For this reason, his method of theatrical composition was not only susceptible of being tolerated, but even of pleasing and receiving the praise, the applause and the admiration of the contemporary public, which did not seek in them the joy of poetic rapture, but a different and more or less refined pleasure, answering to its spiritual needs and aspirations. It could later and can now prove insupportable, because the delight of a certain period in dexterity, expedients and clever devices, in the fine phrases of the courtier, in certain actions that were the fashion, in the gallantries of pastoral and heroic romance, in epigrams, antitheses and madrigals, are no longer our delights. Passionate or realistic art, as it is called, flourishes everywhere, in place of the old scholastic, academic and court models. But for us, everything that concerns Corneille's composition and the technique of his work is indifferent, since we are viewing the problem from the point of view of poetry. We shall not therefore busy ourselves with discriminating those parts of it that are well from those that are ill put together, nor his clever from his unsuccessful expedients, his well-constructed "scenes" from those that suffer from padding, his "acts" that run smoothly from those that drag, the more from the less happy "endings," as is the habit of those critics, who nourish a superstitious admiration for what Flaubert would have called _"l'arcane théâtral."_ We care nothing for the canvas, but only for what of embroidery in the shape of poetry there is upon it. CHAPTER XVI THE POETRY OF CORNEILLE