The three Discourses, “De l’Utilité et des parties du Poëme Dramatique,” “De la Tragédie,” and “Des Trois Unités,” and the _Examens_ of the different plays, are the result of this submission.[326] [Sidenote: _The Three_ Discourses.] Let us say at once that it is in no sense the mere submission of a man who recants, either with tongue in cheek or simply under fear of rack and gallows and fire. Corneille (and this is the interesting point of the French temperament as contrasted with the English) is really affected by authority, and by the _Zeitgeist_. He has been honestly converted; indeed he asserts (and we may believe him to a great extent) that he never needed conversion—it was only his green unknowing age that made him go wrong. In the three Discourses he examines the question with plentiful quotations from Aristotle, with some knowledge of Italians like Castelvetro and Beni and Pazzi (Pacius) as well as of Heinsius. He is quite aware of the weak points of the ancients; he repeats, though he does not much dwell upon, the earlier comments on the singular rapidity with which Agamemnon[327] follows the beacon-fires, the astonishing patness of the turning up of the Corinthian in the _Œdipus_. And to any one who thinks little of Corneille as a critic I should like to prescribe the reading, marking, and inwardly digesting of his remarks in the _Discours des Trois Unités_ on the separation of acts and scenes, and the relation of the chorus to orchestral interludes. Elsewhere we may find the mark of the chain: as where the poet, pretending indifference, is evidently rather unhappy because he cannot tell exactly what the wicked Queen in _Rodogune_ (which some have thought his best play next to the _Cid_) was doing when she was not on the stage. This inquiry is of itself almost sufficient to show the sheer idiocy to which this kind of criticism is always on the point of descending. But on the whole, and since Giant Unity has long ceased even to gnash at the pilgrims, we can tolerate it. ----- Footnote 326: They will be found in all good editions. I always use the best, that of M. Marty-Laveaux, where the _Discours_ appear conveniently, if chronologically out of place, in Vol. I, and the _Examens_, each at the head of its own play. Footnote 327: Let me, for one has always to guard these things, observe that no charge is here brought against the _Agamemnon_, which is perhaps the greatest tragedy in the world out of Shakespeare, and almost worthy to be ranked with Shakespeare’s best. It is of the folly of the commentators that Corneille was, and that I (_quam longo intervallo post Cornelium!_) am thinking. -----