Page:Prophets of dissent essays on Maeterlinck, Strindberg, Nietzsche and Tolstoy (1918).djvu/35

Rh Arthur Schnitzler's characters, — that death is the only subject in life worthy of being pondered by the serious mind. "From our death onwards," so he puts it somewhere, "the adventure of the universe becomes our own adventure."

It will be useful to have a bit of personal information concerning our author. He started his active career as a barrister; not by any means auspiciously, it seems, for already in his twenty-seventh year he laid the toga aside. Experience had convinced him that in the forum there were no laurels for him to pluck. The specific qualities that make for success at the bar were conspicuously lacking in his make-up. Far from being eloquent, he has at all times been noted for an unparalleled proficiency in the art of self-defensive silence. He shuns banal conversation and the sterile distractions of promiscuous social intercourse, dreads the hubbub of the city, and has an intense dislike for travel, to which he resorts only as a last means of escape from interviewers, reporters, and admirers. Maeterlinck, it is seen, is anything but multorum vir hominum. In order to preserve intact his love of humanity, he finds it expedient to live for the most part by himself,