10. Tragic ends: George Steiner, The Death of Tragedy
This is a well-written, well-informed, and (in short space) an opulent book, and even those who reject its main thesis must certainly prize it for the inset estimates of particular dramatists. These appear to be written from an inexhaustible knowledge of European drama, yet at the same time with all the gusto of a young theatre-goer. That on Corneille is perhaps the best; but on Byron's plays the most unexpected. But the author is far too good a critic to make novelty his aim. Where there is nothing both new and true to be said, as on Racine, he is content to say well what most of us already thought.
The discussion of verse in chapter seven is almost equally good. Almost, but not, I think, quite. I welcome Mr Steiner's rejection of the false poetics with which critics and poets have been infected ever since Wordsworth wrote his disastrous passage about diction in the preface to Lyrical Ballads. But I think he sees only half the truth. He sees the distancing and exalting power of verse; but he seems to ignore the equal appropriateness of verse – though, to be sure, a very different sort of verse – to the coarsest humour. Some lyrics in Aristophanes, many epigrams of Martial, many lewd limericks of our own day, come to mind. The truth seems to be that as verse in tragedy makes splendid what in prose would be sheerly painful, so bawdy verse makes brisk and sportive what, without it, would be sheerly hateful.
Again, in a later passage, where Mr Steiner very justly praises the quality of Yeats's blank verse, I question whether his quotation really illustrates it. The last two lines of it, with their artfully simple syntax and their extremely regular iambic movement, seem to me to show Yeats in one of his unusual Tennysonian moments.
A few details are open to dispute. On p. 11 the letter to Can Grande is attributed to Dante; I believe most scholars now think it spurious. And don't we know something more about the Athenian audience than Mr Steiner allows on p. 114? Surely Aristotle says somewhere that Many are good judges of plays? On p. 320 Milton's refusal to choose between Ptolemy and Copernicus is described as ‘a gesture both serene and sorrowful.’ I suggest we should rather emphasise the amazing ingenuity whereby Milton exploits the poetic possibilities of both, evoking by his Chaos all the agoraphobia and bewilderment of ‘outer space’ but also giving us ‘hanging in a golden chain’ a finite, illuminated universe which, if imperfectly Ptolemaic, is as much a kosmos, an artefact, as Ptolemy's.
On the credit side there are felicities enough to fill this review with quotations. Dryden working over Shakespeare is like ‘a skillful transcription for piano of a complete orchestral score’ . . . ‘the stricter a style, the more communicative is any departure from its severity’ . . . drama involves ‘a miracle of controlled self-destruction.’ But it is time to turn to Mr Steiner's real theme. If I express mainly my dissents, that is by way of ‘opening the discussion’. I don't doubt that if he had me in the room Mr Steiner could produce satisfactory answers to some of them and interesting answers to all.
He says at the outset that when we say ‘tragic drama’ we know ‘not exactly but well enough’ what we mean. What he clearly means is a play with an unhappy ending, arising out of the assertion that ‘necessity is blind’ in which ‘the vengeful spite or injustice of the gods’ somehow ‘hallows the sufferer.’ He has every right to define tragedy thus if he pleases. But he seems also to think that his concept of tragedy covers all the works usually called tragedies, as if it had been reached by induction: ‘the word tragedy encloses in a single span both the Greek and the Elizabethan example.’ But does it, as defined by him? He is well aware that we have a happy ending in the Eumenides and something like one in the Oedipus at Colonus: but the short paragraph in which he attempts to discount these as special cases did not convince me. If we had more complete trilogies such endings would, I suspect, turn up more often; we know that the Promethean trilogy ended in reconciliation. Even among extant plays we have happy endings in the Philoctetes and the Iphigenia in Tauris. And what of such French plays as Le Cid or Esther?
The moral I would draw is that tragedy, taken as a common essence of which all ‘tragedies’ are instances, is a phantom concept. They share a common name for historical reasons; as the Postlethwaites are all so called not because they all exhibit a common character of Postlethwaiticity, but in virtue of their genetic connections. An Athenian knew whether the play he had seen was or was not a ‘tragedy’ by far coarser and more objective criteria than ours; more as a modern man knows whether he has been watching rugger or soccer.
And in plays with an unhappy ending do we always find the ‘hallowing effect’? Who is hallowed in the Agamemnon, the Medea, Macbeth, or Phèdre? Is the hallowing indisputably present anywhere except in Oedipus at Colonus and Lear?
An even more disquieting question rises in my mind. Is such hallowing a usual, or frequent, result of undeserved and irreparable disaster in the real world? And if it is not, what claim has the art which depicts it to be a specially ‘stark insight into human life’? Can we wholly avoid the suspicion that tragedy as Mr Steiner conceives it, is our final attempt ‘to see the world as the world's not’?
