uripideans
condescend to happiness at all, they merely "talk, talk, talk about the
empty name," while the thing itself lies neglected beneath their noses;
they

"think out thoroughly how youth should pass--
Just as if youth stops passing, all the same!"

* * * * *

As he proceeds, in the superb defence of his own methods, he sees
Balaustion grow ever more indignant. But he conjures her to wait a
moment ere she "looses his doom" on him--and at last, drawing to an end,
declares that after all the ground of difference between him and her is
slight. In so far as it does exist, however, he claims to have won.
Euripides, for whom she stands, is beaten in this contest, yet he,
Aristophanes, has not even put forth all his power! If she will not
acknowledge final defeat:

"Help him, Balaustion! Use the rosy strength!"

--and he urges her to use it all, to "let the whole rage burst in brave
attack."

It is evident how he has been moved, despite his boasting--how eagerly
he awaits her use of the rosy strength. . . . But she begins meekly
enough. She is a woman, she says, and claims no quality "beside the love
of all things lovable"; in _that_, she does claim to stand pre-eminent.
But men may use, justifiably, different methods from those which women
most admire, and so far and because she is a foreigner, as he reminds
her, she may be mistaken in her blame of him. Yet foreigners, strangers,
will in the ultimate issue be the judges of this matter, and shall they
find Aristophanes any more impeccable than she does? (She now begins to
put forth the rosy strength!) What is it that he has done? He did not
invent comedy! Has he improved upon it? No, she declares. One of his
aims is to discredit war. That was an aim of Euripides also; and has
Aristophanes yet written anything like the glorious Song to Peace in the
_Cresphontes_?

"Come, for the heart within me dies away,
So long dost thou delay!"

She gives this forth, in the old "Syracusan" manner, and is well aware
that he can have no answer for her. Again (she proceeds), Euripides
discredited war by showing how it outrages the higher feelings: by what
method has Aristophanes discredited it? By the obscene allurements of
the _Lysistrata_! . . . Thus she takes him through his works, and
finally declares that only in "more audaciously lying" has he improved
upon the earlier writers of comedy. He has genius--she gla