Take
it for all in all, there are few books in the world that can
be compared with it. There is as much calm and serenity as
Hugo has ever attained to; the melodramatic coarsenesses that
disfigured NOTRE DAME are no longer present. There is
certainly much that is painfully improbable; and again, the
story itself is a little too well constructed; it produces on
us the effect of a puzzle, and we grow incredulous as we find
that every character fits again and again into the plot, and
is, like the child's cube, serviceable on six faces; things
are not so well arranged in life as all that comes to. Some
of the digressions, also, seem out of place, and do nothing
but interrupt and irritate. But when all is said, the book
remains of masterly conception and of masterly development,
full of pathos, full of truth, full of a high eloquence.
Superstition and social exigency having been thus dealt with
in the first two members of the series, it remained for LES
TRAVAILLEURS DE LA MER to show man hand to hand with the
elements, the last form of external force that is brought
against him. And here once more the artistic effect and the
moral lesson are worked out together, and are, indeed, one.
Gilliat, alone upon the reef at his herculean task, offers a
type of human industry in the midst of the vague "diffusion
of forces into the illimitable," and the visionary
development of "wasted labour" in the sea, and the winds, and
the clouds.
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