Faksimile

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2. Cuttings
box 37/7
Akrnuk Schwirzze's Daamarie Wonk 305
youth, to inspire for himself a spark of love in the heart of
his son. He fails utterly. Von Sala, worldly cynic who has
lived as Fichtner, is dying of an incurable disease. Johanna
loves Sala, and discovers that he is a doomed man. Irene
Herms is an old flame of Fichtner’s who has lived out the
golden hours of her youth in idle pleasure-hunting, and is
now growing old, with no attachments or ties to mellow her
declining years. Wegrat is bound up in his scientifie work,
and is oblivious of the finer sympathies and the love which
Johanna'’s heart is hungering for. So each of them walks his
lonely way'' to the end that is inevitable.“ The process of
aging must needs be a lonely one to our kind,'' says Sala and
gives the secret of the tragedy of his life and of Fichtner’s.
The latter has sacrificed love and a family for his art and his
freedom, and now he finds that, in his age, the iron of lone¬
someness has been pressed into his heart by tl.e procession of
the years and that he is without consolation for his sadness.
He has grown fond of Felix, and has a pathetic longing for
the boy to recognize his fatherhood and to return his affection,
but Felix feels only resentment toward him for his treatment
of the injured mother. Schnitzler again takes occasion to
satirize the cruelty and folly of one’s sacrifice of love and
honor for the sake of art.
In the treatment of the character of Sala, we see again the
Hebraic and Eastern temperament in this haunting fear of im¬
pending death which is pursning the doomed man. There is
something of the horror of Andreyev’s pictures of the death¬
cell in the spectacle of the lonely man waiting for the death
that he knows must come; and, I think, there is a note dis¬
tinetly Russian in the cry that bursts from his despairing
heart:
„Is there ever a blissful moment in any man’s life when he can
think of anything else (than dring) in his innermost soul?“
Trene Herms, the lonely woman growing old, reminds us
very much of the sister in Arnold Bennett’s Old Wires' Tale.