And yet in this great novel there are episodes of wonderful beauty. The natural and the impossible, the simple and the incomprehensible are thrown together in hopeless confusion. Jean Valjean, a convict discharged from the galleys after nineteen years of penal servitude, passes through the little town of “D,” where every door is closed against him. Nowhere, not even in the jail, can he find shelter for a single night, until the good bishop, as saintly and lovable a character as ever illustrated the pages of fiction, receives him in simple confidence. Jean Valjean repays his hospitality by stealing the bishop’s silver candlesticks. He is arrested, but the good man, to save him from punishment, tells the gendarmes that the candlesticks have been taken with his own consent. On his way from the village Jean Valjean robs the little Gervais, a poor Savoyard. But the generosity of the bishop now produces a strange tumult in his heart, remorse overcomes him, the whole current of his life is changed, and he is at once transformed into a man as heroic and self-sacrificing as imagination can conceive.
Under the name of M. Madeleine he becomes a successful manufacturer at “M. sur M.,” charitable, public-spirited, and beneficent, and he is elected mayor of the city. Javert, an incorruptible but unamiable sleuth hound of the police, believes that he recognizes in M. Madeleine the convict Jean Valjean, and he writes to his superior officer announcing the discovery, but the proof is insufficient, and when at last he learns that Jean Valjean has been arrested elsewhere, Javert is convinced that he has been mistaken. He thereupon appears before the mayor and tells him what he has done and asks M. Madeleine to remove him from his position, which he considers himself unqualified to fill.
Fantine, the mistress of one Tholomyès, a student, is abandoned by her lover and seeks employment, leaving her child Cosette with one Thenardier, an innkeeper at Montfermeil, by whom the little creature is maltreated and abused, while ever increasing demands are made on the poor mother for her support. Fantine obtains employment in the factory of M. Madeleine, but is discharged without his knowledge, and gradually sinks to the lowest depths of poverty and degradation. When M. Madeleine knows of her misery and the cause of it, he takes Fantine under his protection, but it is now too late, for when he learned that another man under the name of Jean Valjean was about to be sent to the galleys for robbing the little Gervais, he discloses his own identity at the trial in order to prevent another from suffering in his stead. He is arrested by Javert, and Fantine dies committing her little daughter to his care. Jean Valjean is again sent to the galleys, but he escapes, finds Cosette, rescues her from the inhuman Thenardier and his wife, and they live long together in an old house in Paris. Here he is again detected by Javert and followed, but escapes with Cosette after superhuman exertions, climbing over a high wall into a convent, where he is cherished by the old gardener whose life he had saved some time before, and after a remarkable episode in which he is buried alive for a short time, he takes service in the garden of the convent where Cosette becomes a pupil.
The boy Marius now becomes Cosette’s lover, and there are many passages of natural though rather silly love-making, and the sacrifices made by Jean Valjean to the happiness of the young couple are extraordinary, and often indeed unnecessary and unreasonable.
Through the book the French melodramatic instinct and love for exaggeration everywhere appears. Jean Valjean himself is a man of more than human powers. His transformation from a criminal to a saint is very hard to believe. The virtues of the good people and the wickedness of the villains are excessive and unnatural. There is a small group of desperate and impossible bandits, and a small coterie of revolutionists for revolution’s sake, heroic absurdities who could exist nowhere outside of France or bedlam. There are fights at the barricades and labyrinthian journeys through the sewers of Paris, a great deal of slaughtering and many hairbreadth escapes; but in this strange kaleidoscope figures of marvellous beauty sometimes appear—the little Gavroche, the gamin who protects and patronizes his small brothers and lodges them in the entrails of a wooden elephant; the old bourgeois, M. Gillenormand, charitable, wrong-headed, and gallant, to whom “the republic was a guillotine in the twilight and the empire a saber in the night”; and his daughter, Mlle. Gillenormand, “the incombustible prude.”
When Javert, the detective, is at last overcome by the magnanimity of Jean Valjean so that he can no longer pursue his prey and discharge his duty to the state, he finds refuge only in suicide!
There are many wise observations and brilliant passages, also a great abundance of mere conceits. For instance: “Man is not a circle with a single center, but an ellipse with two foci—facts are the one, ideas the other.” There are long descriptions of motives for acts which explain themselves, and there are other acts, the motives for which are not only not explained, but quite inexplicable. There are interminable digressions everywhere. A trifling episode at Waterloo is the occasion for a very long and graphic account of that battle, which has, in fact, nothing to do with the novel. The fact that Jean Valjean happens to take refuge in a convent leads to an elaborate description of the entire conventual system; a few words of slang introduce a long treatise on argot; Gavroche is the peg upon which is hung a treatise on the gamins of Paris; and interminable discussions regarding barricades, sewers, and many other things which appear casually in the story consume more than half the entire space in the whole work. In the meantime the action is wholly suspended. Of course there are many valuable things in these digressions. Hugo is a man of encyclopædic knowledge, and much philosophy, some good, some bad, appears in the book; but the feeling is inevitable that this information and this philosophy ought to be furnished in some other place, and not hung disjointedly upon the thread of a novel with which it has no natural connection.
But in spite of these defects, “Les Misérables” has perhaps appealed more strongly than any novel ever written to the universal sympathy of mankind for sorrow and suffering.
ROMOLA
GEORGE ELIOT
It is no false judgment which has assigned to George Eliot a very distinguished place among the masters of fiction. This writer had a better right than perhaps any other of her sex to assume the nom-de-plume of a man; for one of the striking characteristics of her work is its essentially masculine quality.