The ninth contains no death and ends on a positive note as a blind beggar realizes that his sighted brother was not stealing from him but for him; yet the realization comes as the two are about to be delivered to the law.

Still, that is as close as we get to a happy ending. But what about Dream Story, which owes its recent celebrity to Stanley Kubrick's wretched movie version, Eyes Wide Shut? In it, a young married couple become briefly estranged: he through a rather harmless confession of his wife's that piques his jealousy, and through some nocturnal adventures that indirectly turn him even more against her; she through a dream betokening intense latent resentment of her husband. Yet, in the end, they are reconciled and seem to resume normal family life. But did not their strongest sexual fulfillment come after a masked ball at which each of them was aroused by seductive strangers? What does this say for their future happiness?

Schnitzler's focus is admittedly narrow. Dueling, for example, which he execrated, claims one life in these stories and raises its head in a couple of others. The experience of a lover at the deathbed of his adulterous beloved has its counterpart in a scene where a husband discovers at the deathbed of his wife that his best friend, who has come to console him, was sleeping with her. But such similarities hardly matter because what Schnitzler explored so inspiredly was the particular, the individual, the unique, however superficially similar to some other particular and unique. He himself defined his procedure: "To be an artist means to know how to polish the rough surfaces of reality so smooth that it may mirror all of infinity from the heights of heaven to the depths of hell." But what if this mirror is not so huge, merely a pocket mirror handled with surpassing dexterity?

In a typically waspish essay, the brilliant but malicious critic Karl Kraus described Schnitzler as "standing between those who hold a mirror up to the time, and those who hold a bedroom screen up to it; somehow he belongs in the boudoir." What was intended as a dig comes out a compliment. Yes, Schnitzler was, though a reflector of his times-note the pungent details, piquant digressions, apparent irrelevancies with which he enriches his stories, creating a background almost as dense and ab sorbing as the foreground-even more one of those Chinese or Japanese screens that modestly concealed people's beds. But weren't those very screens witnesses to two supreme human experiences: the making of love and the meeting up with death?

So yes, Schnitzler divided his attention between the often anti-climactic everyday and the dramatic climaxes of love and death. He encompassed great passions, great hatreds, and great losses. Also petty obsessions, ludicrous peeves, and stony detachments. You cannot read him without feeling that this man really understood. And, in feeling that, learn from him.

JOHN SIMON

`LIEUTENANT! . . . LIEUTENANT! . . . LIEUTENANT!" Only after the third call did the young officer move, stretch himself, and turn his head toward the door. Still half asleep, he growled from between the pillows, "What's going on?" Then, having roused himself, and seeing that it was only his orderly standing in the shadow of the half-opened door, he shouted, "What the devil do you want so early in the morning?"

"There is a gentleman below in the courtyard, sir, who wishes to speak with you, sir."

"What do you mean, a gentleman? What time is it? Didn't I tell you not to wake me on Sundays?"

The orderly walked over to the bed and handed Wilhelm a visiting card.

"Do you think I'm an owl, you blockhead? Do you think I can read in the dark? Pull up the shades!"

Even before the command was finished, Joseph had opened the inner shutters of the window and drawn up the dirty white curtain. The lieutenant, half sitting up in bed, could now read the name on the card. He let it fall on the bedcovers, looked at it again, ran his fingers through his blonde, close-cropped, morning-messy hair, and thought quickly: "Send him away? Impossible! I don't really have any reason to. Just because I receive someone, that doesn't imply that I'm close friends with him. Anyway, it was only because of his debts that he had to quit the regiment. Others just have better luck. But what could he want from me?"

He turned back to his orderly: "How does he look, the first lieut-I mean, Herr von Bogner?"

The orderly replied with a broad but somewhat melancholy smile: "If I may be permitted to say so, sir, the first lieutenant looked better in uniform."

Wilhelm was silent for a moment, then sat up more comfortably in the bed. "Well, ask him to come in. And beg the-first lieutenant-to be so good as to excuse me if I'm not quite dressed. And see here-if any of the other officers should ask for me, First Lieutenant Hochster or Lieutenant Wengler, or the captain, or anyone else-I'm not at home.