HANDS AROUND
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HANDS AROUND
[REIGEN]
A Cycle of Ten Dialogues
By
ARTHUR SCHNITZLER
Completely Rendered
Into English
Authorized Translation
NEW YORK
Privately Printed for Subscribers
MCMXX
Copyright, 1920
By
A. KOREN
Humanity seems gayest when dancing on thebrink of a volcano. The culture of a period precedinga social cataclysm is marked by a spirit oflight wit and sophisticated elegance which findsexpression in a literature of a distinct type. Thisliterature is light-hearted, audacious and self-conscious.It can treat with the most charming insouciancesubjects which in another age would havebeen awkward or even vulgar. But with the riperexperience of a period approaching its end thewriters feel untrammeled in the choice of theme bypride or prejudice knowing that they will nevertransgress the line of good taste.
So it was in the declining days of the Romancivilization when Lucian of Samosata wrote hisDialogues of the Hetærai and countless poetspenned their intricate epigrams on the art and experienceof love. So it was in England when thefine vigor of the Elizabethan and Miltonic age gaveway to the Restoration and the calculating brillianceof a Congreve or a Wycherly.
But the exquisite handling of the licentious waselaborated into a perfect technique in eighteenthcentury France. The spirit of the Rococo with itspredilection for the well-measured pose was singularlywell adapted to the artistic expression of whatin a cruder age could only have been voiced withcoarseness and vulgarity. In the literature of thisperiod we meet again the spirit that animates thegracious paintings of Watteau and Fragonard.The scenes we admire in their panels recur in literarystyle in works like Choderlos de Laclos’Liaisons dangereuses and Louvet de Couvray’s Lesamours du Chevalier de Faublas. Again the samenote is heard in Beaumarchais’ Le Mariage deFigaro, in which the society of the period is travestiedwith brilliant wit and worldly philosophy.The court of Louis XVI., quite unaware, looked onand applauded a play which Napoleon later characterizedas “the revolution already in action.”
During the closing years of the nineteenth centurya similar spirit has hovered over Vienna,when it was the last and staunchest stronghold ofaristocracy in the modern world. Its literature reflectedthe charm of a fastidious amatory etiquettewhich is forbidden in sterner and soberer environment,while it gayly ignored the slow gathering ofthe clouds which foreshadowed its own catastrophe[xi]and martyrdom. As Percival Pollard once so wellput it: “All that rises out of that air has had fascination,grac