It implies not only a sense of our having lived
before, of having previously stood in the same relationship to the
people now surrounding us, but of being compelled to repeat our past
experience, even if a sudden flash of illumination out of the buried
past should reveal to us its predestined fatal termination. This idea
meets us again in the first act of "The Lonely Way." The fourth of
those one-act plays, "Literature," is what Schnitzler has named it--a
farce--but delightfully clever and satirical.

Those four plays, and the group of three others published under the
common title of "Puppets" (_Marionetten_), are, next to "Anatol," the
best known works of Schnitzler's outside of Austria and Germany. They
deserve their wide reputation, too, for there is nothing quite like
them in the modern drama. Yet I think they have been over-estimated in
comparison with the rest of Schnitzler's production. "The Puppet
Player," "The Gallant Cassian" and "The Greatest Show of All" (_Zum
grossen Wurstel_) have charm and brightness and wit. But in regard to
actual significance they cannot compare with plays like "The Lonely
Way," for instance.

The three plays comprised in the volume named "Puppets" constitute
three more exemplifications of the artistic temperament, which again
fares badly at the hands of their author. And yet he has more than one
telling word to say in defense of that very temperament. That these
plays, like "Hours of Life" and "Literature," are expressive of the
inner conflict raging for years within the playwright's own soul, I
take for granted. And they seem to reflect moments when Schnitzler felt
that, in choosing poetry rather than medicine for his life work, he had
sacrificed the better choice. And yet they do not show any regrets, but
rather a slightly ironical self-pity. A note of irony runs through
everything that Schnitzler has written, constituting one of the main
attractions of his art, and it is the more acceptable because the point
of it so often turns against the writer himself.

"The Puppet Player" is a poet who has ceased writing in order to use
human beings for his material. He thinks that he is playing with their
destinies as if they were so many puppets. And the little drama shows
how his accidental interference has created fates stronger and happier
than his own--fates lying wholly outside his power. The play suffers
from a tendency to exaggerated subtlety which is one of Schnitzler's
principal