Page:Tragedies of Euripides (Way 1894) v1.djvu/17

Rh genuineness. In examining these destructive-constructive assaults on the text, it has more than once seemed to me that the impatience of a too-clever scholar has rejected a deep thought instinct with poetic feeling, in favour of an obvious and commonplace sentiment. The heavy-shotted dogmatism of such emendators, the contempt which they pour upon the old reading, might well make the conservative translator feel as if the confession of his faith were an admission of imbecility. Yet no sympathetic reader will tamely suffer his private judgment to be taken by storm, and the more I study Euripides, and try to realize, with respect to each reading thus arraigned and condemned, the mental attitude of the poet and his audience, the less am I satisfied that modern scholarship is doing itself credit by this eagerness to reject MS. readings on purely aesthetic grounds. The point of view of the critic is too often one which (to put it mildly) was not demonstrably that of the Athenian audience, while as for that of the poet—only from a Shakespeare could we feel justified in accepting ex cathedrâ judgments on questions of poetic taste or dramatic instinct in Euripides.

While following in the main Paley as an interpreter, I have to acknowledge very considerable obligations to the editions of the other scholars who have done so much to assist students to appreciate Euripides. When I have ventured to differ from one or other of them, it has been because I believed myself to be supported by very high, or at least respectable, authority.

Notes are no part of a translator's duty: a translation is in itself a commentary, and a translator who claims to have found a clear and relevant meaning for a reading challenged on the score of unintelligibility has thereby furnished, in Conington's phrase, "a piece of embodied criticism," which has at any rate the merit of brevity. I have therefore limited my notes almost exclusively to the defence of readings which