The hero is not a luxury, but a necessity. We can no more do without
him than we can do without the sky. Every best man and woman is at
heart a hero-worshiper. Emerson acutely remarks that all men admire
Napoleon because he was themselves in possibility. They were in
miniature what he was developed. For a like though nobler reason, all
men love heroes. They are ourselves grown tall, puissant, victorious,
and sprung into nobility, worth, service. The hero electrifies the
world; he is the lightning of the soul, illuminating our sky,
clarifying the air, making it thereby salubrious and delightful. What
any elect spirit did, inures to the credit of us all. A fragment of
Lowell's clarion verse may stand for the biography of heroism:
"When a deed is done for Freedom, through the broad
earth's aching breast
Runs a thrill of joy prophetic, trembling on from east
to west;
And the slave, where'er he cowers, feels the soul within
him climb
To the awful verge of manhood, as the energy sublime
Of a century bursts full-blossomed on the thorny stem
of Time;"
such being the undeniable result and history of any heroic service.
But the world's hero has changed. The old hero was Ulysses, or
Achilles, or Aeneas. The hero of Greek literature is Ulysses, as
Aeneas is in Latin literature. But to our modern thought these heroes
miss of being heroic. We have outgrown them as we have outgrown dolls
and marbles. To be frank, we do not admire Aeneas nor Ulysses. Aeneas
wept too often and too copiously. He impresses us as a big cry-baby.
Of this trinity of classic heroes--Ulysses, Aeneas, and
Achilles--Ulysses is least obnoxious. This statement is cold and
unsatisfactory, and apparently unappreciative, but it is candid and
just. Lodge, in his "Some Accepted Heroes," has done service in
rubbing the gilding from Achilles, and showing that he was gaudy and
cheap. We thought the image was gold, which was, in fact, thin gilt.
Achilles sulks in his tent, while Greek armies are thrown back defeated
from the Trojan gates. In nothing is he admirable save that, when his
pouting fit is over and when he rushes into the battle, he has might,
and overbears the force opposing him as a wave does some petty
obstacle. But no higher quality shines in his conquest. He is vain,
brutal, and impervious to high motive. In Aeneas one can find little
attractive save his filial regard. He bears Anchises on his shoulders
from toppling Troy; but his wanderings constitute an Odyssey of
commonplaces, or chance, or meanness. No one can doubt Virgil meant to
create a hero of commanding proportions, though we, looking at him from
this far remove, find him uninteresting, unheroic, and vulgar; and why
the goddess should put herself out to allay tempests in his behalf, or
why hostile deities should be disturbed to tumble seas into turbulence
for such a voyager, is a query. He merits neither their wrath nor
their courtesy. I confess to liking heroes of the old Norse mythology
better. They, at least, did not cry nor grow voluble with words when
obstacles obstructed the march. They possess the merit of tremendous
action. Aeneas, in this regard, is the inferior of Achilles. Excuse
us from hero worship, if Aeneas be hero. In this old company of
heroes, Ulysses is easy superior. Yet the catalogue of his virtues is
an easy task. Achilles was a huge body, associated with little brain,
and had no symptom of sagacity. In this regard, Ulysses outranks him,
and commands our respect. He has diplomacy and finesse. He is not
simply a huge frame, wrestling men down because his bulk surpasses
theirs. He has a thrifty mind. He is the man for councils of war,
fitted to direct with easy mastery of superior acumen. His
fellow-warriors called him "crafty," because he was brainy. He was
schooled in stratagem, by which he became author of Ilium's overthrow.
Ulysses was shrewd, brave, balanced--possibly, though not conclusively,
patriotic--a sort of Louis XI, so far as we may form an estimate, but
no more. He was selfish, immoral, barren of finer instincts, who was
loved by his dog and by Penelope, though for no reason we can discover.
Ten years he fought before Troy, and ten years he tasted the irony of
the seas--in these episodes displaying bravery and fortitude, but no
homesick love for Penelope, who waited at the tower of Ithaca for him,
a picture of constancy sweet enough to hang on the palace walls of all
these centuries. We do not think to love Ulysses, nor can we work
ourselves up to the point of admiration; and he is the best hero
classic Rome and Greece can offer. No! Register, as the modern sense
of the classic hero, we do not like him.
He is not admirable, yet is not totally lacking in power to command
attention. What is his quality of appeal to us? This: He is action;
and action thrills us. The old hero was, in general, brave and
brilliant. He had the tornado's movement. His onset redeems him. He
blustered, was spectacular, heartless, and did not guess the meaning of
purity; but he was warrior, and the world enjoys soldiers. And this
motley hero has been attempted in our own days. He was archaic, but
certain have attempted to make him modern. Byron's Don Juan is the old
hero, only lost to the old hero's courage. He is a villain, with not
sense enough to understand he is unattractive. He is a libertine at
large, who thinks himself a gentleman. Don Juan is as immoral,
impervious to honor, and as villainous as the Greek gods. The
D'Artagnan romances have attempted the old hero's resuscitation. The
movement of the "Three Musketeers" is mechanical rather than human.
D'Artagnan's honor is limited to his fealty to his king. He has no
more sense of delicacy toward women, or honor for them as women, than
Achilles had. Some of his doings are too defamatory to be thought of,
much less mentioned. No! Excuse me from D'Artagnan and the rest of
Dumas' heroes. They may be French, but they are not heroic. About
Dumas' romances there is a gallop which, with the unwary, passes for
action and art. But he has not, of his own motion, conceived a single
woman who was not seduced or seducible, nor a single man who was not a
libertine; for "The Son of Porthros" [Transcriber's note: Porthos?] and
his bride are not of Dumas' creation. He is not open to the charge of
having drawn the picture of one pure man or woman. Zola is the natural
goal of Dumas; and we enjoy neither the route nor the terminus. Louis
XIV, Charles II, and George IV are modeled after the old licentious
pretense at manhood, but we may all rejoice that they deceive nobody
now. Our civilization has outgrown them, and will not, even in second
childhood, take to such playthings.
