He wrote a tragedy in Alexandrine verse called “The Cid,” which was an enormous popular success. This Cid was a legendary hero of Spain, a “free captain”--that is, the head of an army of hired mercenaries, who went about fighting for anybody who would pay him. We are used to this system of “free captains” in the United States, where they are called private detective bureaus and strike-breaking agencies. They have armies of tens of thousands of fighting men, horse, foot and artillery, whom they move about from place to place for the crushing of union labor. So before long we shall see on Broadway or in Hollywood some young writer making a tremendous ruling-class drama out of the legendary career of Alan Pinkerton or William J. Burns. The great detective will be shown in love with the beautiful daughter of some labor leader, the tragedy coming when in the course of his duty the great detective has to kill the labor leader. That is the story which Corneille developed--except that of course, it was a rival prince whom the Cid was fighting. Needless to say, in order not to have his head chopped off by Richelieu, the playwright put his hero in the position of defending legitimacy. But the poet had failed to respect the “three unities” in his tragedy; so, although acclaimed by audiences, he was viciously attacked by the academicians--one of them even challenged him to a duel! The Academy as a body was afraid to attack the play, but Richelieu forced it to take action. Corneille was not strong enough to withstand opposition such as this; in his future work he conformed to the rules, and became a humble pensioner of the cardinal. It is interesting to note that his genius began quickly to decline, and he had the humiliation of living to old age and seeing himself scorned and neglected by the new generation. Thus Richelieu’s Academy fulfilled at the outset its function, destroying the greatest tragic dramatist that France had produced, and suppressing for two hundred years the romantic movement in the French theater. It is important to get clear the difference between the real classical art of the Greeks, and this imitation classical art of French absolutism. The Greek stage rules had been made to fit the facts of the Greek stage. Their tragedies had been enacted in a large open-air theater, and to keep the actors from looking too small they had worn high shoes, almost stilts, and had shouted to the audience through a megaphone disguised as a mask. Needless to say, they could not move quickly, and could not do anything but talk. Their tendency was to talk at great length--like mighty ships, which, having got under way, were not easily to be stopped.