There is character drawing of an unexceptional kind in Honour. Robert Heinecke returns from foreign lands to find his family degraded, his sister trading on her beauty, his father and mother accepting bounty from the mansion house, the employers of the honourable son. The maze in which he is caught is constructed with infinite skill; the expository act is the best. There is not much mystery--we seem here to be in the clear atmosphere of the French dramaturgists, Augier and Dumas; while the finale is rather flat, we look for a suicide or a scandal of some sort. The author keeps himself steady in the saddle of realism. This ending is lifelike, inasmuch as the hero goes away with Graf Trast, who literally reasons him out of his dangerous mood. We feel that all the rest do not count, not the ignoble Kurt and his snobbish friends, his philistine parents; not the Heineckes with their vulgar avarice, their Zola-istic squalor. The romance is conventional. In fact, so cleverly did Sudermann mingle the new and old in the opposing currents of dramatic art that his play was instantly a success. Accused of this ambition to drive two horses, the dramatist threw down as a gauge to criticism, Sodom (1891). It was not a great play, because it lacked logic, balance, truthfulness. A distorted picture of artistic degeneracy, its satire on certain circles in Berlin caused a furore; but the piece had not the elements of sincerity. Technically it revealed the mastery of almost hopeless material, and while one's æsthetic sense and the fitness of things are hopelessly upset, the cunning hand of the prestidigitator is everywhere present. There are some episodes that stir, notably the scenes between father and son; but the grimness and sordidness are too much for the nerves. Magda (1893) struck a new note. Many believe it to be Sudermann at his best. Thus far he has not surpassed it in unity of atmosphere and dissection of motives. That the _morale_ may be all wrong is not to the point. Again we see Ibsen's mighty shadow in the revolt of the new against the old; daughter and father posed antagonistically with the figure of the pastor, one of the German author's better creations, as a mediating principle. One of many reasons that the Magda of Sudermann is a remarkable play is the critical controversy over its interpretation. Each one of us reveals his temperamental bias in the upholding of Bernhardt's or Duse's or Modjeska's respective readings. And which one of the three artists has exhausted the possibilities of Magda's many-sided character? On this point Herr Sudermann is distressingly discreet, although he has a preference for Duse, as is well known to a few of his intimates. The reason is simple. Duse presents more phases of the character, exhibits more facets of this curious dramatic gem, and by her excellences, and not her limitations, we must judge her performance.