Faksimile

Text

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box 36/3
1. Panphlets offprints
590
THE NEW QUARTERLY
of modern ideas, without enough feeling and fibre to carry
them out, and catastrophe is inevitable. After a heart¬
rending appeal, Fanny dismisses him from her life. She
has been thrust further into the mire from which he might
have lifted her, and if she becomes a mere“ Dirne?’ the
fault will lie with him.“ am tired,'' she says, “of
imploring your mercy like a sinner, and crawling on my
knees to a man who is no whit better than I am myself.?)
The irony of the situation in which a man demands a
record to which he makes no pretence himself is forcibly
brought out.
In this piece, if anywhere, Schnitzler lies open to
the charge sometimes made against him, that his plays
are only novels in dialogue. But what, after all, is drama
if it is not character displayed in talk? The talk is
at any rate true to life, and here it centres dramatically
round the question of a theatrical engagement offered to
Fanny in St. Petersburg: will she, or will she not, sign
the contract? The question is only settled on her final
rupture with Fedor.“ Das Märchen der Gefallenen, in
spite of Denner’s talk, like other ancient legends, has
proved itself in the course of the story a still vital force
in the lives of men and women; but the author is con¬
tent to relate facts, leaving us to moralise or not, as we
please.
Literatur, one of the brilliant one-act plays collected
under the title Lebendige Stunden, treats farcically one
element in the situation which has so tragic an issue in
the case of Fanny Theren, namely, the peculiar failings
of such characters as Denner’s. It is a satire on the
insincerities of the literary temperament. Margarethe, a
lady who has utilised her past as literary copy, abandons
art for marriage with a man of some social position. After
experimenting both in matrimony (her marriage is not
serlous) and in less permanent connections, the aristocratic
bearing of Graf Clement inspires her first genuine passion.


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