Note 11 — Chapter XIV · GREEK TRAGEDY AND EURIPIDES. (continued 2)

Goethe was very severe on the critics who could not appreciate Euripides: "To feel and respect a great personality, one must be something one's self. All those who denied the sublime to Euripides were either poor wretches incapable of comprehending such sublimity, or shameless charlatans, who, by their presumption, wished to make more of themselves, and really did make more of themselves, than they were" (Eckermann's Conversations of Goethe, English ed., vol. ii. p. 377). In another place he indicates the spirit in which any adverse criticism of Euripides should be attempted: "A poet whom Socrates called his friend, whom Aristotle lauded, whom Menander admired, and for whom Sophocles and the city of Athens put on mourning on hearing of his death, must certainly have been something. If a modern man like Schlegel must pick out faults in so great an ancient, he ought only to do it upon his knees" (ib., vol. i. p. 378). Again (ib., vol. i. p. 260), he energetically combats the opinion that Euripides had caused the decline of Greek tragedy.