BOOKS.
VICTOR HUGO'S NEW NOVEL.*
THE new novel, with which Victor Hugo is now occupying the world of letters in Paris, is a remarkable attempt to examine social pro- blems from the artistic point of view. It has some features which are very open to criticism. The mere idea of presenting a picture of human life in its greatness and in its weakness through ten volumes of an encyclopedic romance seems to argue a curious confusion of scientific and artistic possibilities ; the translator of Shakspeare ought, one would think, to have known better that the depths of the heart are searchless. Again, that strange love of the supernatural and the grotesque, which inspired the painter of Habibrah and Bug- Jargal, of Quasimodo and the Archdeacon, reappears in the present volumes, where the dramatis persona are a patriarchal bishop, a saintly burglar, a narrow-natured inspector of police, and a self-sacrificing Magdalene. Revolt against society and systems is the principle p■ro- claimed in the preface, and taught in every incident of the story. Yet withal Victor Hugo is no vulgar rebel against authority; no mere blaspheming Capaneus ; but a Titan stealing light that he may im- part it. Age has mellowed without impairing his inspiration/ and an unquenchable faith in the good of human nature has finally triumphed over the fervid political animosities of the man, who began life as a Legitimist and is now in exile as a Republican. It need scarcely be said that his style has a nameless charm of language, or that his story always interests, though it may fail to convince. To those who can allow themselves to forget that M. Victor Hugo's system of the world is not ours, and that he has another heaven and another earth, the exquisite finish of every detail, the nature thrown into every little touch, will give, .partially at least, the effects of actual and very beautiful life. It is like music and familiar voices that have blended with the fantastic tracery of a dream. Fantini, as the first part of Les Miserables is called, consists of a series of episodes completing one another, rather than of a connected narrative. The first is a beautiful sketch of Monseigneur Myriel, Bishop of D--, a gentleman who has taken orders late in life, having been ruined by the Revolution, and in whom the devotion of the saint is tempered by the tact of the man of the world. His first act, when he arrives at his see, is to turn his palace into an hospital, and he reserves himself only forty pounds a year out of his revenues for his own support. His liberality and courage make him the idol of his people, and he is equally in his place escorting a criminal 'to the scaffold or arguing with a Voltainan senator. When his oppo- nent tells him that " God does very well for the people," who "butter their dry bread with legends, chimeras, the immortality of the soul, and Paradise," the bishop, instead of losing his temper, only claps his, hands. " This is something like talking. But what a grand and truly wonderful thing this materialism is. He who once has it has his eyes opened ; he will not be so stupid as to expose himself to be banished like Cato, or stoned like Stephen, or burned like Joan of Arc. . . . But you philosophers are * Les Miserable& Par Victor Hugo. Premitre Etude. London : Librairie Fran- gable. easy sovereigns, and you will let the poor believe in God instead of in philosophy, just as they have a goose and cliesnuts for Christ- mas instead of a truffied turkey." Sometimes, it is true, Mon- seigneur Myriel meets with a more formidable disputant. Once in performance of a painful duty he goes to visit a dying member of the Convention, who has only not voted the King's death. But the philosopher has a faith of his own, and pushes his spiritual superior hard. " To me," he observes, when the bishop speaks of the crimes of the Revolution, " the brother of Cartouche, an innocent boy, hung up under the arms till he died for the mere crime of being Car- touche's brother, is as sad a thought as the grandson of Louis XV., an innocent child, martyred in the Temple tower for the mere crime of having been the grandson of. Louis XV." "Sir," said the bishop, "I do not like to hear these names coupled"—" Cartouche,' Louis IV.' Whose advocate are you? " It ends by the Catholic prelate receiving the dying Jacobin's benediction. But although he has learned to appreciate the difference, the bishop's faith in his old creed is unshaken ; he does not care to examine the mysteries he believes ; and "he treasures in his soul a serious reverence for the twilight." In fact, his life is engrossed with other cares than specu- lation ; and his simple genial nature turns from business and study to ' work in his garden, or to the society of his sister and housekeeper, two , old ladies who have grown into Monseigneur's habits, without the ability fully to understand his nature. The housekeeper -especi- ally grumbles at her master's orders that the Palace door be always left on the latch, in order that visitors may have access to him. The custom, in truth, has its inconveniences. One evening the door is opened by a ticket-of-leave convict, who is on his way to the town assigned hint by the police as a residence. Jean Taljeanwas originallycondemned to the hulks for stealing in order to save his sister's family from starvation, but his term of five years has been lengthened to nineteen in consequence of his repeated attempts to escape. Now that he is set at liberty he is a moody, desperate man, at war with society, which has imprisoned him, and which treats him as an outcast. He has not even been able to get lodging in any inn of the bishop's town, and is directed by a lady, who does not know his antecedents, to the Palace. The bishop at once makes him sit down to dinner, talks with him like a friend, and assigns him a bedroom near his own. Next morning it appears that Jean Valjean and the bishop's plate are missing, and the police presently bring him in, having arrested him on suspicion. The bishop declares that the plate was a present, and dismisses the convict with an admonition to employ the proceeds of it in becoming an honest man. But the passage to good is not so easy. Jean Valjean, in his day's march, meets a little Savoyard, who is tossing his money in the air, and a piece of two francs falls at Jean's feet. He takes it, and drives the boy away. Then, when it is too late, the consciousness of his baseness overpowers him, the more vividly, perhaps, because this last offence has been against one of the poor, and he rushes back to the bishop's palace to consult with his benefactor. Thenceforward all trace of hint disappears, though the police are after him.
