Yet it is easy to admire Honour. It contains, notably in the two acts of the "hinter haus," real strokes of observation and profound knowledge of human nature. The elder Heinecke, rapacious rascal, is a father lost to all sense of shame, for he closes his eyes to his daughter's behaviour. This same old scamp is both true and amusing. Nor is his wife depicted with less unwavering fidelity. The motive of Honour is not alone the ironic contrast of real and conventional ideals of honour—it shoots a bolt toward Nietzsche's land where good and evil blend in one hazy hue. Sudermann, here and in nearly all his later pieces, challenges the moral law—Ibsen's loftiest heron feather—and if any appreciable theory of conduct is to be deduced from his works, it is that the moral law must submit to the variations of time and place, even though its infraction spells sin, even though the individual in his thirst for self-seeking smashes the slate of morality and perishes in the attempt.
This battle of good and evil Sudermann dwells upon, often to the confusion of moral values, often to the tarnishing of his art. And in his endeavour to hold the dramatic scales in strict equipoise, to intrude no personal judgments, he leaves his audiences in blank bewilderment. Better the rankest affirmations than the blandest negatives. Yes counts far more than No in the theatre, and Sudermann is happier when he is violently partisan. His contemporary, Hauptmann, shows us the shipwreck of souls in whom the spiritual stress preponderates. Sudermann, except in rare instances, sticks closer to the social scale and its problems; and when he does he is at his best, for it cannot be said that The Three Heron Feathers, written under the spur of The Sunken Bell, betrays a mastery or even a familiarity with those shadowy recesses wherein action is a becoming, where the soul blossoms from a shapeless mass into volitional consciousness. Sudermann's art is more external; it concerns itself with the How rather than with the Why, and one feels that storm and fury were deliberate engraftments, not the power which works from within to the outer world.
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.
We have seen a dozen Magdas: English, French, German, Italian, Belgian, Jewish, and Scandinavian. Fanatical admirers of Bernhardt claim preeminence for her in the part, certain sides of which are child's play for her accomplished virtuosity. But the critic who knows Sudermann's Magda also knows that the very brilliancy of the glorious French actress throws the picture into too high relief; there are no middle tints in Sarah's embodiment. It recalls the playing of an overmasteringly brilliant pianist, one who rolls over the keyboard like a destructive avalanche. The human note, the sobbing, undulating quality of a violoncello whose tone flashes fire, is missing. Little doubt that Bernhardt gives us certain moods of Magda in a transcendental manner. She is the supreme artist of all in the exposition of tragic bravura. Yet she is not Sudermann's Magda. This is so well known as to be a critical commonplace.
Mrs. Campbell's Magda is above the ordinary. Modjeska's powers were on the wane when she appeared in the play; but we cannot forget the native sweetness and true Polish zal with which she suffused the character. Supple, poetic, charming, she was, and despite all, lacked much of Magda's complexity. Does Duse entirely fulfil all the requirements of the rôle?
We do not know. We only feel that in mood-versatility she outstrips all others we have seen, and if she has not seen farthest into the soul of the opera singer, she has viewed it from more sides than her contemporaries. Hence her interpretation is more various and, it being Duse, is more wonderful in the technical sense in the revelation of an effortless art.
She is natural, never photographic. Photography arrests motion; Duse is ever in modulation. Rather, if you will have pictorial analogues, might her Magda be compared to a Richard Earlom or a Valentine Green mezzotint, wherein the luminous shadows and faint spiritual overtones are acidly mellow. And who shall forget the manner of her throat as it trilled with rage when to her Von Keller makes his perfectly honourable and perfectly abominable offer! We have dwelt so much upon the admirable reticences of this artist, upon her "tact of omission," we really forget that she never stops acting or living her part for a moment. She continually evokes musical imagery, for the exquisite and harmonious interrelations of every movement, every word, unroll before us like great, solemn music.