Journalistic Scholarship:

...The use of scholarly information to bolster theses and lead to conclusions is admirable, for, by itself, information is inert...

...Some are evidence for one of his basic propositions, some for the other...

...and the romantic poet Holder lin's Empedokles is such that "not since the Prometheus had drama known such austere passion" (hence not even in much of the best of Sophocles), and "drama has never again approximated so closely the Greek ideal...

...We are informed further that romanticism is "a redemptive mythology...

...To ask why Oedipus should have been chosen for his agony or why Macbeth should have met the Witches on his path, is to ask for reason and justification from the voiceless night...

...Steiner's paradigm for tragedy is always Greek, but which Greek plays does he mean...

...At the end of his book, Steiner writes: "I believe that literary criticism has about it neither rigor nor proof...

...Steiner's phrases sometimes have interchangeable words (and sound as though one were eavesdropping on R. P. Blackmur through a closed door): politics are a translation of rhetoric into action...

...Reviewed by Ralph Ross Professor of humanities, University of Minnesota George Steiner has either invented a new genre or brought one to fruition...

...The third "possibility" is, indeed, impossible unless the second one is false, but it cannot be true unless the first possibility is also true...

...And the treatment of Rousseau as anti-Cartesian and as helping create a romantic French Revolution (which worshipped the Goddess Reason, chose neo-classical art for its own and emerged ideologically from the Enlightenment) is an example of sheerly external scholarship, which keeps the mind tidy only by seeing that the chronology is in order...

...That is not true about literary criticism, which uses a text carefully as evidence for every assertion, but it is a just description of Steiner's own practice and, I suggest, may be an adequate definition of journalistic scholarship as practiced by the author...

...Are there unnatural and romantic forms of tragedy...

...This does not stop him from writing of "the essential force behind the conventions of tragedy," which turns out to be ""the notion that the structure of society is a microcosm of the cosmic design and that history conforms to patterns of justice and chastisement as if it were a morality play set in motion by the gods for our instruction...

...and "such a view of the human condition is radically optimistic...

...Steiner thinks of it as criticism, though it is not, for he doesn't pause long enough in his swift and exciting pace to perform the critic's basic function of discovering the relations and meanings in a work of art...

...But at the end, he writes of " the threefold possibility of our theme: that tragedy is, indeed, dead...

...Where it is honest, it is passionate, private experience seeking to persuade...

...The excitement, even fascination, of the book is indisputable, but the ideas often contradict each other, the breadth of the reading is not paralleled by depth and the scholarship is often only external...

...But tragic drama arises from the postulate that "necessity is blind," an assertion Steiner repeats again and again...

...It cannot engender any natural form of tragic drama...

...Or when the text reads, "Carried over into politics, romanticism became the French Revolution " one wonders why not "Carried over into art, the French Revolution became romanticism...

...that it carries on in its essential tradition despite changes in technical form...

...e.g., "But the ash was too thick in its mouth...

...it tells us that the purposes of men sometimes run against the grain of inexplicable and destructive forces that lie outside' yet very close...

...Such a definition, of course, has little to do with the passage about cosmic design and justice as the force behind the conventions of tragedy...

...Finally, the title of the book is misleading...

...Confusion deepens when it is asserted that "romantic tragedy" is a contradiction in terms...

...Perhaps the closest Steiner comes to explaining the nature of tragedy is when he tells us: "Tragedy would have us know that there is in the very fact of human existence a provocation or paradox...

...That sounds fairly Judaic, one would think, with little of "blind necessity" in it...

...The deux ex machina in Greek tragedies may be deplored on grounds of taste, but he is there, and his rational use of power can scarcely be called "blind necessity...

...Here the "incomparable" is immediately compared...

...And it gets an even deeper coloring when "romantic Hellenism" produces the two plays that, with Milton's Samson Agonistes, "come nearest in European literature to a reincarnation of the Greek ideal...

...At the outset, Steiner announces: "Tragedy is alien to the Judaic sense of the world.' That sense, found later, he thinks, in Marx, is that " the order of the universe and of man's estate is accessible to reason," and "over the sum of time, there can be no doubt that the ways of God to man are just...

...Oedipus himself in Oedipus at Colonus argues that "he should have been excused on grounds of ignorance," and Sophocles thereby moves from an ethic of guilt by pollution to an ethic of guilt through responsibility...

...There is no name I know of for the genre, so let me call it journalistic scholarship...

...Schiller apparently did it again: Although Maria Stuart is "incomparable," the Braut von Messina matches Sophocles in passages...

...Contradiction is everywhere in this book...

...Again, in explaining Ibsen's thought, Emperor and Galilean is never mentioned—although Ibsen regarded the two plays that compose it as his masterpiece...

...That won't help either, for Steiner pronounces that Christianity, too, is anti-tragic...

...The rush of the prose is not infrequently the result of devices like starting a new paragraph with what normally would be the end of the preceding one...

...Let me say at once that the book is good to read and is filled with ideas of considerable interest...

...this is a "blind necessity" passage...

...Thus Corneille, we learn, understood political life better than Shakespeare did...

...But to discuss Shakespeare's grasp of political life without even mentioning The Tempest, King Lear, Macbeth or Othello, is like trying to comprehend Hamlet without the Prince...

...From this point of view, it is difficult to name a truly romantic poet —Keats is described as, in some ways, "superbly classical"—except Rousseau himself...

...and the externals of scholarship are not absent...

...How about "rhetoric is a translation of politics into speech...

...But," you may say, "he is thinking of mediaeval Christianity here, not of Judaism...

...Perhaps the rigor Steiner rules out of criticism might have helped in the statement of his conclusion...

...and Peer Gynt and Brand are mentioned only in passing as "early experimental plays" —although they are verse dramas of real stature, which lead to Emperor and Galilean, and with it provide the scaffolding of Ibsen's philosophy...

...He says, for example, "To argue that Oedipus should have been excused on grounds of ignorance is to diminish to absurdity the weight and meaning of the tragic action...

...This is not, it seems to me, what he set out to show, nor are the three possibilities distinct...

...And Steiner seems to feel more strongly about this proposition than the other...

...Steiner should be applauded for using his wide range of information to some purpose, but often his particular use is not so laudable, for he omits material that might count against his thesis or he treats the material as though it were something else...

...would at least leave open the question whether tragedy had died, and Steiner in fact leaves the question open...

...It is, with Boris Godunov, the one instance in which romanticism rose fully to the occasion of tragedy...

...The dates are at least as good for the second statement as the first...

...It might be saved by an interrogative...

...it is based on very wide reading in at least four languages...

...or, lastly, that tragic drama might come back to life...

...In the early parts of the book, he seems about to close it...

...Yet Steiner says elsewhere in the book: "Maria Stuart is an incomparable work...

...I don't understand the force of the adjective "natural...

...Some of their plays are contrasted briefly to make this point...