A Hero and Some Other Folks. William A. Quayle
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,