A Hero and Some Other Folks | Page 6

a Turner. He is fierce in hates and loves. He does nothing by moderation. Calmness does not belong to him. He is tempestuous always; but tempests are magnificent and purifying to the air. Hugo is painting, and painting heroes, and his hero of heroes is Valjean. Jean Valjean is conscience. In Macbeth, conscience is warring and retributive. In Richard III, conscience, stifled in waking, speaks in dreams, and is menace, like a sword swung by a maniac's hands. In Arthur Dimmesdale, conscience is lacerative. In Jean Valjean, conscience is regulative, creative, constructive. Jean Valjean is conscience, and conscience is king. What the classic heroes lacked, Jean Valjean possesses.
The setting of this character is entirely modern. "Les Miserables" is a story of the city and of poverty, and can not be dissociated from them by any wrench of thought, however violent. Not that urban life or poverty are new elements in the school of suffering. They are not new, as pain is not new. This is the difference. In the old ages, the city and poverty were taken as matters of course. Comfort was not a classic consideration. The being alive to conditions, sensitive to suffering, eager for diminution of the world's woes, is a modern thought, a Christ thought. Sociology is an application of Christ's teaching. He founded this science. Rome was the monster city of the empire, and possibly the monster city of ancient geography, and contained approximately, at its most populous period, two and one half millions of inhabitants. Man is gregarious as the flocks; he seems to fear solitude, and flees what he fears. Certain we are that in America, one hundred years ago, less than one-thirtieth of the population was in cities; now, about one-third is in city communities; and European cities are outgrowing American cities. In other words, at the present time, cities are growing in a ratio totally disproportionate to the growth of population; and this, not in the New World simply, but in the Old. London has nearly as many citizens as England had in the time of the Puritan Revolution. Men are nucleating in a fashion foreboding, but certain. A symptom of the city life is, that he who is city bred knows no life apart from his city. He belongs to it as essentially as the Venetian belonged to Venice. The community is a veritable part of the man's self. Note this in Jean Valjean. It never occurs to him to leave Paris. Had he been a tree rooted in the soil along the Seine, he had not been more stationary. Men live, suffer, die, and hug their ugly tenements as parasites of these dilapidations, and draw their life-saps from such a decayed trunk. This human instinct for association is mighty in its impulsion. Not a few, but multitudes, prefer to be hungry and cold and live in a city to living with abundance of food and raiment in the country. Any one can see this at his alley or in his neighboring street. It is one of the latent insanities of the soul. The city is a live wire, and will not let go of him who grasps it. There is a stream of life pouring into cities, but no stream flowing into the country. The tide runs up the shore and back into the deep seas; not so these human tides. They pour into the Dead Sea basin of the urban community. Jean Valjean was a complete modern in his indissoluble identification with the city. As a matter of course, his was the criminal instinct, superadded to the gregarious instinct, which hides in a city labyrinth rather than the forests of the Amazon. Yet, taken all in all, he evidently is a thorough modern in his urban instinct. The world was big, and he had gold for passage across seas; and there he had, in reason, found entire safety; but such a thought never entered his mind. Paris was the only sea he knew; here his plans for escape and plans for life clung tenaciously as a dead man's hand.
The second element of background for Jean Valjean is poverty. The people of this drama are named "the miserable ones." And poverty is modern and a modern question. All socialists, anarchists, and communists talk of poverty; this is their one theme. Superficial social reformers make poverty responsible for the total turpitude of men. Men are poor, hence criminal. Jean Valjean is poor--miserably poor; sees his sister's children hungry, and commits crime, is a thief; becomes a galley slave as punitive result. Ergo, poverty was the cause of crime, and poverty, and not Valjean, must be indicted; so runs the argument. This conclusion we deny. Let us consider. Poverty is not unwholesome. The bulk of men are poor, and always have