The Battle of the Butterflies (1894) was seen in New York at Conried's Irving Place Theatre. It is comedy of a skin-deep variety, entertaining! And here's an end to it. Happiness in a Corner is deeper in sentiment. It has the Ibsen touch with a pathos foreign to the Norwegian. Inspector Orb is of Ibsen, so is Pastor Weidemann, and the others--Bettina, Räcknitz, Elizabeth, and Helena--are alive and suffer and joy. There is vitality in this work. Also is there force and consummate cleverness in the three one-act plays grouped under the title Morituri (1896). Avowedly devoted to the theme of death they are all three illustrative of the dramatist's feeling for the right phrase, the only right situation. Teja, Fritzchen, and The Eternal Masculine show us in three widely differing modes how, as in life, we miss the happiness near at hand while longing for the ideal--a theme dealt with more broadly in The Three Heron Feathers. John the Baptist (1898), like Paul Heyse's Mary Magdalen, was the occasion of a scandal in Berlin, because the censor forbade its performance on religious grounds, though Otto Ludwig's Maccabees and Hebbel's Judith are stock pieces. As a drama it is weak, for the vacillating hero wearies us to distraction, notwithstanding the poetic charm of the prologue. If the Christ had been boldly dramatized, as was evidently the playwright's purpose, the outcome, no matter how shattering to pious nerves, would have been better artistically. But this vague dreamer, pessimistic, halting, irresolute, what can we make of him across the footlights, and for once Sudermann's technical ability failed him.