Among all the characters of fiction, Victor Hugo’s Jean Valjean stands
out in a light of special distinction. The author intended him to indicate
the limiting influence of social law and custom. However, he accomplishes
a much better thing than that. He furnishes us a master picture of the
upward struggle of a soul despite the influences acting within and without
to keep it down. In certain broad and general features, the redemption of
Jean Valjean is a picture of the redemption of any person in any place
or time.
The opening chapters of the story of _Les Miserables_ reveal a man with
sullen features, suspicious eyes, and unkempt appearance, entering the
town of D. at evening time. He has just escaped from nineteen years in the
galleys. His crime was a serious one. He thrust his hand through a baker’s
window, and stole a loaf of bread to feed the hungry children of his poor
sister. Nineteen years at the oars have been the expiation of this and his
various efforts to escape. He is now a fugitive, forever branded a
criminal by society. The law pursues him. Every man’s hand is against him.
Turned with suspicion from every other place of entertainment, he is
finally received in the home of an aged priest—the first stranger who has
ever trusted him. He yields to his criminal propensity, cultivated by his
years in the galleys, and steals away in the night with the
bishop’s silver.
On the way, he meets a little savoyard, and robs him of his scanty store
of money. The helplessness of the child touches him. Remorse lays hold of
him. He sits down upon a stone and weeps. Restoring the bishop’s silver,
he kneels in prayer at the gate. In a word, Jean Valjean has found
himself. He has taken the first step on the road to better things by
seeing himself as he is. An angel has held a mirror before his face, and
in it he has beheld himself aright.
There is no getting further on the pathway to the higher life until one
has first realized his own situation. So long as he pities himself and
occupies his mind with finding excuses for his own shortcomings, there is
little hope for him. When he sees himself a sinner, the heavenward gates
suddenly swing open. The picture of Jean Valjean seated on a stone,
weeping bitter tears over his sins, is nothing but a powerful sermon on
the old-time doctrine which taught the necessity of conviction as a step
on the road to conversion. Jean Valjean stood convicted in the court of
God. That made him a candidate for divine mercy. The mercy was not
withheld. It is so with us all. There is too little real conviction of
sin in these days. We need the mirror held before us.
Jean Valjean had shared in the experience of Isaiah many centuries before.
When an invisible hand swept aside the curtains that hid the divine glory
from human gaze, Isaiah saw the Lord sitting in his glory in the temple.
Its effect was normal. It forced upon the man a sense of the distressing
contrast between himself and what he saw. Consequently, he cried out that
he was undone because of his uncleanness. Before the scene was over, he
received the dross-destroying touch which made him fit to be a servant of
his Lord. The redemption of Isaiah, too, began with a sense of his
own sinfulness.
The years pass, and Jean Valjean reappears upon the surface of social
life. He has begun life anew in the town of M. sur M. under another name.
He is now Father Madeleine, the head of a large manufacturing
establishment, the mayor of his city, and known among his people as a
gentle-hearted and saintly character.
He is in his room at night, pacing back and forth. His step is nervous,
his face is feverish, his breast is heaving. There is every indication
that he is fighting a great battle. Hugo calls this scene, “The Tempest
in a Skull.”
An old man has been taken in the streets. Under suspicion of being the
long-lost criminal, Jean Valjean, he is under arrest and about to be
committed to the galleys. The question which confronts the prosperous
and honored mayor of M. sur M. is evident. For him, the conflict is
between the choice of wealth, ease, and honor and that of confession,
disgrace, and the prison. He must decide whether he himself will answer
to the charge society has against him, or whether he will avail himself
of the opportunity to let an innocent man suffer in his place.
As the hours pass, the question is settled as an honorable man must
necessarily settle it. The tempest subsides. He seeks the courtroom,
makes himself known, and sees the old man set at liberty. He has
accomplished the next great step in his redemption by conquering himself.
This is one of the severest tests to which any man is ever put. It is also
one which many fail to meet. It is easier to overcome others than to
conquer oneself. Noah proved the hero of the flood, then failed to be
sufficiently master of himself to keep sober when he had planted a
vineyard. Men sometimes lead conquering armies and then fall victims to
their own weaknesses and passions. Yet there is no truer greatness than
that which comes from self-mastery. The ruler of his own spirit is greater
than the conqueror of a city. The mastery of self may be costly. It was in
the case of Jean Valjean. However, it is a necessary step on the
upward road.
In the next significant scene, we see Jean Valjean, once more at liberty,
slipping along a street of Paris holding the hand of a little girl. He has
taken under his protection the orphan child of an unfortunate woman who
worked in his factory at M. sur M. It has been many years since he has had
any one upon whom to lavish his affection. The child receives all the love
so long unreleased from his soul. He serves her as a real parent would do,
as her mother would do had not grim circumstances robbed her of her life.
She shares in his vicissitudes and dangers, but he sees her safely through
to a beautiful womanhood.
As Father Madeline, mayor of M. sur M., Jean Valjean was a notably good
man. Now he becomes a saint. There is no quality of tender-heartedness and
no spirit of self-sacrifice which he does not possess. He has attained to
the glory of a beautiful old age, an old age made beautiful by the
presence within of a noble soul. On the last lap of the journey, he has
been led by a little child. If the influence of a child will not call out
the tenderness planted in the human constitution, then nothing will. Jean
Valjean yields to its influence. He accomplishes the third stage in his
redemption when he gives himself away.
The human heart must have something to love and something to which to
cling. It is never at its best until it does. Much of the divinity planted
in these hardened lives of ours is imprisoned until it finds some object
of affection to draw it out. The lily of life never comes to the fullness
of its bloom until the heart has found someone to love, to toil for, to
sacrifice for. Silas Marner found that influence in little Eppie, who came
to take the place of his paltry and failing gold. Jean Valjean found it
in Cosette.
The human tendency is to make self the centre of the universe. It is plain
that one can never arrive at his best until he recovers from this
tendency. To have the stars and planets revolve about oneself means a
small, narrow, constricted, and embittered life. The end is failure and
disappointment. One must live for more than self, or he never lives
at all.