ALCESTIS.
'Cela vous apprendra', dit d'Artagnan, 'à traiter d'une façon plus
courtoise les hôtes que Dieu vous envoie'.
Dumas.
Apology, if I am not mistaken, is no longer due from an enquirer, who in approaching the study of Euripides, will start, as he has done before, from the assumption that in this region no high road of authority has yet been laid out. It is still a case of exploration; we are not bound, and shall scarcely be wise, to follow religiously in tracks of which one thing only can be said with certainty, that they do not lead to the goal. "Nothing is more certain", as I read with satisfaction in the Preface to the welcome Euripides in English Verse, of which the first volume has just now[1], opportunely for me, been issued by Mr Way, "nothing is more certain than that the old fashion of disparaging his genius (in which Schlegel led the way, giving all the weight of his authority to a sentence which others were too uncritical or too timorous to revise) is now utterly discredited, and that we have ceased to regard the generations of Greeks and Romans, who loved and reverenced him, as degenerate fools and blind. and are at last making some humble efforts to understand them and to recover their point of view". Whether Mr Way is justified or not in his expectation of general sympathy, he has at least himself the credit of setting a good example. The right view of Euripides, the capacity of understanding him, is a thing which we moderns have yet to recover; and our only way is to begin with recognizing that somewhere in our notions about the poet
- ↑ Aug. 1894. Most of this first essay had been written; but I have remodelled some parts.
