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 against him.  Every year more restrictions; Euripides with his priggishness; Socrates with his books and his moonshine, and his supercilious ways:  never resenting his (Aristophanes’) fun, nor seeming even to notice it[40], not condescending to take exception to any but the ‘tragedians;’ as if he, the author of the ‘Birds,’ was a mere comic poet!” Then follows a tirade on the variety of his subjects; their depth, their significance, and the mawkishness and pedantry which they are intended to confute.

“Drunk! yes, he owns that he is.”  This in answer to a look from Balaustion, which has rebuked a too hazardous joke—­“Drink is the proper inspiration.  How else was he beaten in the ‘Clouds,’ his masterpiece, but that his opponent had inspired himself with drink, and he this time had not?[41] Purity! he has learned what that is worth”—­With more in the same strain.  Now, however, that his adventure is told, the tumult of feeling in some degree subsides, and the more serious aspects of the apology will come into play.