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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 July 2024
When Walter Stein, in his book Criticism as Dialogue, proposes his version of criticism and takes it into the area of tragedy, we are challenged to reconsider some essential notions. It is when faced with tragedy, perhaps, that criticism meets its most exacting responsibilities; what it makes of tragedy reveals its inner nature most clearly. What, then, are we to make of Stein’s argument that the demands which criticism faces are nothing less than metaphysical? What do we say to the various stages of his argument ?
Do we agree, for example, that in Arnold we have a key-figure who fails to meet these demands and whose work can be characterized by such words as ‘reductio’ and ‘surrender’ ?
‘His religious strengths (like his insistence that God is “a term thrown out, so to speak, at a not fully grasped object”—not a “fixed and rigid idea”) as well as his complacent, wholesale surrender of dogmatic tradition and metaphysical concepts points directly to present ferments.’
Again, how shall we formulate our uneasiness at the following suggestion ?
‘Dr Leavis may have been led into an undue disregard for conceptual thought as such, including the conceptual presuppositions of his own critical practice.’
page 367 note 1 Stein, Walter, Criticism as Dialogue, Cambridge, 1969CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
page 367 note 2 Stein, p. 5.
page 367 note 3 Stein, p. 38.
page 367 note 4 Stein, p. 48.
page 367 note 5 Stein, p. 50.
page 368 note 1 Nietzsche, Friedrich, The Birth of Tragedy, New York, 1956, p. 92Google Scholar.
page 368 note 2 Stein, p. 96.
page 368 note 3 Stein, p. 107.
page 369 note 1 Knights, L. C., Some Shakespearean Themes, London, 1960, p. 101Google Scholar.
page 369 note 2 Knight, Wilson, The Wheel of Fire, London, 1962, p. 197Google Scholar.
page 369 note 3 Bradley, A. C., Shakespearean Tragedy, London, 1962, p. 276Google Scholar.
page 369 note 4 Bradley, p. 210.
page 369 note 5 Bradley, p. 239.
page 369 note 6 Bradley, p. 245.
page 369 note 7 Bradley, p. 226.
page 370 note 1 Bradley, p. 254.
page 370 note 2 Bradley, p. 255.
page 371 note 1 Johnson on Shakespeare, ed. Raleigh, , Oxford, 1965, p. 158Google Scholar.
page 371 note 2 Boswell, , Life of Johson, ed. Malone, , London, 1821, II, p. 176Google Scholar.
page 371 note 3 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, ‘No Worst, there is None’, Selected Poems, London, 1961, p. 65Google Scholar.
page 372 note 1 Bradley, p. 271. I am influenced here by Dr Wilbur Sanders' Cambridge lectures on ‘Shakespeare and the Heroic’.
page 373 note 1 Norman Mailer once expressed the wish to see Lear acted by Ernest Hemingway.
page 373 note 2 Stein, p. 151.
page 374 note 1 Wordsworth, ‘A slumber did my spirit seal’, Poetical Works, Oxford, 1913, p. 187. From questioning the sense in which King Lear can be said to be a tragedy, we are led to ask just how many tragedies Shakespeare wrote; the word is used loosely by critics, but there is no reason to assume that all the plays conventionally called tragedies are so, in the full sense of the word‐they can still be about tragedy.
page 375 note 1 Williams, Raymond, Modern Tragedy, London, 1966, p. 59Google Scholar.
page 375 note 2 Stein, p. 217.
page 376 note 1 Leavis, F. R., ‘Tragedy and the Medium?’The Common Pursuit, London, 1966, p. 129Google Scholar.
page 376 note 2 Nietzsche, p. 93.
page 378 note 1 Nietzsche, p. 142.
page 378 note 2 Stein, p. 219.
page 378 note 3 Lawrence, D. H., Phoenix II, London, 1968Google Scholar, note to ‘The Crown’, p. 364.
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