Unity of time rests on no firmer foundation than unity of place.  A plot forcibly confined within twenty-four hours is as absurd as one confined within a peristyle.  Every plot has its proper duration as well as its appropriate place.  Think of administering the same dose of time to all events! of applying the same measure to everything!  You would laugh at a cobbler who should attempt to put the same shoe on every foot.  To cross unity of time and unity of place like the bars of a cage, and pedantically to introduce therein, in the name of Aristotle, all the deeds, all the nations, all the figures which Providence sets before us in such vast numbers in real life,—­to proceed thus is to mutilate men and things, to cause history to make wry faces.  Let us say, rather, that everything will die in the operation, and so the dogmatic mutilators reach their ordinary result:  what was alive in the chronicles is dead in tragedy.  That is why the cage of the unities often contains only a skeleton.

And then, if twenty-four hours can be comprised in two, it is a logical consequence that four hours may contain forty-eight.  Thus Shakespeare’s unity must be different from Corneille’s.  ’Tis pity!

But these are the wretched quibbles with which mediocrity, envy and routine has pestered genius for two centuries past!  By such means the flight of our greatest poets has been cut short.  Their wings have been clipped with the scissors of the unities.  And what has been given us in exchange for the eagle feathers stolen from Corneille and Racine?  Campistron.

We imagine that someone may say:  “There is something in too frequent changes of scene which confuses and fatigues the spectator, and which produces a bewildering effect on his attention; it may be, too, that manifold transitions from place to place, from one time to another time, demand explanations which repel the attention; one should also avoid leaving, in the midst of a plot, gaps which prevent the different parts of the drama from adhering closely to one another, and which, moreover, puzzle the spectator because he does not know what there may be in those gaps.”  But these are precisely the difficulties which art has to meet.  These are some of the obstacles peculiar to one subject or another, as to which it would be impossible to pass judgment once for all.  It is for genius to overcome, not for treatises or poetry to evade them.

A final argument, taken from the very bowels of the art, would of itself suffice to show the absurdity of the rule of the two unities.  It is the existence of the third unity, unity of plot—­the only one that is universally admitted, because it results from a fact:  neither the human eye nor the human mind can grasp more than one ensemble at one time.  This one is as essential as the other two are useless.  It is the one which fixes the view-point of the drama; now, by that very fact, it excludes the other two.  There can no more be three unities