Page:Tragedies of Euripides (Way 1896) v2.djvu/30

cover for us; the verse-music of which only the ear could be cognisant, and which must be lost to men who now cannot even agree on such elementary requisites for its appreciation as the pronunciation of the Greek alphabet and the effect of accentuation—all these entered into the old readers' and hearers' estimate, and weighed with an absolute sureness where we must needs depend on guesswork. Scholars are of course fully alive to all this; and so, in their appraisement of the Greek dramatists, limit their consideration mainly to features which the baldest prose translation displays as well as the original text. Such are, the poet's adherence to or departure from a certain standard of the ideal, his philosophy of life, his attitude to religion, his social and political views, the artistic perfection of his plots, his management of dialogue, the subject-matter of his choruses, his presentment of character, and so forth. Yet here too we have to guard against judging the thought, the art, the feeling, the ethics of a far-off age and alien race by canons which have been in part modified by influences that have had birth in far later times and under very different conditions.^[1] In some respects the Greeks regarded their drama and its teachings from a point of view now lost. Some critics, while recognising this, yet assume that they can set themselves right by taking Aristophanes as their guide. Here, however, they need to exercise as much caution as we ourselves should recommend to critics of some future age who should assume that they could recover the lost literary standpoint of our nineteenth century by taking Byron to adjust their estimate of Wordsworth, and certain issues of Blackwood and the Quarterly to assist them in finding the true place of Keats. Once more,