a deep delight, a rare
happiness of the spirit.

Indeed it is precisely for these reasons that it is _not_ considered
Aristophanes' greatest play.

To take a case which is sufficiently near to the point in question, to
make clear what I mean: the supremacy of _Antony and Cleopatra_ in the
Shakespearean aesthetic is yet jealously disputed, and it seems silly to
the academic to put it up against a work like _Hamlet_. But it is the
comparatively more obvious achievement of _Hamlet_, its surface
intellectuality, which made it the favourite of actors and critics. It
is much more difficult to realize the complex and delicately passionate
edge of the former play's rhythm, its tides of hugely wandering emotion,
the restless, proud, gay, and agonized reaction from life, of the blood,
of the mind, of the heart, which is its unity, than to follow the
relatively straightforward definition of Hamlet's nerves. Not that
anything derogatory to _Hamlet_ or the _Birds_ is intended; but the
value of such works is not enhanced by forcing them into contrast with
other works which cover deeper and wider nexus of aesthetic and
spiritual material. It is the very subtlety of the vitality of such
works as _Antony and Cleopatra_ and _Lysistrata_ that makes it so easy
to undervalue them, to see only a phallic play and political pamphlet in
one, only a chronicle play in a grandiose method in the other. For we
have to be in a highly sensitized condition before we can get to that
subtle point where life and the image mix, and so really perceive the
work at all; whereas we can command the response to a lesser work which
does not call so finely on the full breadth and depth of our spiritual
resources.

I amuse myself at times with the fancy that Homer, Sappho, and
Aristophanes are the inviolable Trinity of poetry, even to the extent of
being reducible to One. For the fiery and lucid directness of Sappho, if
her note of personal lyricism is abstracted, is seen to be an element of
Homer, as is the profoundly balanced humour of Aristophanes, at once
tenderly human and cruelly hard, as of a god to whom all sympathies and
tolerances are known, but who is invulnerable somewhere, who sees from a
point in space where the pressure of earth's fear and pain, and so its
pity, is lifted. It is here that the Shakespearean and Homeric worlds
impinge and merge, not to be separated by any academic classifications.
They meet in this sensitivity equally involved and a