[A German-born American novelist and critic, Lewisohn was an authority on German literature, and his translations of Gerhart Hauptmann, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Jakob Wassermann are widely respected. In 1919 he became the drama critic for the Nation, serving as its associate editor until 1924, when he joined a group of expatriates in Paris. In the essay below, originally published in the Nation, Lewisohn provides a mixed assessment ofGlaspell's early plays. ]

In the rude little auditorium of the Provincetown Players on MacDougall Street there is an iron ring in the wall, and a legend informs you that the ring was designed for the tethering of Pegasus. But the winged horse has never been seen. An occasional play might have allured him; the acting of it would invariably have driven him to indignant flight. For, contrary to what one would expect, the acting of the Players has been not only crude and unequal; it has been without energy, without freshness, without the natural stir and eloquence that come from within. This is the circumstance which has tended to obscure the notable talent of Susan Glaspell. The Washington Square Players produced Trifles and thus gave a wide repute to what is by no means her best work. Bernice, not only her masterpiece but one of the indisputably important dramas of the modern English or American theatre, was again played by the Provincetown Players with more than their accustomed feebleness and lack of artistic lucidity. The publication of Miss Glaspell's collected plays at last lifts them out of the tawdriness of their original production and lets them live by their own inherent life.

That life is strong, though it is never rich. In truth, it is thin. Only it is thin not like a wisp of straw, but like a tongue of flame. Miss Glaspell is morbidly frugal in expression, but nakedly candid in substance. There are no terrors for her in the world of thought; she thinks her way clearly and hardily through a problem and always thinks in strictly dramatic terms. But her form and, more specifically, her dialogue, have something of the helplessness and the numb pathos of the "twisted things that grow in unfavoring places" which employ her imagination. She is a dramatist, but a dramatist who is a little afraid of speech. Her dialogue is so spare that it often becomes arid; at times, as in The Outside, her attempt to lend a stunted utterance to her silenced creatures makes for a hopeless obscurity. The bleak farmsteads of Iowa, the stagnant villages of New England, have touched her work with penury and chill. She wants to speak out and to let her people speak out. But neither she nor they can conquer a sense that free and intimate and vigorous expression is a little shameless. To uncover one's soul seems almost like uncovering one's body. Behind Miss Glaspell's hardihood of thought hover the fear and self-torment of the Puritan. She is a modern radical and a New England school teacher; she is a woman of intrepid thought and also the cramped and aproned wife on some Iowa farm. She is a composite, and that composite is intensely American. She is never quite spontaneous and unconscious and free, never the unquestioning servant of her art. She broods and tortures herself and weighs the issues of expression.

If this view of Miss Glaspell's literary character is correct, it may seem strange upon superficial consideration that four of her seven one-act plays are comedies. But two of them, the rather trivial Suppressed Desires and the quite brilliant Tickless Time, were written in collaboration with George Cram Cook, a far less scrupulous and more ungirdled mind. Her comedy, furthermore, is never hearty. It is not the comedy of character but of ideas, or, rather, of the confusion or falseness or absurdity of ideas. Woman's Honor is the best example of her art in this mood. By a sound and strictly dramatic if somewhat too geometrical device, Miss Glaspell dramatizes a very searching ironic idea: a man who refuses to establish an alibi in order to save a woman's honor dies to prove her possessed of what he himself has taken and risks everything to demonstrate the existence of what has ceased to be. The one-act tragedies are more characteristic of her; they cleave deep, but they also illustrate what one might almost call her taciturnity. That is the fault of her best-known piece, Trifles. The theme is magnificent; it is inherently and intensely dramatic, since its very nature is culmination and crisis. But the actual speech of the play is neither sufficient nor sufficiently direct. Somewhere in every drama words must ring out. They need not ring like trumpets. The ring need not be loud, but it must be clear. Suppose in Trifles you do not, on the stage, catch the precise significance of the glances which the neighbor women exchange. There need have been no set speech, no false eloquence, no heightening of what these very women might easily have said in their own persons. But one aches for a word to release the dumbness, complete the crisis, and drive the tragic situation home.

The same criticism may be made, though in a lesser degree, of Miss Glaspell's single full-length play, Bernice. No production would be just to the very high merits of that piece which did not add several speeches to the first and third acts and give these the spiritual and dramatic clearness which the second already has. Crude people will call the play "talky." But indeed there is not quite talk enough. Nor does Miss Glaspell deal here with simple and stifled souls. That objection is the only one to be made. The modern American drama has nothing better to show than Miss Glaspell's portrait of the "glib and empty" writer whose skill was "a mask for his lack of power" and whose wife sought, even as she died, to lend him that power through the sudden impact of a supremely tragic reality. The surface of the play is delicate and hushed. But beneath the surface is the intense struggle of rending forces. Bernice is dead. The soft radiance of her spirit is still upon the house. It is still reflected in her father's ways and words. Her husband and her friend hasten to that house. And now the drama sets in, the drama that grows from Bernice's last words to her old servant. It is a dramatic action that moves and stirs and transforms. There is hardly the waving of a curtain in those quiet rooms. Yet the dying woman's words are seen to have been a creative and dramatic act. Through a bright, hard window one watches people in a house of mourning. They stand or sit and talk haltingly as people do at such times. Nothing is done. Yet everything happens—death and life and a new birth. What more can drama give?

