A Hero and Some Other Folks | Page 4

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