The whole play seems to be written for the sake of the last beautiful words. It is Schnitzler's greatest art to lift us to a sphere where everything seemingly important is solved, where tragedy and melancholy and sadness melt together into a wonderful serenity. His technique is full of subtlety; every little word and gesture has its place, its importance; we feel the weight of the smallest happening, the reality of a seemingly unmeaning fact, the deep consequence of a hasty word. The milieu was nearly always Vienna. Here his over-cultivated, refined men were at home, here his soft and loving women. All the several circles, aristocrats, artists, physicians, business men, furnished material for his work; and even more than the people, the town itself grew to life. The elegant vivaciousness of the inner city, where the fashionable society meets at certain hours and fashionable little shops line the streets, the lonely little streets of the suburb, the wonderful charm of the Wiener Wald embracing the town with its soft rounded lines--all this rich flowering beauty that had surrounded him from childhood he gathered in his work. Perhaps more forcibly than any one else he brought Vienna's charm to our consciousness. And so he returned to Vienna what he had received from her. Only two of his plays are outside the Viennese milieu--_The Green Cockatoo_, a grotesque that puts us marvelously well in the Parisian atmosphere shortly before the outbreak of the French Revolution; and _Beatrice's Veil_, a Renaissance drama which tempted almost every artist in those days. This epoch's refinement, the powerful personalities peopling it, the intensity concentrated on the enjoyment of their life--in all this they saw something akin to their own life's ideal. Schnitzler's plays have nothing of the fresco; they are more like Manet's small landscapes with their richness of color and their soft contours diffused in light.