box 24/5
Le
19. Der Ruf (eS
tecae ShdengAhAn
S
eaGaires erursenee TTrüser-aussemauTreDao
BERLIN SO 16, RUNGESTRASSE 22-24
ns
l
Aussdiitt aus der Nummer vom: 477/210
Drama
Vita Brevis
THAT Schnitzier'’s highly interesting play,“ The Call of Life“
(Comedy Theater), is one of its author’s,earlier efforts is
revealed by something more than that unnatural heightening of
its colors which betrays the exuberance of an undisciplined
imagination. Its very theme—the brevity of life and the sin of
wasting one of its fleeting moments—is a theme which youth
would choose, for it is not toward the end, when ardor has cooled
and experience has taught how many promises go unfulfilled,
that life seems most precious but rather at the beginning when
every knock at the door seems to herald some unknown and de¬
lightful visitor. Thus it is that death seems closest to those
from whom it is in reality farthest away, and thus that old men
with only a year or two to live contentedly doze the months
away while youths agoni over a summer lost as though there
were not countless sumers yet to come. The Schnitzler who
wrote“ The Call of Life' had not yet arrived at the conviction,
so plainly expressed in later plays, that existence is a game
played against an antagonist who always wins and whose name
is Boredom; rather was he one who did not as yet know life
well encugh to picture it in a manner wholly convincing but who,
perhaps because of that imperfect knowledge, was able to ex¬
press his passionate conviction that the bitterest of all thoughts
is the thought that one may be deprived of the opportunity of
knowing it. The sentence, uttered by one in the grip of such a
fear, which gives the key to the emotion of the piece is this:
*Only those who have much to remember lie quietly in their
graves'; and it is plainly the utterance of a man who possessed
the two qualities which make life seem most precious. He was
young and he was an artist.
The first act of the play is by far the best because it is the#
simplest and rhe most clear cut. With a sense of reality never
recaptured during the succeeding two acts it presents the pie¬
ture of a young girl chained to the bedside of a slowly dying
father and struggling between the artificial sense of duty to her
parent and the natural sense of her right to life. Without, the
noise of the passing throng summons her to a participation in
the experiences which seem in imagination so unutterably im¬
portant; within, the old man, intuitively conscious of her strug¬
gle, suggests with the logic of age that many years will remain
after he is dead; but to her it seems that if this one night
and the lover who awaits her is missed all life will be missed.
and the author who understands the father with his head but
understands her with his heart sends her to her adventure and
her lover. From then on, it must be confessed, the play grows
steadily less convincing as a picture of real life; the theme
pursued through various intricacies and reintroduced in new
surroundings becomes less and less sharply defined, and the
#ineidents grow more and more tncatrical. Tet, withal, tho
theatricalism is of a not wholly unpleasant kind, for it is not
the result of insincerity and trickery but of a genuine feeling
which cannot quite adequately express itself; and thus, though
verisimilitude sometimes fails, the genuineness of the emotion is
alwags clearly and interestingly evident.
The author has nowhe.e actually thought his way through,
and his sincerity is not of a predominantly intellectual sort.
Because his conviction that the call of life is higher than the
call of duty is not the reasoned conclusion of a Nietzschean
Le
19. Der Ruf (eS
tecae ShdengAhAn
S
eaGaires erursenee TTrüser-aussemauTreDao
BERLIN SO 16, RUNGESTRASSE 22-24
ns
l
Aussdiitt aus der Nummer vom: 477/210
Drama
Vita Brevis
THAT Schnitzier'’s highly interesting play,“ The Call of Life“
(Comedy Theater), is one of its author’s,earlier efforts is
revealed by something more than that unnatural heightening of
its colors which betrays the exuberance of an undisciplined
imagination. Its very theme—the brevity of life and the sin of
wasting one of its fleeting moments—is a theme which youth
would choose, for it is not toward the end, when ardor has cooled
and experience has taught how many promises go unfulfilled,
that life seems most precious but rather at the beginning when
every knock at the door seems to herald some unknown and de¬
lightful visitor. Thus it is that death seems closest to those
from whom it is in reality farthest away, and thus that old men
with only a year or two to live contentedly doze the months
away while youths agoni over a summer lost as though there
were not countless sumers yet to come. The Schnitzler who
wrote“ The Call of Life' had not yet arrived at the conviction,
so plainly expressed in later plays, that existence is a game
played against an antagonist who always wins and whose name
is Boredom; rather was he one who did not as yet know life
well encugh to picture it in a manner wholly convincing but who,
perhaps because of that imperfect knowledge, was able to ex¬
press his passionate conviction that the bitterest of all thoughts
is the thought that one may be deprived of the opportunity of
knowing it. The sentence, uttered by one in the grip of such a
fear, which gives the key to the emotion of the piece is this:
*Only those who have much to remember lie quietly in their
graves'; and it is plainly the utterance of a man who possessed
the two qualities which make life seem most precious. He was
young and he was an artist.
The first act of the play is by far the best because it is the#
simplest and rhe most clear cut. With a sense of reality never
recaptured during the succeeding two acts it presents the pie¬
ture of a young girl chained to the bedside of a slowly dying
father and struggling between the artificial sense of duty to her
parent and the natural sense of her right to life. Without, the
noise of the passing throng summons her to a participation in
the experiences which seem in imagination so unutterably im¬
portant; within, the old man, intuitively conscious of her strug¬
gle, suggests with the logic of age that many years will remain
after he is dead; but to her it seems that if this one night
and the lover who awaits her is missed all life will be missed.
and the author who understands the father with his head but
understands her with his heart sends her to her adventure and
her lover. From then on, it must be confessed, the play grows
steadily less convincing as a picture of real life; the theme
pursued through various intricacies and reintroduced in new
surroundings becomes less and less sharply defined, and the
#ineidents grow more and more tncatrical. Tet, withal, tho
theatricalism is of a not wholly unpleasant kind, for it is not
the result of insincerity and trickery but of a genuine feeling
which cannot quite adequately express itself; and thus, though
verisimilitude sometimes fails, the genuineness of the emotion is
alwags clearly and interestingly evident.
The author has nowhe.e actually thought his way through,
and his sincerity is not of a predominantly intellectual sort.
Because his conviction that the call of life is higher than the
call of duty is not the reasoned conclusion of a Nietzschean