Page:Tragedies of Euripides (Way 1896) v2.djvu/11



position of Euripides in literature may fairly be called unique. Other great writers, not only of antiquity, but of modern times, have, when once immediate posterity has countersigned the verdict of their contemporaries which allotted them a place amongst the immortals, thereafter held it as by unassailable right. Homer, Virgil, Dante, Chaucer, are but examples of a multitude whose crowns have not only never been challenged, but have gathered lustre with the lapse of ages. The eighteenth-century eclipse of Shakspeare is, in our own literature, the one striking exception to the rule. Yet this phenomenon, due to a transient foreign literary influence, was but the temporary reversal of a verdict which had not been as yet confirmed by long prescription. But it has been the singular fate of Euripides, after more than two thousand years of intellectual sovereignty, to find himself within the last hundred years assailed as thinker, as poet, as moralist, as dramatic artist, by a sturdy phalanx of very positive scholar-critics, who seem for some time to have carried with them at least the tacit acquiescence of the Universities. The vituperative phase of their opposition has indeed passed by; but the note of judicial condemnation is still heard from some whose learning invests their judgment with a certain authority which makes it no light matter to differ from them.