was not printed until 1900, and then only
privately. Yet those ten dialogues provoked from the first a storm
which seriously threatened Schnitzler's growing reputation and
popularity. When Vienna finds a work immoral, one may look for
something dreadful. And the work in question attempts a degree of
naturalism rarely equaled in France even. Yet those dialogues are
anything but immoral in spirit. They introduce ten men and as many
women. The man of one scene reappears with a new woman in the next, and
then that woman figures as the partner of a new man in the third scene.
The story is always the same (except in the final dialogue): desire,
satisfaction, indifference. The idea underlying this "ring dance," as
the title means literally, is the same one that recurs under a much
more attractive aspect in "Countess Mizzie." It is the linking together
of the entire social organism by man's natural cravings. And as a
document bearing on the psychology of sex "Change Partners!" has not
many equals.

In "The Legacy" (_Das Vermaechtnis_) we meet with a forcible presentation
and searching discussion of the world's attitude toward those ties that
have been established without social sanction. A young man is brought
home dying, having been thrown from his horse. He compels his parents
to send for his mistress and their little boy, and he hands both over
to the care of his family. That is his "legacy." The family tries hard
to rise to this unexpected situation and fails miserably--largely, it
must be confessed, thanks to the caddish attitude of a self-made
physician who wants to marry the dead man's sister. The second act ends
with the death of the little boy; the third, with the disappearance and
probable suicide of his mother. The dead man's sister cries out:
"Everything that was his is sacred to us, but the one living being who
meant more to him than all of us is driven out of our home." The one
ray of light offered is that the sister sees through the man who has
been courting her and sends him packing. It is noticeable in this play,
as in others written by Schnitzler, that the attitude of the women is
more sensible and tolerant than that of the men.

The physician is one of the few members of that profession whom the
author has painted in an unfavorable light. There is hardly one
full-length play of his in which at least one representative of the
medical profession does not appear. And almost invariably they seem
destined to ac