Page:The Dial (Volume 75).djvu/713

Rh curiosity stirs you who a moment ago sought death, to discover whose lips touch the pipe from which those sounds rise

There is no co-operation between the writer and his characters. The second paragraph is distressing in its expatiation; the reader knows what Erasmus tells Dionysia before he tells it; he is a martyr to a curious sort of reality (for it is undeniably reality) a vividness of such sort as to defy analysis even as it defys synthesis. That much may be said in defence of one who needs no defence. It is his privilege to indulge in the obvious, and his power is unimpaired by weakness which would well-nigh wreck another writer.

Keen wit, linked to this indescribable and inimitable gift, can well save Schnitzler. His stories are not good; the disjointed and rather clumsily contrived wanderings of Dionysia, the trivially incidental tale of The Murderer, the petty affair of the blind brother, are neither clever nor compelling. Oddly enough, it takes a good deal of thought to realize this. They are written in such a way that they become tremendously important. Dionysia as the symbol of Woman—she is highly Viennese in her capacity for adultery—is conducted through assorted aspects of life with a cleverness which actually fascinates; it is the sort of amazing skill which one is conscious of in a marksman who can spin quarters with one hand and put revolver bullets into them with the other, it is hopelessly inimitable. The ordinary observer cannot escape a reverent admiration for Schnitzler.

Chiefly it is his absolute command of the art of making reality which places him surely in the ambiguous class called geniuses. That is no matter of voluminous and insanely accurate note books of a Goncourt; it results only in truth to life, a not over interesting thing in many cases. Schnitzler's characters are not copies of actual types, they are actual types. Alfred in The Murderer is nothing more than an amazingly intricate psychological study; he doesn't exist. But Schnitzler creates him much in the manner of God creating Adam; he breathes on the dust. It does not at all matter that Alfred is an impossible character in trivial circumstances; he is made not only possible, but probable and even necessary, and what he does becomes of the highest importance, all by a mere act of arbitrary creation on the author's part. This is very difficult to explain if it can be explained at all; it doesn't happen once in a hun-