But what was the old hero's chief failure? The answer is, He lacked
conscience. Duty had no part in his scheme of action, nor in his
vocabulary of word or thought. Our word "virtue" is the bodily
importation of the old Roman word "virtus," but so changed in meaning
that the Romans could no more comprehend it than they could the
Copernican theory of astronomy. With them, "virtus" meant
strength--that only--a battle term. The solitary application was to
fortitude in conflict. With us, virtue is shot through and through
with moral quality, as a gem is shot through with light, and
monopolizes the term as light monopolizes the gem. This change is
radical and astonishing, but discloses a change which has
revolutionized the world. The old hero was conscienceless--a
characteristic apparent in Greek civilization. What Greek patriot,
whether Themistocles or Demosthenes, applied conscience to patriotism?
They were as devoid of practical conscience as a Metope of the
Parthenon was devoid of life. Patriotism was a transient sentiment.
Demosthenes could become dumb in the presence of Philip's gold; and in
a fit of pique over mistreatment at the hands of his brother-citizens,
Themistocles became a traitor, and, expatriated, dwelt a guest at the
Persian court. Strangely enough--and it is passing strange--the most
heroic personality in Homer's Iliad, the Greek's "Bible of heroisms,"
was not the Atridae, whether Agamemnon or Menelaus; not Ajax nor
Achilles, nor yet Ulysses; but was Hector, the Trojan, who appears to
greater advantage as hero than all the Grecian host. And Homer was a
Greek! This is strange and unaccountable irony. Say once more, the
old hero's lack was conscience. He, like his gods and goddesses, who
were deified infamies, was a studied impurity. Jean Valjean is a hero,
but a hero of a new type.
Literature is a sure index of a civilization. Who cares to settle in
his mind whether the world grows better, may do so by comparing
contemporaneous literature with the reading of other days. "The
Heptameron," of Margaret of Navarre, is a book so filthy as to be
nauseating. That people could read it from inclination is unthinkable;
and to believe that a woman could read it, much less write it, taxes
too sorely our credulity. In truth, this work did not, in the days of
its origin, shock the people's sensibilities. A woman wrote it, and
she a sister of Francis I of France, and herself Queen of Navarre, and
a pure woman. And her contemporaries, both men and women, read it with
delight, because they had parted company with blushes and modesty.
Zola is less voluptuous and filthy than these old tales. Some things
even Zola curtains. Margaret of Navarre tears the garments from the
bodies of men and women, and looks at their nude sensuality smilingly.
Of Boccaccio's "Decameron," the same general observations hold; save
that they are less filthy, though no less sensual. In the era
producing these tales, witness this fact: The stories are represented
as told by a company of gentlemen and ladies, the reciter being
sometimes a man, sometimes a woman; the place, a country villa, whither
they had fled to escape a plague then raging in Florence. The people,
so solacing themselves in retreat from a plague they should have
striven to alleviate by their presence and ministries, were the
gentility of those days, representing the better order of society, and
told stories which would now be venal if told by vulgar men in some
tavern of ill-repute. That Boccaccio should have reported these tales
as emanating from such a company is proof positive of the immodesty of
those days, whose story is rehearsed in the "Decameron." Rousseau's
"Confessions" is another book showing the absence of current morality
in his age. Notwithstanding George Eliot's panegyric, these memoirs
are the production of unlimited conceit, of a practical absence of any
moral sensitiveness; and while Rousseau could not be accused of being
sensual, nor amorous and heartless as Goethe, he yet shows so crude a
moral state as to render him unwholesome to any person of ordinary
morals in the present day. His "Confessions," instead of being naive,
strike me as being distinctly and continuously coarse. A man and woman
who could give their children deliberately to be farmed out, deserting
them as an animal would not, and this with no sense of loss or
compunction, nor even with a sense of the inhumanity of such
procedure--such a man and woman tell us how free-love can degrade a
natively virtuous mind. Such was Rousseau; and his "Confessions" are
like himself, unblushing, because shameless. These books reflect their
respective ages, and are happily obsolete now. Such memoirs and
fictions in our day are unthinkable as emanating from respectable
sources; and if written would be located in vile haunts in the purlieus
of civilization. Gauged by such a test, the world is seen to be
better, and immensely better. We have sailed out of sight of the old
continent of coarse thinking, and are sailing a sea where purity of
thought and expression impregnate the air like odors. The old hero,
with his lewdness and rhodomontade, is excused from the stage. We have
had enough of him. Even Cyrano de Bergerac is so out of keeping with
the new notion of the heroic, that the translator of the drama must
apologize for his hero's swagger. We love his worth, though despising
his theatrical air and acts. We are done with the actor, and want the
man. And this new hero is proof of a new life in the soul, and,
therefore, more welcome than the glad surprise of the first
meadow-lark's song upon the brown meadows of the early spring.
A reader need not be profound, but may be superficial, and yet discover
that Jean Valjean is fashioned after the likeness of Jesus. Michael
Angelo did not more certainly model the dome of St. Peter's after
Brunelleschi's dome of the Duomo than Hugo has modeled his Valjean
after Christ. We are not necessarily aware of ourselves, nor of our
era, until something discovers both to us, as we do not certainly know
sea air when we feel it. I doubt if most men would recognize the tonic
of sea air if they did not know the sea was neighbor to them. We sight
the ocean, and then know the air is flooded with a health as ample as
the seas from which it blows. So we can not know our intellectual air
is saturated with Christ, because we can not go back. We lack
contemporaneous material for contrast. We are, ourselves, a part of
the age, as of a moving ship, and can not see its motion. We can not
realize the world's yesterdays. We know them, but do not comprehend
them, since between apprehending and comprehending an epoch lie such
wide spaces. "Quo Vadis" has done good in that it has popularized a
realization of that turpitude of condition into which Christianity
stepped at the morning of its career; for no lazar-house is so vile as
the Roman civilization when Christianity began--God's angel--to trouble
that cursed pool. Christ has come into this world's affairs
unheralded, as the morning does not come; for who watches the eastern
lattices can see the morning star, and know the dawn is near. Christ
has slipped upon the world as a tide slips up the shores, unnoted, in
the night; and because we did not see him come, did not hear his
advent, his presence is not apparent. Nothing is so big with joy to
Christian thought as the absolute omnipresence of the Christ in the
world's life. Stars light their torches in the sky; and the sky is
wider and higher than the stars. Christ is such a sky to modern
civilization.
