“Il faut observer l’Unité d’action, de lieu et de jour. Personne n’en doute.” But, out of France at least, and perhaps in it, it is possible that few people may know, or even doubt, whence this saying comes. [Sidenote: _Corneille._] It would be an insult to a Frenchman of letters to tell him that it comes from Pierre Corneille; long, it is true, after the debate over the _Cid_, but nearly a quarter of a century before the close of his glorious, if not too happy, life. It may be gathered—rather from a long and large induction than from any single utterance of a person of importance—that the French do not think very much of Corneille as a critic; it may be further gathered from this that a man should never submit his genius. _Tu contra audentior ito_ is the counsel of wisdom. He has written much the best things that have been written in favour of the “correct” theory; but its partisans (and small blame to them) suspect him. They see the eyes of Chimène behind the mask, and they distrust them—wisely also after their kind. But we must not rhapsodise here on the admirable poetry of this great poet, and the way in which the critics not merely, as somebody said in his own day, _ont tari sa veine_, but made him in a way false to it. We have only to do with his actual criticism; and whatever view we take of the general question, it must be here pronounced great criticism of its kind. The three _Discours_, and the series of _Examens_ which appeared first in 1660, present an almost unique, an extremely touching, and (to men of English birth) a rather incomprehensible instance of a man of supreme genius crouching and curbing himself to obey the tendency of the time and the dictates of “the wits.”[325] _We_ are not kneaded of this dough. We cannot even conceive Shakespeare taking a copy of Sidney or going to Ben, and afterwards constructing dramas as regularly as he could, or apologising for their irregularity; Milton adjusting _Paradise Lost_ to Dryden’s views of rhyme; nay, even Dryden himself (who is in some ways, as we shall see, very close to Corneille) “looking first at the stop-watch” in any way. But “things are as they are,” and (a great saying from which sometimes the wrong inference has been drawn) “their consequences will be what they will be.” ----- Footnote 325: Tennyson paid almost greater heed to his critics in detail; but he never made any formal or general concession. -----