box 39/3
goth Birthday
* UIETLY eneugh, no doubt, but with a profound
G spiritual gratitude many men and women all over the
world will turn in their thoughts on the twenty-fifth of this
month, which is his sixtieth birthday, to Arthur Schnitzler.
It is hard to think-of-Schfitzler as growing old, though the
works even of his youth are tinged with the melancholy of
one who has thought his way to the end of things. But
side by side with this melancholy he always cultivated a
Mozartian gaiety and sparkle which age should not touch
nor decay tarnish. His many plays and stories have given
him a wide international fame. Yet the spirit and mean¬
ing of his art are but ill understood. The stories are more
than stories, the plays more than plays. He is the least
didactic of writers and the most instructive. By a final
and relentless dissection of the soul of man he has given
us the fullest sense of its actual complexity and of the
necessary relativity of all rough and ready moral values.
But his relentlessness has been scientific, never bitter nor
personal, and has been coupled with the tenderness of a
great physician, and the love of beauty of a great artist.
All translations wrong him. The prose both of his narra¬
tive and of his dialogue is limpid and exact and supported
by a delicate inner rhythm which is the very music of his
pity, his understanding, his love. His city is erumbling
about him. It may never recover. The finest fruit of its 5
modern civilization is permanently preserved for mankind
in his works.
#so
18./7. A.