t Euripides, whose coldness, he asserted, had belied this
union, and made him guilty of a crime inexpiable in the sight of the
gods.

Yet he could not dismiss him from his thoughts. He wanted to go over the
old ground with him, and put himself in the right. Balaustion and her
husband were in a manner representatives of the dead tragedian. That was
why he had come. He was not sure that he expressed, or at the moment
even felt, all that he had just repeated. "Drunk he was with the good
Thasian, and drunk he probably had been." Nevertheless, the impulse he
had thus obeyed sprang perhaps from some real, if hitherto undiscovered
depths in his soul.

Up to this moment his defence has been carried on in a disjointed
manner, and consists rather in defying attack than in resisting it: the
defiant mood being only another aspect of the perturbed condition which
has brought him to Balaustion's door. It finds its natural
starting-point in the coarse treatment of things and persons which his
"Thesmophoriazusae," with its "monkeying" of Euripides,[39] has so
recently displayed. But he reminds Balaustion that the art of comedy is
young. It is only three generations since Susarion gave it birth. (He
explains this more fully later on.) It began when he and his companions
daubed their faces with wine lees, mounted a cart, and drove by night
through the villages: crying from house to house, how this man starved
his labourers, that other kissed his neighbour's wife, and so on. The
first comedian battered with big stones. He, Aristophanes, is at the
stage of the wooden club which he has taken pains to plane smooth, and
inlay with shining studs. The mere polished steel will be for his
successors.

"And is he approaching the age of steel?" Balaustion asks, well knowing
that he is not. "His play failed last year. Was his triumph to-night due
to a gentler tone? Is he teaching mankind that brute blows are not human
fighting, still less the expression of godlike power; and that ignorance
and folly are convicted by their opposites, not by themselves?"

"Not he, indeed," he replies; "he improves on his art: he does not turn
it topsy-turvy. _He_ does not work on abstractions. _His_ power is not
that of the recluse. He wants human beings with their approbation and
their sympathy, and his Athens, to be pleased in her own way. He leaves
the rest to Euripides. Real life is the grist to _his_ mill. It is clear
enough, however, that the times are again