Schnitzler’s method is to examine the ‘case history’ of his characters and to deal as briskly with them as if there were plenty of others in his waiting-room. In an essay on Fiction and the Medical Mode (1975), I pointed out that there was a link between writers as apparently diverse as – for obvious examples – Arthur Conan Doyle, Anton Chekhov and Somerset Maugham. All were doctors and all excelled in short fiction and in the terse use of dialogue; none had any use for fancy language.

Schnitzler’s abiding sense of the disintegration both of Austrian society and of its individual citizens has no clearer expression than Dream Story, in which a happy marriage is anatomized into the contrary impulses of murderous rage and reckless sensuality, of mutual desire and mutual revulsion, of tenderness and violence. Is a marriage to become stronger as a result of what seems to fracture it or is it fatally flawed? Schnitzler’s irony is so deftly attuned to the ambiguity of conjugal love that his pessimism, when read in a cheerful light, seems not to bar an optimistic reading. ‘Feelings and understanding,’ he once said, ‘may sleep under the same roof, but they run completely separate households in the human soul.’

The calm, almost chilly, tone of his narrative enables him to achieve what Wittgenstein tried to do in philosophy: say the new thing in the old language. Dream Story is erotic without being pornographic. It unsettles as much as it excites; like a dream, it recurrently threatens to come to a climax which eludes the protagonist as it does the reader. It is both explicit and decorous, outspoken and reticent, believable and incredible. Albertine’s dreams are what dreams might be, if they were more artistic and more explicit than usual.

Schnitzler does not scarify the surface of his text with literary experiment; he seems simply to track Fridolin in a world where dream and reality are no longer distinct. Do the events which so disconcert Fridolin ‘really’ take place? Or are the dreams which Albertine recounts in such cruel detail only part of an all-embracing dream which is the story as a whole? The narrative avoids unreality and absurdity by virtue of its unexcited, matter-of-fact vocabulary. With its realistic detail, Fridolin’s adventure seems to belong to the waking world, but does it? The reader must decide, though the use of ‘Denmark’ (as the password when Fridolin is seeking entry to the mysterious house where beautiful women are to be found) echoes, surely deliberately, the fact that Albertine’s dream lover is a Dane. Perhaps there was such an oneiric quality to life in Vienna that, as Schnitzler’s leading character says in Paracelsus,

… only those who look for a meaning will find it. Dreaming and waking, truth and lie mingle. Security exists nowhere. We know nothing of others, nothing of ourselves. We always play. Wise is the man who knows.

That knowing wisdom was at the centre of the solemn playfulness of Schnitzler’s art, and life.

I

‘Twenty-four brown slaves rowed the splendid galley that would bring Prince Amgiad to the Caliph’s palace. But the Prince, wrapped in his purple cloak, lay alone on the deck beneath the deep blue, star-spangled night sky, and his gaze –’

Up to this point the little girl had been reading aloud; now, quite suddenly, her eyes closed. Her parents looked at each other with a smile, and Fridolin bent over her, kissed her flaxen hair, and snapped shut the book that was resting on the table, which had not as yet been cleared. The child looked up as if caught out.

‘Nine o’clock,’ said her father, ‘time for bed.’ And as Albertine too had now bent over the child, the parents’ hands touched as they fondly stroked her brow, and, with a tender smile that was no longer intended solely for the child, their eyes met. The maid came in and bade the little one say goodnight to her parents; obediently she got up, proffered her lips to her father and mother to be kissed, and let the maid escort her quietly from the room. Left alone under the reddish glow of the hanging lamp, Fridolin and Albertine suddenly felt impelled to resume the discussion of their experiences at yesterday’s masked ball, which they had begun before the evening meal.

It had been their first ball of the year, which they had decided to attend just before the close of the Carnival season. Immediately upon entering the ballroom, Fridolin had been greeted like an impatiently awaited friend by two dominoes dressed in red, whom he had not managed to identify, even though they were remarkably well informed about various episodes from his hospital and student days. They had left the box to which they had invited him with such auspicious friendliness, promising to return shortly unmasked, but then had stayed away so long that he became impatient and decided to descend to the ground floor, hoping to meet the two enigmatic creatures there again. He looked around intently, without, however, catching sight of them; instead, quite unexpectedly, another female reveller took him by the arm: it was his wife. She had just withdrawn rather abruptly from a stranger, whose blasé, melancholy air and foreign-sounding – evidently Polish – accent had at first intrigued her, but who had then suddenly let slip a surprisingly crude and insolent remark that had hurt and even frightened her. And so man and wife, glad at heart to have escaped a disappointingly banal charade, were soon sitting in the refreshment room over oysters and champagne, like two lovers among other amorous couples, and chatting amiably drew one another, as if they had just become acquainted, into a game of gallantry, seduction, resistance and fulfilment; and then, after a swift coach-ride through the white winter’s night, they sank into one another’s arms with an ardour they had not experienced for quite some time. A grey morning awoke them all too soon. The husband’s profession summoned him to his patients’ bedsides at an early hour, and the duties of housekeeper and mother did not allow Albertine to rest much longer. And so the time had passed predictably and soberly enough in work and routine chores, and the events of the previous night from first to last had faded; and only now that both their days’ work was over, the child asleep and no further disturbance anticipated, did the shadowy figures from the masked ball, the melancholy stranger and the dominoes in red, revive; and those trivial encounters became magically and painfully interfused with the treacherous illusion of missed opportunities.