The Lonely Way—Intermezzo—Countess Mizzie

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Arthur Schnitzler. The Lonely Way—Intermezzo—Countess Mizzie

The Lonely Way—Intermezzo—Countess Mizzie

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PERSONS

THE LONELY WAY

PERSONS

INTERMEZZO

PERSONS

COUNTESS MIZZIE

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Arthur Schnitzler

Three Plays

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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. 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.

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