It is here
that we touch most intimately the generative artistic idea of the
romance: are they not all four taken out of some quaint moulding
Illustrative of the Beatitudes, or the Ten Commandments, or the seven
deadly sins? What is Quasimodo but an animated gargoyle? What is the
whole book but the reanimation of Gothic art? It is curious that in this, the earliest of the five great romances,
there should be so little of that extravagance that latterly we have
come almost to identify with the author's manner. Yet even here we are
distressed by words, thoughts, and incidents that defy belief and
alienate the sympathies. The scene of the _in pace_, for example, in
spite of its strength, verges dangerously on the province of the penny
novelist. I do not believe that Quasimodo rode upon the bell; I should
as soon imagine that he swung by the clapper. And again, the following
two sentences, out of an otherwise admirable chapter, surely surpass
what it had ever entered into the heart of any other man to imagine
(vol. ii. p. 180): "Il souffrait tant que par instants il s'arrachait
des poignées de cheveux, _pour voir s'ils ne blanchissaient pas_." And,
p. 181: "Ses pensées étaient si insupportables qu'il prenait sa tête à
deux mains et tàtchait de l'arracher de ses épaules _pour la briser sur
le pavé_." One other fault, before we pass on. In spite of the horror and misery
that pervade all of his later work, there is in it much less of actual
melodrama than here, and rarely, I should say never, that sort of
brutality, that useless insufferable violence to the feelings, which is
the last distinction between melodrama and true tragedy. Now, in "Notre
Dame," the whole story of Esmeralda's passion for the worthless archer
is unpleasant enough; but when she betrays herself in her last
hiding-place, herself and her wretched mother, by calling out to this
sordid hero who has long since forgotten her--well, that is just one of
those things that readers will not forgive; they do not like it, and
they are quite right; life is hard enough for poor mortals without
having it indefinitely embittered for them by bad art. We look in vain for any similar blemish in "Les Misérables." Here, on
the other hand, there is perhaps the nearest approach to literary
restraint that Hugo has ever made: there is here certainly the ripest
and most easy development of his powers. It is the moral intention of
this great novel to awaken us a little, if it may be--for such
awakenings are unpleasant--to the great cost of the society that we
enjoy and profit by, to the labour and sweat of those who support the
litter, civilisation, in which we ourselves are so smoothly carried
forward. People are all glad to shut their eyes; and it gives them a
very simple pleasure when they can forget that our laws commit a million
individual injustices, to be once roughly just in the general; that the
bread that we eat, and the quiet of the family, and all that embellishes
life and makes it worth having, have to be purchased by death--by the
deaths of animals, and the deaths of men wearied out with labour, and
the deaths of those criminals called tyrants and revolutionaries, and
the deaths of those revolutionaries called criminals. It is to something
of all this that Victor Hugo wishes to open men's eyes in "Les
Misérables"; and this moral lesson is worked out in masterly coincidence
with the artistic effect. The deadly weight of civilisation to those who
are below presses sensibly on our shoulders as we read. A sort of
mocking indignation grows upon us as we find Society rejecting, again
and again, the services of the most serviceable; setting Jean Valjean to
pick oakum, casting Galileo into prison, even crucifying Christ. There
is a haunting and horrible sense of insecurity about the book. The
terror we thus feel is a terror for the machinery of law, that we can
hear tearing, in the dark, good and bad, between its formidable wheels
with the iron stolidity of all machinery, human or divine. This terror
incarnates itself sometimes and leaps horribly out upon us; as when the
crouching mendicant looks up, and Jean Valjean, in the light of the
street lamp, recognises the face of the detective; as when the lantern
of the patrol flashes suddenly through the darkness of the sewer; or as
when the fugitive comes forth at last at evening, by the quiet
riverside, and finds the police there also, waiting stolidly for vice
and stolidly satisfied to take virtue instead. The whole book is full of
oppression, and full of prejudice, which is the great cause of
oppression. We have the prejudices of M. Gillenormand, the prejudices of
Marius, the prejudices in revolt that defend the barricade, and the
throned prejudices that carry it by storm. And then we have the
admirable but ill-written character of Javert, the man who had made a
religion of the police, and would not survive the moment when he learned
that there was another truth outside the truth of laws; a just creation,
over which the reader will do well to ponder. With so gloomy a design this great work is still full of life and light
and love. The portrait of the good Bishop is one of the most agreeable
things in modern literature. The whole scene at Montfermeil is full of
the charm that Hugo knows so well how to throw about children. Who can
forget the passage where Cosette, sent out at night to draw water,
stands in admiration before the illuminated booth, and the huckster
behind "lui faisait un peu l'effet d'être le Père éternel"? The pathos
of the forlorn sabot laid trustingly by the chimney in expectation of
the Santa Claus that was not, takes us fairly by the throat; there is
nothing in Shakespeare that touches the heart more nearly. The loves of
Cosette and Marius are very pure and pleasant, and we cannot refuse our
affection to Gavroche, although we may make a mental reservation of our
profound disbelief in his existence. 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.