The Three Heron Feathers (1899) is an attempt to meet Hauptmann on equal terms. It lacks coherence, despite the occasional lift of its verse--Sudermann fancied that he had forsworn the prose of the realistic drama forever--while the lofty moral ideal, unduly insisted upon, soon becomes a thorn in the flesh. No one is alive but the trusty Lorbuss, the Prince being a theory set in action. The next play, St. John's Fire (1900), we confess to having read with more pleasure than seeing it enacted. It goes up in the air soon after the curtain rises on Act III, though the story is a capital one for dramatic purposes. It would seem that Sudermann was again attacked by his doubting mania. He has contrived the atmosphere of romance, the pagan fire of St. John, the mystery of night, the passion of Georg and Marikke; but either his courage failed him, or else beset by some idea of resignation he spoilt his development and conclusion, and we leave the theatre dissatisfied, not with that spiritual dissatisfaction which Ibsen plants, a rankling sore in one's heart, but the kind that grows into resentment against the dramatist, for Marikke is a girl of whom Thomas Hardy would have been proud. And then there is a muddle of symbolism and heredity,--Sudermann endeavouring to scoop up in his too comprehensive net the floating ideas of the hour. Georg von Hartwig's sudden lapse into a selfish citizen we can never forgive. Of the criticism of masterpieces there is no end. Take Sudermann's The Joy of Life as an example. (Why such an Ibsen-like title for Es Lebe das Leben?) Obsessed by subject and subject-matter only, many of us turn a blind side to the real qualities that make up an excellent play. Now this harping on the theme of a drama--whether pleasant, unpleasant, dull, brilliant, or truthful--is eminently amateurish. It is rather the function of the manager; it affects his box-office, and, as he is not in business for art, he cherishes that brave little place above all else. But a critic is supposed to wear an open mind, to accept a subject without looking the gift poet in the mouth, and also to judge how near the dramatist reaches the goal of his own ideal--not the critic's. That we do not do so is to be pitied. It is because of this that so many wonderful plays never see the light, or else are botched at their birth. This persistent avoidance of the dramatist's view-point, this refusal to enter into sympathetic complicity with him, leads to sad conclusions. If you decide violently that a play has no right to exist because it exhibits a situation or character abhorrent to your notions, in what a predicament is the dramatist! It recalls the story told by George Saintsbury about the man who was shown Flameng's beautiful etching of Herrera's Child with the Guitar. "But I don't like babies," said the man, unconsciously illustrating uncatholicity in criticism. The subject did not appeal to him, therefore its truthful art could go hang.