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K I
LITTLE NOVELS
Lrrrez NovEzs, (Constable, 7s.6d.net) consists
olten of Arthur Sehnitzler’s. short stories, 5.—
all written between 1900 ang 1910. Most 7.50
of the ten are studies in feinimme,psyelology, 9.—
accomplished, elever, surprisingf lbut rather
onthe romantie side of things? Love, it seeins,
née.
was a desperate business in the Vienna of a
generation ago; passion played fast and loose
with tlie commonplaces of existence, and the
happiest of husbands and wives were those
whlose infidelities were not discovered. Herr
Schnitzler has generally written in restrained
and refreshingly straightforward language,
but he has also shown a marked liking for
pathological types and emnotional aberrations
und enigmatie feininine passions and so on.
The result is that his stories, although thev
are contrived with great skill and although
they displav a remarkable power of analysis,
seldom strike the reader—the English reader
inore particularly—as being quite real.
Thiere is, indeed, an element of artificiality
The
in every story in this volume. The first,
Stranger, is the tale of a woman of in¬
able mmpulses who fascinated a great mu¬
of inen. One of thein, a sober, conventionalolli¬
cial, fell madly in love with her, saw that she
was queer, and married her, determined to
commit suleide on the day she left him. She
departed one morning after a honeymoon
lastinga fortnight; and thie husband thereupon
went out to shoot himnself at about the same
moment that his wife, for sore reason beyond
human fathoming, was betraying him with a
stranger." The Fate of the Freiherr von
Leisenbohg“ is a little less mysterious. He
tell deeply in love with another tempera¬
inental womnan, an opera singer, who rejected
his advances, but who retained his affection
during all the years in which she took one
lover after another, and whio finally yielded to
him for one night for no more worthy purpose
than to expiate the curse of the last and most
jealous of her lovers. The story las an extra¬
ordinarily deft ending, but it is obvions that
the whole thing was written round the sur¬
prise wilich 18 sprung on tiie render in the last
couple of pages. Equally effective in its
slightly artificial way is“ The Greek Dancing
Girl,'’ which tells of a woman who died be¬
cause she no longer had the peculiar strength
of mind which enabled her to disbelieve in
her husband’s infidelities." The Death of a
Bachelor,?’ which is again a masterly piece
of construction, asks the reader to believe
that a dying iian would occupy the last
few mnoments of his life in writing a letter
to lns friends for the purpose of informing
them that he had seduced each of their wives
in turn.
Psychological experiments in this manner
are put to greater artistie advantage in the
stories of the occult. The Prophecy,? for
instance, teils of a man whose fortune was
told to him by a Jewish conjurer (who gave
the name of Marco Polo), and whose destiny
was consummated during the performance of
a play in which the dramatist had visualized
every detail of the conjurer’s prophecy. Un¬
real as the stories are in fact, thiey are the,
work of a story-teller who las never had much
to learn in thie way of eraftsmanship. Mr. Eric)
Sutton's translations have the direetness and
the finish which Sehnitzler requires in Englisi.
a: 1#8