Plainly, Jean Valjean is meant for a hero. Victor Hugo loves heroes,
and has skill and inclination to create them. His books are
biographies of heroism of one type or another. No book of his is
heroless. In this attitude he differs entirely from Thackeray and
Hawthorne, neither of whom is particularly enamored of heroes.
Hawthorne's romances have not, in the accepted sense, a single hero.
He does not attempt building a character of central worth. He is
writing a drama, not constructing a hero. In a less degree, this is
true of Thackeray. He truly loves the heroic, and on occasion depicts
it. Henry Esmond and Colonel Newcome are mighty men of worth, but are
exceptions to Thackeray's method. He pokes fun at them even. "Vanity
Fair" he terms a novel without a hero. He photographs a procession.
"The Virginians" contains no character which can aspire to centrality,
much less might. He, loving heroes, attempts concealing his passion,
and, if accused of it, denies the accusation. After reading all his
writings, no one could for a moment claim that Thackeray was the
biographer of heroes. He is a biographer of meanness, and times, and
sham aristocracy and folks, and can, when he cares to do so, portray
heroism lofty as tallest mountains. With Hugo all is different. He
will do nothing else than dream and depict heroism and heroes.
He loves them with a passion fervent as desert heats. His pages are
ablaze with them. Somebody lifting up the face, and facing God in some
mood or moment of briefer or longer duration--this is Hugo's method.
In "Toilers of the Sea," Galliatt, by almost superhuman effort, and
physical endurance and fortitude and fertility in resource, defeats
octopus and winds and rocks and seas, and in lonely triumph pilots the
wreck home--and all of this struggle and conquest for love! He is a
somber hero, but a hero still, with strength like the strength of ten,
since his love is as the love of a legion. The power to do is his, and
the nobility to surrender the woman of his love; and there his nobility
darkens into stoicism, and he waits for the rising tide, watching the
outgoing ship that bears his heart away unreservedly--waits, only eager
that the tide ingulf him.
In "Ninety-Three," the mother of the children in the burning tower is
heroine. In "By Order of the King," Dea is heroic, and spotless as
"Elaine, the lily maid of Astolat;" and Ursus, a vagabond, is
fatherhood in its sweet nobleness; and Gwynplaine, disfigured and
deserted--a little lad set ashore upon a night of hurricane and snow,
who, finding in his wanderings a babe on her dead mother's breast,
rescues this bit of winter storm-drift, plodding on through untracked
snows, freezing, but no more thinking to drop his burden than the
mother thought to desert it--Gwynplaine is a hero for whose deed an
epic is fitting. Quasimodo, the hunchback of Notre Dame, found, after
long years, holding in his skeleton arms a bit of woman's drapery and a
woman's skeleton--Quasimodo, hideous, herculean, hungry-hearted,
tender, a hunchback, yet a lover and a man--who denies to Quasimodo a
hero's laurels? In "Les Miserables" are heroes not a few. Gavroche,
that green leaf blown about Paris streets; Fantine, the mother;
Eponine, the lover; Bishop Bienvenu, the Christian; Jean Valjean, the
man,--all are heroic folk. Our hearts throb as we look at them.
Gavroche, the lad, dances by as though blown past by the gale.
Fantine, shorn of her locks of gold; Fantine, with her bloody lips,
because her teeth have been sold to purchase medicine for her sick
child--her child, yet a child of shame; Fantine, her mother's love
omnipotent, lying white, wasted, dying, expectantly looking toward the
door, with her heart beating like a wild bird, beating with its wings
against cage-bars, anxious for escape; Fantine, watching for her child
Cossette, watching in vain, but watching; Fantine, dying, glad because
Monsieur Madeleine has promised he will care for Cossette as if the
babe were his; Fantine, dead, with her face turned toward the door,
looking in death for the coming of her child,--Fantine affects us like
tears and sobbing set to music. Look at her; for a heroine is dead.
And Eponine, with the gray dawn of death whitening her cheeks and
gasping, "If--when--if when," now silent, for she is choked by the rush
of blood and stayed from speech by fierce stabs of pain, but
continuing, "When I am dead--a favor--a favor, Monsieur Marius [silence
once again to wrestle with the throes of death]--a favor--a favor when
I am dead [now her speech runs like frightened feet], if you will kiss
me; for indeed, Monsieur Marius, I think I loved you a little--I--I
shall feel--your kiss--in death." Lie quiet in the darkening night,
Eponine! Would you might have a queen's funeral, since you have shown
anew the moving miracle of woman's love!
Bishop Bienvenu is Hugo's hero as saint; and we can not deny him beauty
such as those "enskied and sainted" wear. This is the romancist's
tribute to a minister of God; and sweet the tribute is. With not a
few, the bishop is chief hero, next to Jean Valjean. He is redemptive,
like the purchase money of a slave. He is quixotic; he is not balanced
always, nor always wise; but he falls on the side of Christianity and
tenderness and goodness and love--a good way to fall, if one is to fall
at all. We love the bishop, and can not help it. He was good to the
poor, tender to the unerring, illuminative to those who were in the
moral dark, and came over people like a sunrise; crept into their
hearts for good, as a child creeps up into its father's arms, and
nestles there like a bird. Surely we love the bishop. He is a hero
saint. To be near him was to be neighborly with heaven. He was ever
minding people of God. Is there any such office in earth or heaven?
