When George Steiner announced The Death of Tragedy, in 1961, it was already somewhat unclear whether tragedy was said to be dead or dying, or in fact on the way to being reborn. Since then, Leo Aylen’s Greek Tragedy and the Modern World has challengingly affirmed the possibility of actual equivalents to Greek tragedy in our time. And now Raymond Williams flatly entitles his own critical diagnosis: Modern Tragedy.

These questions of course extend far beyond the theatre. Ultimately they concern the entire substance of our culture, and especially our age’s increasing estrangement from religion. For Tragedy — whether Greek, mediaeval, Elizabethan or neo-classical – has, typically, sprung from societies rooted in religion; although the greatest moments of tragic art were precisely those moments when received beliefs stood under radical historical challenge. To ask why traditional tragic forms have increasingly been abandoned in the theatre of our time is thus, to raise questions we might otherwise not even be able to formulate about our epoch’s relations to religion – and about the resources of humanist faith.

Raymond Williams’ confrontation of these questions seems to me crucial, in several ways. Unmistakably at the growing-point of humanist consciousness, his work is at once a critique of tragic theory, a socio-critical map of modern tragic literature, and a reassertion in depth of revolutionary imperatives in the face of objections to revolution truly wrestled with. Significantly, the book concludes not with any theoretical summing up but with an actual drama of revolution.

Kierkegaard’s The Concept of Irony with Constant Reference to Socrates, submitted at the University of Copenhagen in 1841 for the degree of Magister Artium, has at last appeared in English translation.1 Not before time. It is the last of his major works to reach the English speaking public, and certainly the one without which all the rest of Kierkegaard’s work is in danger of being misunderstood. It is interesting to note that 1841 is the year when Marx took his doctorate at Jena. Marx has been accorded every kind of critical attention, but Kierkegaard, discovered late, is still emerging into his full importance. Last summer Gallimard of Paris issued Kierkegaard vivant. Comprising papers read at a recent U.N.E.S.C.O. conference by such figures as Sartre, Heidegger, Jaspers, Marcel etc, it forms an eloquent proof that the thought of Kierkegaard is being revalued by those very thinkers who ‘discovered’ him thirty years ago. Collins, in publishing The Concept of Irony, adds one further work of ‘the living Kierkegaard’ to their previous excellent output in the field.

Lee Capel has rendered us great service in letting us have at last his polished and erudite translation. It has taken a long time, at least six years in the correcting. The difficulties of this work are famous. Now the work is available to anyone who, while interested in the enigmatic thought of Kierkegaard, has not a ready command of a fluent and punning Danish.

The Concept of Irony deserves to be well-known, hailed, read and enjoyed. Rarely can such a witty, good-humoured, mature, intelligent and ferociously yea-saying work have appeared as an academic dissertation.

Professor Germain Grisez of Georgetown has written his criticism of contraception from the viewpoint of a natural-law theorist. He goes about his task in a tidily business-like way, first setting forth some of his own credentials:

Husband and wife, to use some earlier imagery of the book were not ‘goaded on to wrong paths by enthusiasm over the greener pastures projected in an illusory light by the latest phantasms of secular thought.’ Being thus armored in these durable orthodoxies, Professor Grisez adds a kindly admonition for many of his readers, ‘Those not accustomed to subtle argument, as well as those who do not respect reason, will be little moved by what I have to say. Against the heart reason has little power, and it is just as impotent against sentimentalism which has become confused with charity as it is against plain ill will.’

The subtlety of the argument is immediately evident in Professor Grisez’s derivation of the fundamental and absolutely basic principles of morality from our knowledge of man’s intrinsic inclinations.

‘The Church in Mission’ is a collection of papers by various authors, mostly translated from the French, which have been published in recent years. There are eleven; and nine would have been enough. After an excellent introduction from Information Catholique we are given two papers on missionary theology which make weary reading. Presumably it is a prudent convention, before launching into any subject, to survey what has already been done, but in the field of theology this can be tedious, and the reader begins to wonder whether the Church is well served by writings which wrap up a few simple ideas in many yards of abstractions. In these sixty two pages we learn that whereas at one time the primary aim of the missions was said to be to plant the Church in pagan lands, which took precedence over the aim to save souls, -more recent thought has reached the conclusion that the first cannot be done without the second. There is an interior as well as an exterior Church, a res of which the visible Church is the sacrament. That the theologian is not redundant when dealing with living issues can be appreciated in the articles by P. A. Liégé, who writes realistically and economically on ‘The Theology of the Church and the Mission Pastoral’ ‘Religious Liberty’ and ‘Before the Catechuminate’. His third paper contains this important paragraph:

Towards the end of the sixth century, the invading pagans were pushing their way northwards along the eastern coast of Britain. At this period too, Aneirin the poet was singing his verses in the court of Mynyddawg Mwynfawr at Edinburgh. He was to sing the lament at the death of the brave three hundred who lost their lives in the desperate attempt to retake Catterick, and so halt the pagan advance. Farther to the west, about his time too, Taliesin was celebrating the victories of Urien Rheged and of his son Owain. He also sang their elegies. These two are the earliest Welsh poets of whom we can say with reasonable certainty that we have some of their authentic work. Both of them can use the word bedydd (baptism) to mean the world. To them, the only world they knew was the baptised world. All outside that was darkness and barbarism.

In 1823, at meetings at Aberystwyth and Bala, the Welsh Calvin-istic Methodists met and agreed on the forty four articles of their Cyffes Ffydd, their confession of Faith. It was published in book form in the following year, and literate Wales could read and learn by rote the restrained and powerful language, the finest prose of the nineteenth century written to give glory to God and to instruct His people.

It is a long cry from the sixth to the nineteenth century. The earliest Welsh literature was written in Southern Scotland, before Wales as an entity had come into existence.