The purpose of the book is to account for the decay of the tragic drama. The author sees clearly that it has flourished only in a few periods, so that its existence, not its absence, is what really ‘calls for particular note.’ That being so, to account for its absence from any particular age seems a strange enterprise – like asking why some particular man is not six feet tall, or a champion sprinter. You could answer it only if you knew why anybody was, and then it would answer itself. But this objection is merely technical. If you explain the absence, you will, by implication, have explained the presence. If Mr Steiner can show why tragedy died we shall know why it ever lived.
The best of Mr Steiner's explanations, to my mind, turns on the loss of an accepted, and highly imaginative, Weltanschauung once common to the dramatist and his whole audience. This has no doubt raised difficulties for all poetry; but most acutely for the most public forms, epic and drama. I would even like to add a buttress to Mr Steiner's view. He wisely admits opera as, in some sort, the 19th-century successor to, or usurper of, the tragic stage. Is it not then highly significant that we find the nearest approach to great tragedy in the first three parts of The Ring which do really embody something like a widely accepted myth – the philosophy of Keats's Oceanus, the vague evolutionism or developmentalism for which Darwin was later to supply the scientific super-structure. By the tragedy I here mean the tragedy of Wotan who ‘rises to the height of willing his own downfall.’ (In Götterdämmerung, recasting old work, Wagner relapses both dramatically and musically into his earlier and far inferior manner.)
I am rather less convinced by the role which Mr Steiner attributes to the French Revolution, conceived as ‘a triumph of the militant bourgeoisie – with its lack of literary background and its taste for pathos and happy endings.’ Courtly romance, no less than popular melodrama, is full of pathos and happy endings. There is some danger of making ‘the rise of the middle classes’ a maid of all work. I have hardly ever read a historical book which did not begin by telling me that in the period under consideration this ill-defined class was rising into new importance. Mysterious body, which appears to have been always rising, and working all evil by its rise, up to the very moment when I was born into it!
Mr Steiner also suggests that ‘the middle-class spectator’ in the revolutionary period wanted escapism in the theatre because the real world was then giving him ‘a surfeit and tumult of emotion.’ ‘After the great levies had marched and retreated across Europe, the ancient balance between public and private life had altered.’ But does this apply to England? There, surely, no class shared less in these marches and retreats than the bourgeoisie or viewed them with greater phlegm? I doubt, furthermore, whether ‘surfeit and tumult of emotion’ were so absent from the audience at the Globe. In every age the most private life will often be surfeited with emotion; and the Elizabethans lived under the permanent fear of hell-fire, witches, plagues, a second Armada, and a disputed succession with a consequent civil war.
Mr Steiner is good on the ambivalent relations between Romanticism and tragedy. He sees in the Romantics, on the one hand, an ‘impulse towards drama.’ But he also sees that the essentially lyrical and egocentric character of Romanticism was inevitably fatal to ‘the controlled self-destruction’ which drama demands (‘Falstaff lives because he is not Shakespeare’). I could wish, however, that he had not, without qualification, connected Romanticism with Revolution as a liberation from reason. It was not for nothing that the Revolution made Reason a goddess. It attacked the ancien régime not only for iniquities but for ‘absurdities’ (as the author agrees on p. 125). The ‘reason’ from which Wordsworth records his liberation in The Prelude is not that of Descartes but that of Godwin.
Once, and I think only once, Mr Steiner is misled into blurring a point by the incisiveness of his own style. In distinguishing ‘near-tragedy’ – drama that ends, like Faust or Peer Gynt with some sort of redemption – he says ‘near-tragedy is, in fact, another word for melodrama.’ He may or may not be right. But the trouble is that ‘melodrama’ is more a pejorative than a descriptive term. And I suggest, as a fundamental canon of exposition, that a distinction of kinds should never be thus combined with a judgment of comparative value. This always weakens it and distracts our attention. If you say, ‘This is not port but sherry’, you speak to the purpose. If you say, ‘This is not port, but the vile drink sherry’, you have introduced a red herring. Tell us afterwards how you dislike sherry, but don't mix this up with the distinction.
It would even be argued that when we are discussing the death of tragedy the term melodrama needs to be defined with especial care. I rather suspect that an extreme sensitivity to the charge of melodrama, felt by poet, actor, and spectator alike, may be one symptom of an ethos which renders tragedy impossible. The flamboyant gesture, the uninhibited emotion fully articulated in eloquent speech, are suspect. They were first driven away by the Victorian ideal of the Strong Silent Man and the Stiff Upper Lip, and the collapse of that ideal into mere cynicism has banished them still further. Irony and suspicion have suffered a hypertrophy. Tragedy is certainly a different thing from melodrama; but I doubt whether those who are not prepared to risk the one can ever make, act, or fully enjoy the other. We might perhaps describe melodrama as ‘the tragic in exile.’ It is what happens to certain elements of tragedy when they are rejected by cultured people and abandoned by the masses.