To look at this bishop always puts our heart in the mood of prayer, and
what helps us to prayer is a celestial benefit. The pertinent fact in
him is, that he is not greatness, but goodness. We do not think of
greatness when we see him or hear him, but we think with our hearts
when he is before our eyes. Goodness is more marketable than
greatness, and more necessary. Goodness, greatness! Brilliancy is a
cheap commodity when put on the counter beside goodness; and Bishop
Bienvenu is a romancer's apotheosis of goodness, and we bless him for
this deification.
The bishop was merchantman, freighting ships. His wharves are wide,
his fleet is great, his cargoes are many. Only he is freighting ships
for heaven. No bales of merchandise nor ingots of iron, but souls for
whom Christ died,--these are his cargoes; and had you asked him, "What
work to-day?" a smile had flooded sunlight along his face while he,
said, "Freighting souls with God to-day, and lading cargoes for the
skies." This is royal merchandise. The Doge of Venice annually flung
a ring into the sea as sign of Venice's nuptials with the Adriatic; but
Bishop Bienvenu each day wedded himself and the world to heaven, and he
comes
"O'er my ear like the sweet south,
That breathes upon a bank of violets,
Stealing and giving odor."
Hugo paints with sunset tints and with lightning's lurid light; his
contrasts are fierce, his backgrounds are often as black as a
rain-cloud. He paints with the mad rush of a Turner. He is fierce in
hates and loves. He does nothing by moderation. Calmness does not
belong to him. He is tempestuous always; but tempests are magnificent
and purifying to the air. Hugo is painting, and painting heroes, and
his hero of heroes is Valjean. Jean Valjean is conscience. In
Macbeth, conscience is warring and retributive. In Richard III,
conscience, stifled in waking, speaks in dreams, and is menace, like a
sword swung by a maniac's hands. In Arthur Dimmesdale, conscience is
lacerative. In Jean Valjean, conscience is regulative, creative,
constructive. Jean Valjean is conscience, and conscience is king.
What the classic heroes lacked, Jean Valjean possesses.
The setting of this character is entirely modern. "Les Miserables" is
a story of the city and of poverty, and can not be dissociated from
them by any wrench of thought, however violent. Not that urban life or
poverty are new elements in the school of suffering. They are not new,
as pain is not new. This is the difference. In the old ages, the city
and poverty were taken as matters of course. Comfort was not a classic
consideration. The being alive to conditions, sensitive to suffering,
eager for diminution of the world's woes, is a modern thought, a Christ
thought. Sociology is an application of Christ's teaching. He founded
this science. Rome was the monster city of the empire, and possibly
the monster city of ancient geography, and contained approximately, at
its most populous period, two and one half millions of inhabitants.
Man is gregarious as the flocks; he seems to fear solitude, and flees
what he fears. Certain we are that in America, one hundred years ago,
less than one-thirtieth of the population was in cities; now, about
one-third is in city communities; and European cities are outgrowing
American cities. In other words, at the present time, cities are
growing in a ratio totally disproportionate to the growth of
population; and this, not in the New World simply, but in the Old.
London has nearly as many citizens as England had in the time of the
Puritan Revolution. Men are nucleating in a fashion foreboding, but
certain. A symptom of the city life is, that he who is city bred knows
no life apart from his city. He belongs to it as essentially as the
Venetian belonged to Venice. The community is a veritable part of the
man's self. Note this in Jean Valjean. It never occurs to him to
leave Paris. Had he been a tree rooted in the soil along the Seine, he
had not been more stationary. Men live, suffer, die, and hug their
ugly tenements as parasites of these dilapidations, and draw their
life-saps from such a decayed trunk. This human instinct for
association is mighty in its impulsion. Not a few, but multitudes,
prefer to be hungry and cold and live in a city to living with
abundance of food and raiment in the country. Any one can see this at
his alley or in his neighboring street. It is one of the latent
insanities of the soul. The city is a live wire, and will not let go
of him who grasps it. There is a stream of life pouring into cities,
but no stream flowing into the country. The tide runs up the shore and
back into the deep seas; not so these human tides. They pour into the
Dead Sea basin of the urban community. Jean Valjean was a complete
modern in his indissoluble identification with the city. As a matter
of course, his was the criminal instinct, superadded to the gregarious
instinct, which hides in a city labyrinth rather than the forests of
the Amazon. Yet, taken all in all, he evidently is a thorough modern
in his urban instinct. The world was big, and he had gold for passage
across seas; and there he had, in reason, found entire safety; but such
a thought never entered his mind. Paris was the only sea he knew; here
his plans for escape and plans for life clung tenaciously as a dead
man's hand.
The second element of background for Jean Valjean is poverty. The
people of this drama are named "the miserable ones." And poverty is
modern and a modern question. All socialists, anarchists, and
communists talk of poverty; this is their one theme. Superficial
social reformers make poverty responsible for the total turpitude of
men. Men are poor, hence criminal. Jean Valjean is poor--miserably
poor; sees his sister's children hungry, and commits crime, is a thief;
becomes a galley slave as punitive result. Ergo, poverty was the cause
of crime, and poverty, and not Valjean, must be indicted; so runs the
argument. This conclusion we deny. Let us consider. Poverty is not
unwholesome. The bulk of men are poor, and always have been. Poverty
is no new condition. Man's history is not one of affluence, but one of
indigence. This is a patent fact. But a state of lack is not
unwholesome, but on the contrary does great good. Poverty has supplied
the world with most of the kings it boasts of. Palaces have not
cradled the kings of thought, service, and achievement. What greatest
poet had luxury for a father? Name one. Poverty is the mother of
kings. Who censures poverty censures the home from whose doors have
passed the most illustrious of the sons of men. Christ's was a poverty
so keen and so parsimonious that Occidentals can not picture it. More,
current social reformers assume that the poor are unhappy; though if
such reformers would cease dreaming, and learn seeing, they would
reverse their creed. Riches do not command joy; for joy is not a
spring rising from the depths where gold is found and gems gathered.
