But in a moment the sea-god is again the sea-monster, with "tail-splash, frisk of fin"; the majestic Aristophanes relapses into the most wonderful of mockers. No passage in the poem is quite so impressive as this through its strangeness in beauty. But the entry of Sophocles--"an old pale-swathed majesty,"--at the supper which followed the performance of the play, is another of those passages to find which _in situ_ is a sufficient reward for reading many laborious pages that might almost as well have been thrown into an imaginary conversation in prose: Then the grey brow sank low, and Sophokles Re-swathed him, sweeping doorward: mutely passed 'Twixt rows as mute. 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.