Page:Tragedies of Euripides (Way 1896) v2.djvu/29

Euripides. I own that I now like him better than Sophocles."^[1] Browning, in Balaustion's Adventure and Aristophanes' Apology, has done a great poet's utmost to commend him to our reverent study. "It is ill," says Joubert, "to differ from the poets in poetry, and from the saints in religion."

Modern opinion: its limitations.The world of scholars is, perhaps, still divided into two camps on the question of his true position; but the voice of dispraise is not as of old. It is tempered by much discrimination, and somewhat faint with diffidence. It may be doubted whether critics who brush aside the judgment of antiquity with a few supercilious observations on "degraded taste" and "decadence of literature," have given full weight to an important consideration, viz., that the ancients, whose verdict, early pronounced and adhered to with increasing emphasis through hundreds of years, they have called in question, were, in many respects, in a far better position to judge than we moderns can be. Whereas we possess but seven plays of Aeschylus, seven of Sophocles, and nineteen of Euripides, they possessed all, or nearly all, that these three had written,^[2] as well as a vast number of the works of the contemporary and later dramatists. Hence a full comparative study was possible to them. Again, to these old-time students the great dramatists spoke in their mother-tongue; and, however ripe may be the scholarship, and however "thrice-repured " the taste of a modern critic, there are inevitable limitations to his judgment of an ancient, which none will recognise more promptly and appreciate more fully than himself. The nuances of signification, the connotation of words which usage creates, and which no lexicon can preserve, no comparative study of authors re-