Most men are poor, and most men are happy, or, if they are not, they
may trace their sadness to sources other than lack of wealth. The best
riches are the gifts of God, and can not be shut off by any sluicing;
the choicest riches of the soul, such as knowledge and usefulness and
love and God, are not subject to the tariff of gold. Poverty, we
conclude, is not in itself grievous. Indeed, there are in poverty
blessings which many of us know, and from which we would not be
separated without keen regret. But penury is hard. When poverty
pinches like winter's night, when fuel fails, and hunger is our
company, then poverty becomes harsh and unpalatable, and not to be
boasted of; though even penury has spurred many a sluggish life to
conquering moods. When a man lies with his face to the wall,
paralytic, helpless, useless, a burden to himself and others, and hears
the rub of his wife washing for a livelihood--and he loves her so; took
her to his home in her fair girlhood, when her beauty bloomed like a
garden of roses, and promised to keep her, and now she works for him
all day and into the dark night, and loves to; but he turns his face to
the wall, puts his one movable hand against his face, sobs so that his
tears wash through his fingers and wet his pillow as with driving
rain,--then poverty is pitiful. Or, when one sees his children hungry,
tattered, with lean faces and eyes staring as with constant fear; sees
them huddling under rags or cowering at a flicker meant for
flame,--then poverty is hard; and then, "The poor always ye have with
you," said our Christ, which remember and be pitiful!
But such penury, even, does not require crime. Valjean became a
criminal from poverty; but himself felt now, as the days slipped from
his life-store, that crime was not necessary. Theft is bad economics.
The criminals on the dockets are not those pinched with poverty, as one
may assure himself if he gives heed to criminal dockets. People prefer
crime as a method of livelihood. These are criminals. The "artful
dodger," in "Oliver Twist," is a picture of the average criminal.
Honest poverty need not steal. In the writer's own city, the other
day, a man accused of theft pleaded his children's poverty as
palliative of his crime; but in that city was abundant help for worthy
poverty. That man lacked an absolute honesty. He and his could have
been fed and clothed, and himself maintained his manly dignity and
uncorrupted honesty. To blame society with criminality is a current
method, but untrue and unwise; for thus we will multiply, not decimate,
criminals. The honest man may be in penury; but he will have help, and
need not shelter in a jail. Thus, then, these two items of modernity
paint background for Jean Valjean's portrait; and in Jean Valjean,
To-day has found a voice.
This man is a criminal and a galley slave, with yellow passport--his
name, Jean Valjean. Hear his story. An orphan; a half-sullen lad,
reared by his sister; sees her husband dead on a bed of rags, with
seven orphans clinging in sobs to the dead hands. Jean Valjean labors
to feed this motley company; denies himself bread, so that he may slip
food into their hands; has moods of stalwart heroism; and never having
had a sweetheart--pity him!--toils on, hopeless, under a sky robbed of
blue and stars; leading a life plainly, wholly exceptional, and out of
work in a winter when he was a trifle past twenty-six; hears his
sister's children crying, "Bread, bread, give bread;" rises in sullen
acerbity; smites his huge fist through a baker's window, and steals a
loaf; is arrested, convicted, sent to the galleys, and herded with
galley slaves; attempts repeated escapes, is retaken, and at the age of
forty-six shambles out of his galley slavery with a yellow passport,
certifying this is "a very dangerous man;" and with a heart on which
brooding has written with its biting stylus the story of what he
believes to be his wrongs, Jean Valjean, bitter as gall against
society, has his hands ready, aye, eager, to strike, no matter whom.
Looked at askance, turned from the hostel, denied courtesy, food, and
shelter, the criminal in him rushes to the ascendant, and he thrusts
the door of the bishop's house open. Listen, he is speaking now, look
at him! The bishop deals with him tenderly, as a Christian ought;
sentimentally, but scarcely wisely. He has sentimentality rather than
sentiment in his kindness; he puts a premium on Jean Valjean becoming a
criminal again. To assume everybody to be good, as some
philanthropists do, is folly, being so transparently false. The good
bishop--bless him for his goodness!--who prays God daily not to lead
him into temptation, why does he lead this sullen criminal into
temptation? Reformatory methods should be sane. The bishop's methods
were not sane. He meant well, but did not quite do well. Jean
Valjean, sleeping in a bed of comfort, grows restless, wakens, rises,
steals what is accessible, flees, is arrested, brought back, is
exonerated by the bishop's tenderness, goes out free; steals from the
little Savoyard, cries after the retreating lad to restore him his
coin, tails to bring him back; fights with self, and with God's good
help rises in the deep dark of night from the bishop's steps; walks out
into a day of soul, trudges into the city of M----, to which he finds
admission, not by showing the criminal's yellow passport, but by the
passport of heroism, having on entrance rescued a child from a burning
building; becomes a citizen, invents a process of manufacturing jet,
accumulates a fortune, spends it lavishly in the bettering of the city
where his riches were acquired; is benefactor to employee and city, and
is called "Monsieur;" and after repeated refusals, becomes "Monsieur
the Mayor;" gives himself up as a criminal to save a man unjustly
accused, is returned to the galleys for the theft of the little
Savoyard's forty-sous coin; by a heroic leap from the yardarm, escapes;
seeks and finds Cossette, devotes his life to sheltering and loving
her; runs his gauntlet of repeated perils with Javert, grows steadily
in heroism, and sturdy, invigorating manhood; dies a hero and a saint,
and an honor to human kind,--such is Jean Valjean's biography in meager
outline. But the moon, on a summer's evening, "a silver crescent
gleaming 'mid the stars," appears hung on a silver cord of the full
moon's rim; and, as the crescent moon is not the burnished silver of
the complete circle, so no outline can include the white, bewildering
light of this heroic soul. Jean Valjean is the biography of a redeemed
life. The worst life contains the elements of redemption, as words
contain the possibility of poetry. He was a fallen, vicious, desperate
man; and from so low a level, he and God conspired to lift him to the
levels where the angels live, than which a resurrection from the dead
is no more potent and blinding miracle. Instead of giving this book
the caption, "Jean Valjean," it might be termed the "History of the
Redemption of a Soul;" and such a theme is worthy the study of this
wide world of women and of men.
