ee_!

So much, then, for the divergence of the two authors; and now as to
their relationship. It is, perhaps, in their power of putting their
sense of a multitude before the reader, of exhibiting the passions by
which that multitude is animated, and of tracing the phases and
fluctuations of that passion, that the Frenchman or Italian and the Scot
come first and most strikingly together. Witness in this book the scene
of the advance of the congregations to the trial of the Ministers, or
that of the return of the Reformer, Knox, to Scotland. This of itself,
however, is not much; nor should we have felt justified in drawing
special attention to it, but for the fact that it seems to us to be an
outward and visible sign of what is a vital, perhaps _the_ vital
characteristic of either writer--or, at least, that of Galt in this
book, and of Zola in his masterwork. It is associated, then, as we read
it, with a desire to rise in art above the limitation of the merely
individual, and the springs of this desire we take to lie in that noble
and abounding pity which is the dominant passion of either author, or of
either book. In either case it is an "objective" or artistic pity,
called into being by the spectacle of human suffering as specific as it
is intolerable to contemplate. Only that with Galt it is felt for a
particular historical group of men, with Zola for a particular section
of his contemporaries. And from this characteristic there naturally
results a gain of the quality of artistic grandeur in the books. For it
is less the fortunes of the individual colliers than the Rights of
Labour and their chances of recognition which form the true theme of
_Germinal_; whilst in _Ringan Gilhaize_ we are called to gaze upon
nothing less than the grandiose spectacle of a nation in death-grips
with a race of mansworn sovereigns. Hence, in either case, the
individual characters, measured by the greatness of the issues at stake,
sink into comparative insignificance. But this very insignificance
serves to illustrate a fundamental truth. For, to quote the words of a
great modern thinker, "This is the law which governs humanity: an
immense prodigality in regard to the mere individual, a contemptuous
heaping together of the unit of human life." He continues, "I can
picture to myself the artificer letting great quantities of his material
go to waste--undisturbed, indeed, although three parts of it fall
useless to the ground. For it is the fate