Page:Euripides and his age.djvu/13

Rh from the works of Euripides. Another good writer, Steiger, draws an elaborate parallel between Euripides and Ibsen and finds the one key to Euripides in his realism and his absolute devotion to truth. Yet an older generation of Euripides-lovers felt these things quite differently. When Macaulay proclaimed that there was absolutely nothing in literature to equal The Bacchae, he was certainly not thinking about rationalism or realism. He felt the romance, the magic, the sheer poetry. So did Milton and Shelley and Browning. And so did the older English scholars like Porson and Elmsley. Porson, while admitting that the critics have many things to say against Euripides as compared, for instance, with Sophocles, answers in his inarticulate way "ilium admiramur, hunc legimus"—"we admire the one, but we read the other." Elmsley, so far from regarding Euripides as mainly a thinker, remarks in passing that he was a poet singularly addicted to contradicting himself. To Porson and Elmsley the poetry of Euripides might or might not be good on the highest plane, it was at any rate delightful. Quite different again are the momentous judgments pronounced upon him as a writer of tragedy