Another form of the comic, discoverable in him, must also be insisted upon; but this is not involuntary and blameworthy, but coherent and praiseworthy. The form in question is that which led to the comedy of character and of costume, to psychological and political comedy. Brunetière even said between jest and earnest: "The _Cid, Horace, Cinna_ and _Polyeucte,_ give me much trouble. Were it not for these four, I should say that Corneille is fundamentally and above all a comic poet, and an excellent comic poet; and this is perfectly true; but how are we to say it, when the _Cid, Horace, Cinna_ and _Polyeucte_ are there? These four tragedies embarrass me exceedingly!" And he proceeds to note and illustrate the "family scenes" scattered among his tragedies, the prosaic and conversational phraseology, which so displeased Voltaire, and the complete absence in some of them of tragic quality, even of the external sort, that is, scenes of blood and death, and the prevalence of the ethical over the pathetic representation, in the manner of the comedy of Menander and of Terence. Despite all this, his definition of Corneille as a comic poet will be admired as acute and ingenious, but will never carry conviction as being true: none of those tragedies is a comedy, because none is accentuated in that manner. For the same reason that Corneille could not attain to the poetical representation of life, because he was not able to pass beyond the one-sidedness of his ideal, by merging it in the fulness of things, he was unable to present the comic or ethical side of them, because he did not pass beyond the spectacle of life and so of his ideal, by viewing it _sub specie intellectus,_ in its external and internal limitations. The attempt to do so in the Alidor of the _Place Royale_ had not been successful, and it never was successful, even assuming that he attempted it. He did not indeed attempt it, and the ethos that so often took the place of the pathos in the structure of his tragedies, was itself a natural consequence of their mechanicity. Owing to this, when they had lost the guidance of the initial poetic motive, they often fluctuated between emphasis and cold observation, between eloquence and prose, between stylisation of the characters and certain realistic determinations.