action? Does not he who spares the wolf kill the sheep?"
This question, as I say, meets with one answer after another
during the course of the book, and yet seems to remain
undecided to the end. And something in the same way,
although one character, or one set of characters, after
another comes to the front and occupies our attention for the
moment, we never identify our interest with any of these
temporary heroes nor regret them after they are withdrawn.
We soon come to regard them somewhat as special cases of a
general law; what we really care for is something that they
only imply and body forth to us. We know how history
continues through century after century; how this king or
that patriot disappears from its pages with his whole
generation, and yet we do not cease to read, nor do we even
feel as if we had reached any legitimate conclusion, because
our interest is not in the men, but in the country that they
loved or hated, benefited or injured. And so it is here:
Gauvain and Cimourdain pass away, and we regard them no more
than the lost armies of which we find the cold statistics in
military annals; what we regard is what remains behind; it is
the principle that put these men where they were, that filled
them for a while with heroic inspiration, and has the power,
now that they are fallen, to inspire others with the same
courage. The interest of the novel centres about
revolutionary France: just as the plot is an abstract
judicial difficulty, the hero is an abstract historical
force. And this has been done, not, as it would have been
before, by the cold and cumbersome machinery of allegory, but
with bold, straightforward realism, dealing only with the
objective materials of art, and dealing with them so