Hazlitt held the French Revolution responsible for bequeathing to Britain an over-politicised public sphere which had marginalised the Muse, who now ‘droops in bye-corners of the mind’. Steiner’s arguments are in fact pre-dated by well over a century, for the death-of-tragedy thesis finds its first articulation in an 1820 article in London Magazine by the celebrated essayist William Hazlitt.

Instead of assessing the accuracy of Steiner’s prognosis, though, this essay will show that his claims were not the first of their kind similar anxieties ran throughout the nineteenth century, and while dramatic tragedy certainly did decline, nineteenth-century novelists were able to take its rusting parts and make something new out of them. This is a lovely little myth of literary history, in which Steiner discerns ‘a strain of melancholy historicism which leads directly from the romantics to Spengler’, 1 but his own work springs from the same Romantic tendency towards telling another story of decline and twilight. On the following page, Steiner discusses Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s anxiety that the colossal birth of Shakespeare so exhausted Nature’s bounty that, in a kind of creative Malthusianism, she now could only produce dwarves like himself and the other Romantics. Here the heroic individualism of tragedy gave way to the social realities of class and economics, considerably less glamorous determinisms than the Greek gods of old. Steiner argues that tragedy was well on its way out by the end of the eighteenth century, largely owing to a changing intellectual climate uncongenial to tragedy – the chief culprits were Enlightenment ideals of reason, the utopian optimism of revolutionary politics, and Romanticism more widely – while the ‘decline of serious drama’ was accelerated even further in the nineteenth century by ‘the rise of the novel’. For it is one long, elaborate lament – the prolonged cry of a critic wounded by the loss of what was once the most eminent art form in the Western world, lifting up a desperate finger to charge modernity with its murder.

George Steiner’s The Death of Tragedy (1961) was one of the best-known works of literary criticism in the twentieth century, and though its sweeping trajectory is at times more than open to scholarly qualification, it remains important for us to listen to its lament.

Not That Complicated by Isabel Murray