Initial in this redemptive work was the good bishop, whose words, "Jean
Valjean, my brother, you belong no longer to evil, but to good," never
lost their music or might to Valjean's spirit. Some man or woman
stands on everybody's road to God. And Jean Valjean, with the bishop's
words sounding in his ears--voices that will not silence--goes out with
his candlesticks, goes trembling out, and starts on his anabasis to a
new life; wandered all day in the fields, inhaled the odors of a few
late flowers, his childhood being thus recalled; and when the sun was
throwing mountain shadows behind hillocks and pebbles, as Jean Valjean
sat and pondered in a dumb way, a Savoyard came singing on his way,
tossing his bits of money in his hands; drops a forty-sous piece near
Jean Valjean, who, in a mood of inexplicable evil, places his huge foot
upon it, nor listened to the child's entreaty, "My piece, monsieur;"
and eager and more eager grows a child whose little riches were
invaded, "My piece, my white piece, my silver;" and in his voice are
tears--and what can be more touching than a child's voice touched with
tears? "My silver;" and the lad shook the giant by the collar of his
blouse--"I want my silver, my forty-sous piece"--and began to cry. A
little lad a-sobbing! Jean Valjean, you who for so many years "have
talked but little and never laughed;" Jean Valjean, pity the child;
give him his coin. You were bought of the bishop for good. But in
terrible voice he shouts: "Who is there? You here yet? You had better
take care of yourself;" and the little lad runs, breathless and
sobbing. Jean Valjean hears his sobbing, but made no move for
restitution until the little Savoyard has passed from sight and
hearing, when, waking as from some stupor, he rises, cries wildly
through the night, "Petit Gervais! Petit Gervais!" and listened,
and--no answer. Then he ran, ran toward restitution. Too late! too
late! "Petit Gervais! Petit Gervais! Petit Gervais!" and, to a
priest passing, "Monsieur, have you seen a child go by--a little
fellow--Petit Gervais is his name?" And he calls him again through the
empty night; and the lad hears him not. There is no response, and for
the first time since he passed to the galleys, Jean Valjean's heart
swells, and he bursts into tears; for he was horrified at himself. His
hardness had mastered him, even when the bishop's tenderness had thawed
his winter heart. Jean Valjean was now afraid of himself, which is
where moral strength has genesis. He goes back--back where? No
matter, wait. He sees in his thought--in his thought he sees the
bishop, and wept, shed hot tears, wept bitterly, with more weakness
than a woman, with more terror than a child, and his life seemed
horrible; and he walks--whither? No matter. But, past midnight, the
stage-driver saw, as he passed, a man in the attitude of prayer,
kneeling upon the pavement in the shadow before the bishop's door; and
should you have spoken, "Jean Valjean!" he would not have answered you.
He would not have heard. He is starting on a pilgrimage of manhood
toward God. He saw the bishop; now he sees God, and here is hope; for
so is God the secret of all good and worth, a thing to be set down as
the axiom of religion and life. A conscience long dormant is now
become regnant. Jean Valjean is a man again!
Goodness begets goodness. He climbed; and the mountain air and azure
and fountains of clear waters, spouting from cliffs of snow and the far
altitudes, fed his spirit. God and he kept company, and, as is meet,
goodness seemed native to him as lily blooms to lily stems. God was
his secret, as God is the secret of us all. To scan his process of
recovery is worth while. The bishop reminded him of God. Goodness and
love in man are wings to help us soar to where we see that service,
love, and goodness are in God--see that God is good and God is love.
Seeing God, Jean Valjean does good. Philanthropy is native to him;
gentleness seems his birthright; his voice is low and sweet; his
face--the helpless look to it for help; his eyes are dreamy, like a
poet's; he loves books; he looks not manufacturer so much as he looks
poet; he passes good on as if it were coin to be handled; he suffers
nor complains; his silence is wide, like that of the still night; he
frequently walks alone and in the country; he becomes a god to Fantine,
for she had spit upon him, and he had not resented; he adopts means for
the rescue of Cossette. In him, goodness moves finger from the lips,
breaks silence, and becomes articulate. Jean Valjean is brave,
magnanimous, of sensitive conscience, hungry-hearted, is possessed of
the instincts of motherhood, bears being misjudged without complaint,
is totally forgetful of himself, and is absolute in his loyalty to
God--qualities which lift him into the elect life of manhood.
Jean Valjean was brave. He and fear never met. The solitary fear he
knew was fear of himself, and lest he might not live for good as the
bishop had bidden him; but fear from without had never crossed his
path. His was the bravery of conscience. His strength was prodigious,
and he scrupled not to use it. Self-sparing was no trait of his
character. Like another hero we have read of, he would "gladly spend
and be spent" for others, and bankrupt himself, if thereby he might
make others rich. There is a physical courage, brilliant as a shock of
armies, which feels the conflict and leaps to it as the storm-waves
leap upon the sword edges of the cliffs--a courage which counts no
odds. There is another courage, moral rather than physical. Valjean
possessed both, with moral courage in ascendency. He has the agility
and strength sometimes found in criminals. He is now in the galleys
for life. One day, while engaged in furling sail, a sailor has toppled
from the yard; but in falling caught a rope, but hangs, swinging
violently, like some mad pendulum. The height is dizzying. Death
seems certain, when a convict, clad in red, and with a green cap, runs
up for rescue, lets himself down alongside of the swaying sailor, now
in the last extremity of weakness, and ready to drop like a winter
leaf. Valjean (for it is he) oscillates violently to and fro while the
throng below watch breathlessly. His peril is incredible, but his is a
bravery which does not falter, and a skill which equals bravery.