While managers are returning from early spring trips to London and Paris with the manuscripts of plays ranging from Shaw to Bataille, our native drama is gathering an ever more vigorous life. The process has few observers. But all great things have had their origin in obscurity and have often become stained and stunted by contact with the world and its success. It need matter very little to Susan Glaspell whether her play Inheritors, which the Provincetown Players are producing, ever reaches Broadway. Nor need it affect her greatly whether the criticism of the hour approves it or not. If the history of literature, dramatic or non-dramatic, teaches us anything, it is that Broadway and its reviewers will some day be judged by their attitude to this work.

Inheritors is not, in all likelihood, a great play, as it is certainly not a perfect one. Neither was Hauptmann's Before Dawn. Like the latter it has too pointed an intention; unlike the latter its first act drifts rather than culminates and needs both tightening and abbreviation. But it is the first play of the American theatre in which a strong intellect and a ripe artistic nature have grasped and set forth in human terms the central tradition and most burming problem of our national life quite justly and scrupulously, equally without acrimony or compromise.

In 1879 two men occupied adjoining farms in Iowa: Silas Morton, son of the earliest pioneers from Ohio who fought Black Hawk and his red men for the land, and Felix Fejevary, a Hungarian gentleman, who has left his country and sought freedom in America after the abortive revolution of 1848. The two men were lifelong friends, and Morton, who had had but two months of schooling, absorbed from his Hungarian friend a profound sense of the liberation of culture and left the hill which the white man had wrung by force from the red to be the seat of a college that was to perpetuate the united spirits of liberty and learning. In the second act we are taken to the library of this college. The time is October, 1920. Felix Fejevary, 2nd, now chairman of the board of trustees, is in consultation with Senator Lewis of the finance committee of the State legislature. Fejevary wants an appropriation and recalls to the senator that the college has been one hundred per cent. American during the war and that the students, led by his son, have even acted as strike-breakers in a recent labor dispute. The son, Horace Fejevary, is introduced, a youth who thinks Morton College is getting socially shabby—too many foreigners!—and who is just now enraged at certain Hindu students who have plead the cause of the Indian revolutionists and quoted Lincoln in defense of their position. Senator Lewis thinks the lad a fine specimen. But, talking of appropriations, there is a certain Professor Holden who does not think that the Hindus ought to be deported, who has said that America is the traditional asylum of revolutionaries, and who seems to be a Bolshevik in other ways. Fejevary promises to take care of Holden, and the ensuing scene between these two with its searching revelation of spiritual processes, its bitter suppressions, its implication of an evil barter in values not made with hands touches a point of both dramatic truth and force which no other American playwright has yet rivaled. The ironic and tragic catastrophe is brought about by another member of the third generation, Madeline Fejevary Morton. To her mind, natural and girlish though it is, the monstrous inner contradictions of the situation are not wholly dark. It is two years after the armistice. Yet a boy chum of hers, a conscientious objector, is still in a narrow and noisome cell; the Hindu students who are to be sent to certain destruction are but following the precepts of Lincoln's second inaugural. She interferes in their behalf and proclaims in public, crudely but with the passionate emphasis of youth, the principles for which her two grandfathers founded Morton College. Her offense, under the Espionage Act, is no laughing matter. People with foreign names have got twenty years for less. Her uncle and her aunt plead with her; Holden asks her to let herself ripen for greater uses; her father's state pleads for itself. Miss Glaspell has been careful to make her neither priggish nor tempestuous. Some inner purity of soul alone prompts her to resist. Suddenly an outcast, she goes forth to face her judges and suffer her martyrdom.

No competent critic, whatever his attitude to the play's tendency, will be able to deny the power and brilliancy of Miss Glaspell's characterization. The delineation of the three Fejevarys—father, son and grandson—is masterly. Through the figures of these men she has recorded the tragic disintegration of American idealism. The second Felix remembers his father and his inheritance. But he has faced the seeming facts so long and compromised so much that he is drained dry of all conviction and sincerity. His son is an empty young snob and ruffian. With equal delicacy and penetration we are shown the three Morton generations—the slow, magnificent old pioneer, his broken son, his granddaughter Madeline whose sane yet fiery heart symbolizes the hope and the reliance of the future. Alone and pathetic among them all stands Holden, the academic wage slave who knows the truth but who has an ailing wife; who yearns to speak but who has no money laid by; a quiet man and a terrible judgment on the civilization that has shaped him.

In the second and third acts Miss Glaspell's dialogue expresses with unfailing fitness her sensitive knowledge of her characters. It has entire verisimilitude. But it has constant ironic and symbolic suppressions and correspondences and overtones. This power of creating human speech which shall be at once concrete and significant, convincing in detail and spiritually cumulative in progression, is, of course, the essential gift of the authentic dramatist. That gift Miss Glaspell always possessed in a measure; she has now brought it to a rich and effective maturity.

Ludwig Lewisohn, "Susan Glaspell," in his The Drama and the Stage, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1922, pp. 102-110.