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THE REVIVAL OF NATURALISM 221
injustice of the classes." Take all the minor characters, entangled and swept up in the great " cataclysm that symbolizes their lives," the Strike. To quote Mr. Josephson :
1 Germinal ' is the poem of a strike. The whole central portion of the book deals with the assembling of the outraged miners in a forest at night, and their long procession consequently in a mob through one mining town after another, upon a career of vengeance and destruction. . . . All the moments in the life of this mob are stark and clear, from that in which the dying sun throws ' great lakes of blood ' upon the flat plains behind them, and upon their distorted faces, to that dreadful pause and silence which precedes the firing by the military guards upon the bare-fisted men and women." Here again we can plainly see the influence of Zola on the Soviet cinema.
In a letter to Henry Ceard, Zola comments on " Germinal " : " The truth is that this novel is a great fresco. Each chapter, each compartment of the composition is so closely packed that everything seems foreshortened. ... In this design I had thought that the large movements expressed a thought sufficiently, in imposing themselves upon the mass of the crowd. My subject was the action and reciprocal reaction of the individual and the crowd, one upon the other. ..."
Writing three years ago on the descriptive power of Zola, I said : " He shows the big things with the little things taking place at one and the same moment, in a filmic manner. In ' La Debacle,' that epic war novel, when I had read to the end of the part dealing with the Battle of Sedan, I said to myself, it is impos