Valjean is swayed in the wind as the swaying sailor, until he catches
him in his arm, makes him fast to the rope, clambers up, reaches the
yard, hauls up the sailor, and carries him to a place of safety. And
the throng below, breathless till now, applauded and cried, "This man
must be pardoned." Then it is that he, free once more, leaps
down--falls from the dizzying height, the multitude thinks--leaps down
into the seas, and wins liberty. Jean Valjean is heroic. His moral
courage, which is courage at its noon, is discovered best in his rescue
of Fauchelevent, old, and enemy--an enmity engendered by Madeleine's
prosperity--to Monsieur Madeleine. The old man has fallen under his
cart, and is being surely crushed to death. The mayor joins the crowd
gathered about the unfortunate car-man; offers a rising price for one
who will go under the cart and rescue the old man. Javert is
there--keen of eye and nostril as a vulture--and Jean Valjean is his
prey. He believes the mayor to be Jean Valjean, and, as the mayor
urges some one to rescue the perishing man, says, with speech cold as
breath from a glacier, "I have known but one man who was equal to this
task, and he was a convict and in the galleys." The old man moans,
"How it crushes me!" and, hearing that cry, under the cart the mayor
crawls; and while those beside hold their breath, he, lying flat under
the weight, lifts twice, ineffectually, and, with one herculean effort,
lifts again, and the cart slowly rises, and many willing hands helping
from without, the old man is saved; and Monsieur Madeleine arises,
pale, dripping with sweat, garments muddy and torn, while the old man
whom he has rescued kisses his knees and calls him the good God. And
the mayor looks at Javert with tranquil eye, though knowing full well
that this act of generous courage in the rescue of an enemy has doomed
himself. This is moral courage of celestial order.
His magnanimity is certainly apparent,--in the rescue of his enemy,
Fauchelevent; in his release of his arch-enemy, Javert; in his presence
within the barricade to protect Marius, who had, as a lover, robbed him
of the one blossom that had bloomed in the garden of his heart, save
only the passing bishop and the abiding God. No pettiness is in him.
He loves and serves after a fashion learned of Christ. If compelled to
admire his courage, we are no less compelled to pay homage to his
magnanimity.
His was a hungry heart. Love he had never known; he had never had a
sweetheart. And now all pent-up love of a long life empties its
precious ointment on the head of Cossette. He was all the mother she
ever knew or needed to know. Heaven made her rich in such maternity as
his. Mother instinct is in all good lives, and belongs to man.
Maternity and paternity are met in the best manhood. The tenderness of
motherhood must soften a man's touch to daintiness, like an evening
wind's caress, before fatherhood is perfect. All his youthhood, which
knew not any woman's lips to kiss; all his manhood, which had never
shared a hearth with wife or child,--all this unused tenderness now
administers to the wants of this orphan, Cossette. His rescue of her
from the Thenardiers is poetry itself. He had the instincts of a
gentleman. The doll he brought her for her first Christmas gift was
forerunner of a thousand gifts of courtesy and love. See, too, the
mourning garments he brought and laid beside her bed the first morning
he brought her to his garret, and watched her slumber as if he had been
appointed by God to be her guardian angel. To him life henceforth
meant Cossette. He was her servant always. For her he fought for his
life as if it had been an unutterable good. He lost himself, which is
the very crown of motherhood's devotion. He was himself supplanted in
her affections by her lover, Marius, and his heart was stabbed as if by
poisoned daggers; for was not Cossette wife, daughter, sister, brother,
mother, father, friend--all? But if his heart was breaking, she never
guessed it. He hid his hurt, though dying of heartbreak.
Then, too, Jean Valjean is misjudged, and by those who should have
trusted him as they trusted God. We find it hard to be patient with
Marius, and are not patient with Cossette. Her selfishness is not to
be condoned. Her contrition and her tears come too late. Though
Valjean forgives her, we do not forgive her. She deserves no
forgiveness. Marius's honor was of the amateur order, lacking depth
and breadth. He was superficial, judging by hearing rather than by
eyes and heart. We have not patience to linger with his wife and him,
but push past them to the hero spirit, whom they have not eyes to see
nor hearts to understand. Jean Valjean misjudged, and by Marius and
Cossette! Impossible! Javert may do that; Fantine, not knowing him,
may do that, but once knowing him she had as lief distrusted day to
bring the light as to have distrusted him. Misjudged, and by those he
loved most, suffered for, more than died for! Poor Valjean! This
wakes our pity and our tears. Before, we have watched him, and have
felt the tug of battle on him; now the mists fall, and we put our hands
before our eyes and weep. This saint of God misjudged by those for
whom he lives! Yet this is no solitary pathos. Were all hearts'
history known, we should know how many died misjudged. All Jean
Valjean does has been misinterpreted. We distrust more and more
circumstantial evidence. It is hideous. No jury ought to convict a
man on evidence of circumstances. Too many tragedies have been enacted
because of such. Marius thought he was discerning and of a sensitive
honor. He thought it evident that Jean Valjean had slain Javert, and
had slain Monsieur Madeleine, whose fortune he has offered as
Cossette's marriage portion. Poor Jean Valjean! You a murderer, a
marauder--you! Marius acts with frigid honor. Valjean will not live
with Marius and Cossette, being too sensitive therefor, perceiving
himself distrusted by Marius, but comes to warm his hands and heart at
the hearth of Cossette's presence; and he is stung when he sees no fire
in the reception-room. The omission he can not misinterpret. He goes
again, and the chairs are removed. Marius may have honor, but his
honor is cruel, like an inquisitor with rack and thumbscrew; and then
Jean Valjean goes no more, but day by day suns his heart by going far
enough to look at the house where Cossette is--no more; then his eyes
are feverish to catch sight of her habitation as parched lips drink at
desert springs. Misjudged! O, that is harder to bear than all his
hurts!
