The critical study of comedy, its origin, its development, its function, its decline, is written with admirable vigour, but the case of Aristophanes can be read elsewhere.  It is interesting, however, to note the argument in support of the thesis that comedy points really to ideals of humanity which are beyond human attainment; that its mockery of man’s infirmities implies a conception of our nature which in truth is extra-human; while tragedy on the contrary accepts man as he is, in his veritable weakness and veritable strength, and wrings its pity and its terror out of these.  It is Aristophanes who thus vindicates Euripides before the revellers who have assembled in his own honour, and they accept what seems to them a paradox as his finest stroke of irony.  But he has indeed after the solemn withdrawal of Sophocles looked for a moment through life and death, and seen in his hour of highest success his depth of failure.  For him, in this testing-time of life, art has been the means of probation; he has squandered the gifts bestowed upon him, which should have been concentrated in the special task to which he was summoned.  He should have known—­he did in fact know—­that the art which “makes grave” is higher than that which “makes grin”; his own peculiar duty was to advance his art one step beyond his predecessors; to create a drama which should bring into harmony the virtue of tragedy and the virtue of comedy; to discover the poetry which

     Makes wise, not grave,—­and glad,
    Not grinning:  whereby laughter joins with tears.

Instead of making this advance he had retrograded; and it remained for a poet of a far-off future in the far-off Kassiterides—­the Tin Isle which has Stratford at its heart—­to accomplish the task on which Aristophanes would not adventure.  One way a brilliant success was certain for Aristophanes; the other and better way failure was possible; and he declined to make the venture of faith.  It is with this sense of self-condemnation upon him that he essays his own defence, and it is against this sense of self-condemnation more than against the genius and the methods of Euripides that he struggles.  When towards the close of the poem he takes in hand the psalterion, and chants in splendid strains the story of Thamuris, who aspired and failed, as he himself will never do, the reader is almost won over to his side.  Browning, who felt the heights and depths of the lyric genius of Aristophanes, would seem to have resolved that in this song of “Thamuris marching,” moving in ecstasy amid the glories of an autumn morning, he would dramatically justify his conception of the poet; and never in his youth did Browning sing with a finer rapture of spirit.  But reading what follows, the record of the subjugation of Athens, when the Athenian people accept the ruin of their defences as if it were but a fragment of Aristophanic comedy, we perceive that this song, which breaks off with an uproar of laughter, is the condemnation as well as the glory of the singer.