The Call of Death and the Lure of Love: A Study in Schnitzler

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THE call of death came to Arthur Schnitzler while he was busy revising his drama The Call of Life. Though the end came suddenly, it did not find him unprepared. For the consciousness of death was ever present about him from his earliest youth. Not only did his medical profession bring him in frequent contact with the dying but also his creative work is largely an expression of his yearning for life and his preoccupation with death. His brooding, melancholy temperament, his extreme sense of moral responsibility, and his social position as a member of a very respectable Jewish upper middle class family prevented him from lightly experiencing the frivolities of youth and love. Hence arose his subconscious admiration for the magic world in which characters such as Anatol, or Fritz Lobheimer, or Max von Reisenberg flitted about, a world of spring and color and adventure, a world in which he himself was never quite at home. For, the roots of Schnitzler's personality are to be sought elsewhere, perhaps in that soil which produced figures such as Stefan von Sala and Heinrich Bermann, Falkenir and Sylvester Thorn, sentimental sceptics and ironical idealists, wellmannered heroes saw in all human struggles and ambitions merely the play of marionettes against a background of death. Schnitzler at his best is not a gay poet. Death ever lurks behind the merry words and the light loves of his figures and often it breaks in unexpectedly upon the finest feasts. Repeatedly we are reminded that all acts and relations, all eternal vows and far-flung ambitions are but transitory and destined to be nipped before long. It is this consciousness of death's omnipresence which often lends to Schnitzler's works the peculiar pathos and aroma which we associate with his name. It almost seems as though death exercised a peculiar fascination upon him, as though he sought to rob it of its fabled terrors by constantly invoking it. Now it appears to him as a lowering of veils over a person and now as the ending of a dialogue. Is there any intelligent human being, asks his hero Sala in Der einsame Weg, who in happy hours thinks in the depths of his soul of anything else save death? Only unintelligent people, Schnitzler holds, can speak lightly of life's end. Only those do not know the full import of being 21