--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.

As he speaks thus, Balaustion's "heart burns up within her to her
tongue." She exclaims that the baseness of Aristophanes' attack, of his
"mud-volleying" at Euripides, consists in the fact that both men had, at
bottom, the same ideals; they both extended the limitations of art,
both were desirous from their hearts that truth should triumph--yet
Aristophanes, thus desiring, poured out his supremacy of power against
the very creature who loved all that _he_ loved! And she declares that
such shame cuts through all his glory. Comedy is in the dust, laid low
by him:

"Balaustion pities Aristophanes!"

Now she has gone too far--she has spoken too boldly.

"Blood burnt the cheek-bone, each black eye flashed fierce:
'But this exceeds our license!'"

--so he exclaims; but then, seizing his native weapon, stops ironically
to search out an excuse for her. He finds it soon. She and her husband
are but foreigners; they are "uninstructed"; the born and bred Athenian
needs must smile at them, if he do not think a frown more fitting for
such ignorance. But strangers are privileged: Aristophanes will condone.
They want to impose their squeamishness on sturdy health: that is at the
bottom of it all. Their Euripides had cried "Death!"--deeming death the
better life; he, Aristophanes, cries "Life!" If the E