"I also pooh-pooh your feasts, your ambrosia and nectar. For having passed a few months in a large village they call London, I have so completely lost my palate and taste, that for the next two thousand years, at anyrate, I shall not be able to distinguish nectar from stale ale, nor ambrosia from cabbage.
"Yes, I still pooh-pooh, disdain and neglect most of the things that you and your worshippers hold in great esteem. Alcibiades raved about the beauty of women now limping about in the various cities of the barbarians, and more particularly in the towns of the English. A woman! A mere woman! What is the good of a woman unless one is rid of her? I still think what I used to teach, that between a man and a woman there is only a slight difference, one that is scarcely worth considering.
"You may laugh until Vesuvius again vomits scorn upon you, but I tell you here, at Pompeii, what I used to tell everybody at Corinth: your glories are all gone, or ought to go. Just look at Venus. There she sits displaying to eager-looking Pans and Sileni the loveliness of her head and neck and figure. But what does it mean after all? Repentance and wormwood. Look at Ares--(Mars). Does he not look as if he ruled the world? Does he not behave as if all great things were achieved through and by him? And what is it in reality? Mere butchery--cowardly butchery. You laugh; of course, you do. But I mean to show you that all that I have ever taught is nothing less than strictly true; the only truth; truth the one.
"Aristotle, in pointing me out as the person who can best tell you what this new Shavian drama of England really is; Aristotle, I say, may have acted with malice. He has, nevertheless, acted with great wisdom. I am indeed the only man out of the world (there is none in it), who does clearly and fully understand my little disciple who calls himself Bernard Shaw. Of the other friends and admirers of his, he might very well say what that great German philosopher Hegel said in his last moments: 'One man alone has understood me well,--and even he misunderstood me entirely.' He might with reference to my Cynic lady friend Hipparchia also say: 'One man alone understood me well,--and she was a woman.'