purpose than to present it as it
is. That was his starting point in "Anatol," but then he was not yet
ready for the realism that must be counted the highest of all: the
realism that has no tendency and preaches no lesson, but from which we
draw our own lessons as we draw them from life itself in moments of
unusual lucidity.

"Hours of Life" (_Lebendige Stunden_), which has given its name to
a volume of four one-act plays, may be described as a mental duel
between two sharply opposed temperaments--the practical and the
imaginative. An elderly woman, long an invalid, has just died, and a
letter to the man who has loved and supported her during her final
years reveals the fact that she has taken her own life because she
feared that the thought of her was preventing her son, a poet, from
working. The duel is between that son and the man who has befriended
his mother. The play constitutes a scathing arraignment of the artistic
temperament. Bernard Shaw himself has never penned a more bitter one.
"Even if you were the world's greatest genius," the old man cries to
the young one, "all your scribbling would be worthless in comparison
with a single one of those hours of real life that saw your mother
seated in that chair, talking to us, or merely listening, perhaps."

The most important of those four one-act plays, however, is "End of the
Carnival" (_Die letzten Masken_). An old journalist, a might-have-been,
dying in a hospital, sends for a life-long friend, a successful poet,
whom he hates because of his success. All he thinks of is revenge, of
getting even, and he means to achieve this end by disclosing to the
poet the faithlessness of his wife. Once she had been the mistress of
the dying man, and that seems to him his one triumph in life. But when
the poet arrives and begins to talk of the commonplaces of daily life,
of petty gossip, petty intrigues, and petty jealousies, then the dying
man suddenly sees the futility of the whole thing. To him, who has one
foot across the final threshold, it means nothing, and he lets his
friend depart without having told him anything. There is a curious
recurrence of the same basic idea in "Professor Bernhardi," where the
central figure acquires a similar sense of our ordinary life's futility
by spending two months in jail.

To what extent Schnitzler has studied and been impressed by Nietzsche I
don't know, but the thought underlying "The Lady With the Dagger" is
distinctly Nietzschean.