Then we will not say of Valjean, "He has conscience," but rather, we
will say, "He is conscience." Valjean's struggle with conscience is
one of the majestic chapters of the world's literature, presenting, as
it does, the worthiest and profoundest study of Christian conscience
given by any dramatist since Christ opened a new chapter for conscience
in the soul. Monsieur Madeleine, the mayor, is rich, respected,
honored, is a savior of society, sought out by the king for political
preferment. One shadow tracks him like a nightmare. Javert is on his
track, instinct serving him for reason. At last, Javert himself thinks
Jean Valjean has been found; for a man has been arrested, is to be
tried, will doubtless be convicted, seeing evidence is damning. Now,
Monsieur Madeleine, mayor of M----, your fear is all but ended. An
anodyne will be administered to your pain. Jean Valjean has known many
a struggle. He thought his fiercest battles fought; but all his
yesterdays of conflict are as play contests and sham battles matched
with this. Honor, usefulness, long years of service, love,
guardianship of Cossette, and fealty to a promise given a dying
mother--all beckon to him. He is theirs; and has he not suffered
enough? More than enough. Let this man alone, that is all. Let him
alone! He sees it. Joy shouts in his heart, "Javert will leave me in
quiet." "Let us not interfere with God," and his resolution is formed.
But conscience looks into his face. Ha! the bishop, too, is beside
him. Conscience speaks, and is saying, "Let the real Valjean go and
declare himself." This is duty. Conscience speaks, and his words are
terrible, "Go, declare thyself." Jean Valjean's sin is following him.
That evening he had robbed Petit Gervais; therefore he is imperiled.
Sin finds man out. But the fight thickens, and Valjean thinks to
destroy the mementos of his past, and looks fearfully toward the door,
bolted as it is, and gathers from a secret closet his old blue blouse,
an old pair of trousers, an old haversack, and a great thorn stick, and
incontinently flings them into the flames. Then, noticing the silver
candlesticks, the bishop's gifts, "These, too, must be destroyed," he
says, and takes them in his hands, and stirs the fire with one of the
candlesticks, when he hears a voice clamoring, "Jean Valjean! Jean
Valjean! Jean Valjean!" Conscience and a battle, but the battle was
not lost; for you see him in the prisoners' dock, declaring, "I am Jean
Valjean;" and those of the court dissenting, he persisted, declared his
recognition of some galley prisoners, urging still, "I am Jean Valjean;
you see clearly that I am Jean Valjean;" and those who saw and heard
him were dazed; and he said: "All who are here think me worthy of pity,
do you not? Do you not? Great God! When I think of what I was on the
point of doing, I think myself worthy of envy;" and he was gone. And
next, Javert is seizing him fiercely, brutally, imperiously, as a
criminal for whom there is no regard. With this struggle of conscience
and its consequent victory, "The Charge of the Light Brigade" becomes
tawdry and garish. The sight moves us as the majestic minstrelsy of
seas in tempest. No wonder that they who looked at Valjean, as he
stood declaring himself to be the real Valjean, were blinded with a
great light.
And his heart is so hungry, and his loyalty to God so urgent and so
conquering. Jean Valjean has suffered much. Ulysses, buffeted by wars
and stormy seas, has had a life of calm as compared with this new hero.
Ulysses' battles were from without; Valjean's battles were from within.
But if he has suffered greatly, he has also been greatly blessed.
Struggle for goodness against sin is its own reward. We do not give
all and get nothing. There are compensations. Recompense of reward
pursues goodness as foam a vessel's track. If Jean Valjean loved
Cossette with a passion such as the angels know; if she was his sun,
and made the spring, there was a sense in which Cossette helped
Valjean. There was response, not so much in the return of love as in
that he loved her; and his love for her helped him in his dark hours,
helped him when he needed help the most, helped him on with God. He
needs her to love, as our eyes need the fair flowers and the blue sky.
His life was not empty, and God had not left himself without witness in
Jean Valjean's life; for he had had his love for Cossette.
But he is bereft. Old age springs on him suddenly, as Javert had done
in other days. He has, apparently without provocation, passed from
strength to decrepitude. Since he sees Cossette no more, he has grown
gray, stooped, decrepit. There is no morning now, since he does not
see Cossette. You have seen him walking to the corner to catch sight
of her house. How feeble he is! Another day, walking her way, but not
so far; and the next, and the next, walking; but the last day he goes
scarce beyond his own threshold. And now he can not go down the
stairs; now he is in his own lonely room, alone. He sees death camping
in his silent chamber, but feels no fright. No, no! rather,
"Death, like a friend's voice from a distant field
Approaching, called.
* * * * * *
For sure no gladlier does the stranded wreck
See, through the gray skirts of a lifting squall,
The boat that bears the hope of life approach
To save the life despaired of, than he saw
Death dawning on him, and the close of all."
But Cossette, Cossette! To see her once. Just once, only once! To
touch her hand--O that were heaven! But he says to his heart, "I shall
not touch her hand, and I shall not see her face--no more, no more!"
And the little garments he brought her when he took her from her
slavery with the Thenardiers, there they are upon his bed, where he can
touch them, as if they were black tresses of the woman he had loved and
lost. The bishop's candlesticks are lit. He is about to die, and
writes in his poor, sprawling fashion to Cossette--writes to her. He
fronts her always, as the hills front the dawn. He ceases, and sobs
like a breaking heart. O! "She is a smile that has passed over me. I
shall never see her again!" And the door dashes open; Marius and
Cossette are come. Joy, joy to the old heart! Jean Valjean thinks it
is heaven's morning. Marius has discovered that Jean Valjean is not
his murderer, but his savior; that he has, at imminent peril of his
life, through the long, oozy quagmire of the sewer, with his giant
strength, borne him across the city, saved him; and now, too late,
Marius began to see in Jean Valjean "a strangely lofty and saddened
form," and has come to take this great heart home. But God will do
that himself. Jean Valjean is dying. He looks at Cossette as if he
would take a look which would endure through eternity, kisses a fold of
her garment, and half articulates, "It--is--nothing to die;" then
suddenly rises, walks to the wall, brings back a crucifix, lays it near
his hand. "The Great Martyr," he says; fondles Marius and Cossette;
sobs to Cossette, "Not to see you broke my heart;" croons to himself,
"You love me;" puts his hands upon their heads in a caress, saying, "I
do not see clearly now." Later he half whispered, "I see a light!"
And a man and woman are raining kisses on a dead man's hands. And on
that blank stone, over a nameless grave in the cemetery of Pere la
Chaise, let some angel sculptor chisel, "Here lies Jean Valjean, Hero."