At every turn of his argument, Aristophanes is sure of her comprehension. He knows that he need not adapt himself to a feebler mind: "You understand," he says again and again. At length he comes, in his narration, to the end of their feast that night, and tells how, rising from the banquet interrupted by the entrance of Sophocles with tidings of Euripides dead, he had cried to his friends that they must go and see
"The Rhodian rosy with Euripides! . . .
And here you stand with those warm golden eyes!
Maybe, such eyes must strike conviction, turn
One's nature bottom-upwards, show the base . . .
Anyhow, I have followed happily
The impulse, pledged my genius with effect,
Since, come to see you, I am shown—myself!"
She instantly bids him, as she has honoured him, that he do honour to Euripides. But, seized by perversity, he declares that if she will give him the Herakles tablets (which he has discerned, lying with the other gifts of Euripides), he will prove to her, by this play alone, the "main mistake" of her worshipped Master.
She warmly interrupts, reproving him. Their house is the shrine of that genius, and he has entered it, "fresh from his worst infamy"—yet she has withheld the words she longs to speak, she has inclined, nay yearned, to reverence him:
"So you but suffer that I see the blaze
And not the bolt—the splendid fancy-fling,
Not the cold iron malice, the launched lie."
If he does this, if he shows her
"A mere man's hand ignobly clenched against
Yon supreme calmness,"
she will interpose:
"Such as you see me! Silk breaks lightning's blow!"
But Aristophanes, at that word of "calmness," exclaims vehemently. Death is the great unfairness! Once a man dead, the survivors croak, "Respect him." And so one must—it is the formidable claim, "immunity of faultiness from fault's punishment." That is why he, Aristophanes, has always attacked the living; he knew how they would hide their heads, once dead! Euripides had chosen the other way; "men pelted him, but got no pellet back"; and it was not magnanimity but arrogance that prompted him to such silence. Those at whom Aristophanes or he should fling mud were by that alone immortalised—and Euripides, "that calm cold sagacity," knew better than to do them such service.