Thus much for the sunny side of tragedy. But let us recur to the night side of comedy. Falstaff is a comic figure, is he not? And yet what thoughtful man is there who has not enough of the Puritan in him to see the tragedy of such a character as Falstaff? How must Falstaff have appeared to Bunyan!--every stroke of genius which to us makes for the comic, adding a phosphor-gleam of hell-fire. And Bunyan is right: Falstaff is an awful picture; and had Shakespeare punished him adequately he would appear awful. Let us imagine that Shakespeare had written a play about the old age of Falstaff, picturing his decay of intellect, his destitution, his flickering return to humor which is no longer funny--what could have been more tragic? * * * * * Was it with such arguments as these that Socrates put Aristophanes and Agathon to sleep on the famous morning which Plato chronicles? We cannot tell. Plato has cast the magic of a falling star over the matter and thus leaves it: his humor, his knack, his destiny compelled him to treat subjects in this way. Something passes, and after a light has fallen far off into the sea, we ask “What was it?” Enough for Plato’s purpose that he has placed Comedy where, perhaps, no philosopher before or after him ever had the vision to place it--in the heaven of man’s highest endeavor. II. The divine affinities of comedy have thus been established, and we may make some few stray observations on the nature of the comic, not hoping to explain laughter, which must remain forever a spontaneous mystery, but only to point out places where this mystery crosses the other mysteries and refuses to be merged in them, keeping its own course and intensifying the darkness of our ignorance by its corruscations. In the first place the comic is about the most durable vehicle that truth has ever found. It pretends to deal with momentary interests in terms of farce and exaggeration; and yet it leaves an image that strikes deeper and lasts longer than philosophy. In our search for truth we are continually getting into vehicles that break down or turn into something else, even during our transit. Let us take, for example, the case of Plato’s dialogues. How much we have enjoyed them, how much trusted them! And yet there comes a time when we feel about Plato’s work that it is almost too well lighted and managed, too filled with parlor elegance. He seems more interested in the effects that can be got by manipulating philosophy than in any serious truth. There is something superficial about the pictures of Greek life that you get from Plato. The marble is too white, the philosophers are too considerate of each other’s feelings, Socrates is too clever, everything is a little arranged. Greek life was not quite like that, and the way to convince yourself of this is to read Aristophanes.