. He starts to discuss it, and does so with a clearness and fairness that have not been equaled since the days of Lessing—and then he drifts off in a new direction. The mutual opposition between Jews and Catholics becomes an opposition between the skeptical and the mystical temperaments. It is as if he wanted to say that all differences are unreal except those between individuals as such. And if that be his intention, he is right, I believe, and his play is the greater for bringing that thought home to us.
The play is a remarkable one in many respects. It deals largely with the internal affairs of a hospital. An overwhelming majority of the characters are physicians connected with the big hospital of which Professor Bernhardi is the head. They talk of nothing but what men of that profession in such a position would be likely to talk of. In other words, they are all the time "talking shop." This goes on through five acts. Throughout the entire play there is not the slightest suggestion of what the Broadway manager and the periodical editor call a "love interest." And yet the play holds you from beginning to end, and the dramatic tension could not be greater if its main theme were the unrequited love of the professor's son instead of his own right to place his duties as a physician above all other considerations. To one who has grown soul-weary of the "triangle" and all other combinations for the exploiting of illicit or legitimized love, "Professor Bernhardi" should come as a great relief and a bright promise.
These are the main outlines of Schnitzler's work as a dramatist. They indicate a constant, steady growth, coupled with increased realization of his own possibilities and powers as well as of his limitations. In all but a very few of his plays, he has confined himself to the life immediately surrounding him—to the life of the Viennese middle class, and more particularly of the professional element to which he himself belongs. But on the basis of a wonderfully faithful portrayal of local characters and conditions, he has managed to rear a superstructure of emotional appeal and intellectual clarification that must render his work welcome to thinking men and women wherever it be introduced. And as he is still in the flower of his manhood, it seems reasonable to expect that still greater things may be forthcoming from his pen.
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