Arthur Schnitzler Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Joseph W. Bailey

Critical Essay by Joseph W. Bailey

SOURCE: Bailey, Joseph W. “Arthur Schnitzler's Dramatic Work.” Texas Review 5, no. 4 (1920): 294-307.

In the following essay, Bailey addresses the supposed amorality that other critics found in Schnitzler's works, arguing that Schnitzler rightly puts his art above the “interests of a prudish morality.”

In that classic of literary criticism which Mr. Joseph Conrad has appended as a preface to his inimitable novel, The Nigger of the Narcissus, we are given a statement of the author's artistic creed:

To arrest, for the space of a breath, the hands busy about the work of the earth, and compel men entranced by the sight of distant goals to glance for a moment at the surrounding vision of form and color, of sunshine and shadows; to make them pause for a look, for a sigh, for a smile—such is the aim, difficult and evanescent, and reserved only for a very few to...
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