“What have you done,” she continues, “beyond devoting the gold of your genius to work, which dross, in the person of a dozen predecessors or contemporaries, has produced as well.  Pun and parody, satire and invective, quaintness of fancy, and elegance, have each had its representative as successful as you.  Your life-work, until this moment, has been the record of a genius increasingly untrue to its better self.  Such satire as yours, however well intended, could advance no honest cause.  Its exaggerations make it useless for either praise or blame.  Its uselessness is proved by the result:  your jokes have recoiled upon yourself.  The statues still stand which your mud has stained; the lightning flash of truth can alone destroy them.  War still continues, in spite of the seductions with which you have invested peace.  Such improvements as are in progress take an opposite direction to that which you prescribe.  Public sense and decency are only bent on cleansing your sty.”

And now her tone changes.  “Has Euripides succeeded any better?  None can say; for he spoke to a dim future above and beyond the crowd.  If he fail, you two will be fellows in adversity; and, meanwhile, I am convinced that your wish unites with his to waft the white sail on its way.[48] Your nature, too, is kingly.”  She concludes with a tribute to the “Poet’s Power,” which is one with creative law, above and behind all potencies of heaven and earth; and to that inherent royalty of truth, in which alone she could venture to approach one so great as he.  He too, as poet, must reign by truth, if he assert his proper sway.

       “Nor, even so, had boldness nerved my tongue,
       But that the other king stands suddenly
       In all the grand investiture of death,
       Bowing your knee beside my lowly head—­
       Equals one moment!” (vol. xiii. p. 144.)

Then she bids him “arise and go.”  Both have done homage to Euripides.

“Not so,” he replies; “their discussion is not at an end.  She has defended Euripides obliquely by attacking himself.  Let her do it in a more direct fashion.”  This leads up to what seems to her the best defence possible:  that reading of the “Herakles” which the entrance of Aristophanes had suspended.  Its closing lines set Aristophanes musing.  The chorus has said: 

       “The greatest of all our friends of yore,
       We have lost for evermore!” (p. 231.)

“Who,” he asks, “has been Athens’ best friend?  He who attracted her by the charm of his art, or he who repelled her by its severity?” He answers this by describing the relative positions of himself and Euripides in an image suggested by the popular game of Cottabos.[49] “The one was fixed within his ‘globe;’ the other adapted himself to its rotations.  Euripides received his views of life through a single aperture, the one channel of ‘High’ and ‘Right.’  Aristophanes has welcomed also the opposite impressions