The next scene is of a very different kind. Three students have promised their mistresses a surprise, and take them to dine in a restaurant near Paris. After dinner they leave the room, and it presently appears that the surprise planned has been the young men's return to their homes in the south, and the abandonment of the women they have been living with. "The country demands," says their parting letter, "that‘we turn out prefects, fathers of families, and counsellors of state like other people. Venerate us—we are sacri- ficing ourselves. Shed some hasty tears for us, and replace us with- out delay." The counsel is speedily followed by two of the desolate Ariadnes, but the third, Fantine, has not yet been depraved, and has a little daughter to live for. Renouncing the ineffectual struggle to earn her bread honestly in Paris, she commits her child to the care of a family at Montfermeil, and goes herself to M.-sur-M., where she finds employment in the manufactories of a M. Madeleine. M. Madeleine, we may say at once, is the reformed Jean Valjean, now a man of substance and cultivation, and an intelligent philanthropist, who has refused the Cross of the Legion of Honour, and only con- sented to become mayor that his opportunities of doing good may be enlarged. Unhappily, the female operatives under him are super- intended by a woman less large-natured than himself, who, having ascertained Fantine's antecedents, dismisses her at a time when she is in debt, and the unworthy guardians of her child clamorous for money. Fantine naturally sinks to the lowest depth; and, having sold her hair, and even her front teeth to procure money for her child, becomes a street outcast. In this capacity she is taken up by the police for disorderly conduct, and is only saved from prison and sent to the hospital by M. Madeleine's intervention. But this interference of the mayor irritates the Inspector Javert, a methodical man, in whom the spirit of his duties has become intellect and conscience, and who having long suspected M. Madeleine's antecedents, now denounces him at head-quarters. Unexpectedly the accusation is not even listened to. It appears that a man has already been taken up who is believed to be the ex- convict Jean Valjean, and Javert himself is confounded and convinced by the strong resemblance. It thus becomes M. Madeleine's duty to denounce himself, and after a terrible inner conflict he accom- plishes it. Before measures can be taken for his arrest he has just time to see Fantine die. She is buried in "what is called the public ditch" of the cemetery where the poor lie confusedly. " Happily God knows how to recover the soul.' Jean Valjean, again convict in the eyes of the law, as his robbery of the little Savoyard is in- scribed in the banks of the police, escapes chiefly through the devo-
tion of a heroic Sister of Charity—the work of his last ten years ruined—to begin the world again.
It is difficult to criticize an unfinished work where the next few volumes may correct all that we find one-sided and im- perfect in the first two, but the question to what purpose is this picture of human misery and short-oomings remains to our mind the great argument against M. Victor Hugo's book. He himself says that it is one of a class which can never fail to have a use" so long as there shall exist through laws and manners a social damnation creating artificial hells in the midst of civilization, and complicating destiny, which is divine, with a human fatality." No doubt much of this is true. Our imperfections do often reproduce themselves in a ghastly progeny of crime, with which we seem to be unconnected, and which only God can father on its true parents. The philanthropy that teaches us to educate that we may not have to correct, and to make reform the great object of punishment, can never be out of place. But surely it is false to infer that laws and manners do in any eminent degree create a social damnation. Allowing that Jean Valjean was punished beyond his due, and so brutalized by punishment, we may yet fairly say that the era of Draconian legisla- tion is passed, and that, after all, we must in this world look chiefly to acts, and leave the question of intention to Heaven. The true pre- ventive for all crimes that arise from necessity is the simple expedient of an efficient poor law, which M. Victor Hugo, like most French- men not men of science, would probably regard with horror. For the man who, having the workhouse at hand, prefers stealing to breaking stones and a temporary separation from his family, we confess we have little pity. The case of Fantine's ruin and desertion is no doubt more difficult. The problem how to keep a young girl, who can earn a scanty but sufficient living by her needle, from pre- ferring to live idly, expensively, and at the cost of her self-respect, with a young man whose dress and manners fascinate her, because they seem to indicate superiority, is one which no legislation can solve. But M. Victor Hugo is untrue to morality and to art when he en- titles the latter period of Fantine's career "the Descent." He seems to imply that if her seducer had pensioned her, and she had been able to live on without selling herself, taking her old sin as matter of pleasant memory, she would have been a higher woman than she was as the street Pariah. To ourselves, Fantine, mutilating herself, sacrificing life and shame for her daughter, is on a higher moral level than Fantine dining happily at St. Cloud with her seducer and his friends. Nor can we see that matters would be much mended if the inequalities of social life could by any miracle be so far levelled that a woman's love of refinement and indolence should no longer be in- ducements to her to prefer concubinage to marriage. Without refer- ence to the fact that great disparity in the number of the sexes seems to lead under any circumstance to illicit connexions, or to the argu- ment that inequalities must always remain, and that a woman may as well sell herself for refinement or even for money as for physical beauty, we object absolutely to the idea that we can extirpate vice by removing its opportunities. We want the morality of men, not the faultless movements of puppets, and the feeble innocence of the boy unacquainted with evil or unattracted by it is of less value than the firm will that has learned in much suffering to be its own law. It is strange that an artist like M. Victor Hugo should believe that there is any fatality in men's manners which can overbear a resolute will or God's order. The Greek school of art was truer in its primary conception of morality. Prometheus never falters from his purpose, though the vulture gnaws his liver, and the earth is heaving around him. Is it reserved for our own century to proclaim that man, who seems to have conquered spate, is yet powerless against his own appetites, and must bind himself that he may not rush upon the sword? If so, " Christus nos liberavit," the text M. Victor Hugo mournfully quotes, has indeed lost its moaning, or has brought death into the world.
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