The unfailing brilliancy of expression and abundant technical power of Hermann Sudermann have so seldom failed him in the lengthy list of his plays and novels that his admirers are too often oblivious to his main defect as an artist and thinker--a dualism of style and ideas. The Prussian playwright wishes to wear three heron feathers in his cap. Cosmopolitan as he is, he would fill his dramas with the incomparable psychologic content of Ibsen; he would be a painter of manners; he would emulate Sardou in his constructive genius. To have failed, and failed more than once, in his effort to precipitate these three qualities in his surprisingly bold and delicate wit, is not strange. And to have grazed so often the edge of triumphs, not popular but genuinely artistic, warrants one in placing Sudermann high in the ranks of German dramaturgists. In a very favourable review written by Mr. W. S. Lilly of The Joy of Life, he ranks Sudermann among the great painters of manners, and, after reading Dame Care and The Cat's Bridge, we are tempted to agree with the enthusiasm of the English critic. He thus sets down the qualities of a painter of manners: "Sense and sensibility, sagacity and suppleness, openness of mind and originality of thought, depth of feeling and delicacy of touch." Does Sudermann's art include all these things? We think not. Rather is he as a dramatist--the expert _Techniker_, the man of the theatre, impregnated by the dominant intellectual ideas of the hour, than a poet who from a haunting necessity gazes into his heart and then writes: Sudermann is too photographic; he too often wills his characters into a mould of his own, not of their own, making; he wills his atmosphere to blend with his theses, the reverse of Hauptmann's method. He is more cerebral than emotional, more of a philosopher than a dramatic psychologist. Above all, he is literary; he has the literary touch, the formal sense, the up-gushing gift of verbal expression. Add to this order of talent a real feeling for dramatic _nuance,_ and Sudermann's enigmatic warring opposites of temperament and action seem remarkable. In 1889, miraculous year of modern artistic Germany, Sudermann's dramatic début in Honour was more of a nine days' wonder than Hauptmann's Before Sunrise. The surety of touch, the easy mastery of theatric effects, the violent contrasts, and the sparkling dialogue transformed Sudermann's cometary career into a fixed star of the first magnitude. To-day this first play appears banal enough. Time has permitted us to see it in completer historic perspective. Ibsen's influence in the posing of the moral conflict is speedily recognized, just as Count Von Trast may be traced to those _raisonneurs_ so dear to the younger Dumas, those human machines spouting logic and arranging the dénouement like the god behind the cloud. One inevitably recalls the relation of Björnsen to Ibsen in the present position of Sudermann and Hauptmann.