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2. guftings
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box 37/7
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She is profoundly pathetic in her seclusion and loneliness—
fleeing from the memories of her youth which the old familiar
scenes in Vienna have brought crowding to her mind—with
her pitifully vain regrets and her visions and dreams of what
might have been—with the agonizing ery of her mothering
heart making itself heard when her halcyon days are gone
and it is too late to begin life again.
Johanna is the most pathetically lonely of them all, and her
seclusion and sädness is the more pitiable because she is in the
golden hours of her youth when the blighting tragedy of time
and sorrow should not be felt and when the spirit of youth
should be upheld by the conviction of its own immortality.
And the great fact behind all the minor sadnesses of life is
the eternal tragedy of the passing of time—erushing and
rending in its inexorable march all that it has made beautiful
and strong-creating, nurturing, and then destroying, only to
begin again its cyele of interminable labor. In his last con¬
versation with Christine, Sala sums up the life of every man
in his reference to the enigma of time:
The present—what does it mean anyhow? Are we then locked
breast to breast with the moment as with a friend whom we embrace
or an enemy who is pressing us? Has not the word that just rings
out turned to memory already? Is not the note that starts a melody
reduced to memory before the song is ended? Is your coming to this
garden anything but a memory, Johanna? Are not your steps across
that meadow as much a matter of the past as are the steps of crea¬
tures dead these many years?“
The play ends with a tragie irony which is, 1 think, char¬
acteristic of Schnitzler'’s philosophy of life. Christine is dead,
and Felix, the real son of Fichtner, has spoken to Professor
Wegrat and called him" Father?' Wegrat answers in a burst
of penitence for his neglect of Johanna:
Must things of this kind happen to make that word sound as if I
had heard it for the first time?“
Schnitzler's future is uncertain. We are not acquainted