And there is truth also in the judgment of the Academy, that the subject of the _Cid_ is "defective in the essential part" and "lacking in verisimilitude"; of course not because it was so with Guillen de Castro, or that a subject, that is to say, mere material, can be of itself good or bad, verisimilar or the reverse, poetic or unpoetic, but because it had become defective and discordant in the hands of Corneille, who elaborated and refined it. Rodrigue, Jimena the lady Urraca, are simple, spontaneous, almost childlike souls, in the mould of popular heroes. Chimène and Rodrigue and the Infanta are reflective and dialectical spirits, and since their novel psychological attitude does not chime well with the old-fashioned manner of behaviour, Rodrigue and the father sometimes appear to be charlatans, Chimène sometimes even a hypocrite, the Infanta insipid and superfluous. Also, when Corneille returned to the "Spanish style," in _Don Sanche d'Aragon,_ he charged it with reflections and ponderations and deliberative resolutions, without aiming at the picturesque, as the romantics did later, but at dialectic and subtlety. It must however be admitted that all this represents a superiority, if viewed from another angle: but this superiority does not reside in the artistic effect obtained; it is rather mental and cultural and represents a more complex and advanced humanity. Thus the _Cid_ is to be looked upon as really a work of transition, a transition to the _Horace,_ which has seemed to a learned German, to be substantially the same as the _Cid,_ the _Cid_ reconstructed after the censures passed upon it by his adversaries and in the Academy, which Corneille inwardly felt to be, in a certain measure at any rate, just. But another prejudice creates a gap between what are called the four principal tragedies, the _Cid,_ the _Horace,_ the _China_ and the _Polyeucte_--"the great Cornelian quadrilateral" eulogised by Péguy in rambling prose,--and the later tragedies, as though Corneille had changed his method in these and begun to pursue another ideal, "political tragedy." Setting aside for the time being the question of greater or lesser artistic value, it is certain that he never really changed his method. In the _Horace,_ there is no suggestion of the ferocious national sanctity of a primitive society, in the _Cinna,_ there is no trace of the imagined tragedy of satiety or of the _lassitude,_ which the sanguinary Augustus is supposed to have experienced. The _Polyeucte_ does not contain a shadow of the fervour, the delirium, the fanaticism, of a religion in the act of birth, but as Schlegel well expressed it, "a firm and constant faith rather than a true religious enthusiasm." In the four tragedies above mentioned, _le cœur_ is not supreme, any more than _l'esprit_ is supreme in the later tragedies, but "political tragedy" is present more or less in all of them, in the intrinsic sense of a representation