Les Misérables

“ Quoique le sort fût pour lui bien étrange, Il vivait. Il mourut quand il n’eut plus son ange. La chose simplement d’elle-même arriva, Comme la nuit se fait lorsque le jour s’en va.70
LETTER TO M. DAELLI
Publisher of the Italian translation of Les Misérables in Milan. ”

“ Two years after Les Misérables appeared the magnificent book of meditations on the mission of art in the world, on the duty of human thought towards humanity, inscribed by Victor Hugo with the name of William Shakespeare. To allow that it throws more light on the greatest genius of our own century than on the greatest genius of the age of Shakespeare is not to admit that it is not rich in valuable and noble contemplations or suggestions on the immediate subject of Shakespeare's work ”

“ Really, every great literary man is a poet, for he is constantly occupied with ecstasy and human emotions. Do you think Hugo was a poet only when he chanted in verse and ceased being one when he wrote Les Misérables or Notre Dame de Paris? It is not necessary to use the old poetical machinery of rhythm, or metaphors or similes, or apostrophe or personification or any other figure of speech; one may dispense with allusions to mythology or the use of any but current expressions and idioms; one may write almost as one talks; and poetry may nevertheless be produced. ”

“ Oh, my brothers, this is the point of junction between those who think and those who suffer. This barricade is not made of paving-stones, beams, and iron bars; it is made of two masses,—a mass of ideas and a mass of sorrows. Misery meets then the ideal; day embraces the night there, and says to it, 'I am about to die with thee, and thou wilt be born again with me.' Faith springs from the embrace of all the desolations; sufferings bring hither their agony, and ideas their immortality. ”

“ Rue Plumet.
4. Jean Valjean.
Note.—Les misérables, Toilers of the sea, and Notre Dame are said to form a trilogy.
Hume, F.
1. Madam Midas.
2. Miss Mephistopheles.
Hunt, V.
1. Their lives.
2. Their hearts. ”

“ He had come to the supreme crossing of good and evil. He had that gloomy intersection beneath his eyes. On this occasion once more, as had happened to him already in other sad vicissitudes, two roads opened out before him, the one tempting, the other alarming.
Which was he to take? ”

“ For if they had had another neighbor who was less chimerical and more attentive, any ordinary and charitable man, evidently their indigence would have been noticed, their signals of distress would have been perceived, and they would have been taken hold of and rescued! They appeared very corrupt and very depraved, no doubt, very vile, very odious even; but those who fall without becoming degraded are rare; ”

“ That evening, before he went to bed, he said again: "Let us never fear robbers nor murderers. Those are dangers from without, petty dangers. Let us fear ourselves. Prejudices are the real robbers; vices are the real murderers. The great dangers lie within ourselves. What matters it what threatens our head or our purse! Let us think only of that which threatens our soul." ”

“ And if we’re the evil ourselves, if we’re the spark of devil-fire, out we must go! What misery I could have saved for Hal, if I’d understood before—and what a cheap price! An old, used-up life for a new, strong, fresh one. ”

“ For a few minutes longer George and Hippolyte, dismayed, afflicted, contemplated this formidable crowd, from which arose a nauseating stench, from which emerged here and there the painted faces of mimes and the hooded faces of the fortune-tellers. Disgust arose in their throats, impelled them to flee; and yet the attraction of this human spectacle was stronger, retained them in this heaped-up horde, led them to the spots where the worst misery was exhibited, where the worst excesses of cruelty, ignorance, and fraud were revealed, where voices howled or tears streamed. ”

“ The time was ripe for such exchange too,--for fair exchange. (The epithet "fair" haunted him, trying to still the keen remorse for that shot in the dark; for one part of him knew it to have been cowardly.) Yes! this useless plot, with foolish mischief hidden in its heart, to which he had just been listening with loyal intent to frustrate it, could be made to serve his purpose without delay. His men would follow him anywhere. He had but to say the word--the word so many of them wanted. Then, those thieves of all that made life worth living would learn a lesson. ”

“ He ridiculed the vain; he denounced, scathingly, the hypocrite; he made scores in his audience turn with perspiration at the end of their noses with conscious guilt. Oh, never before in the years since he had mounted to the pulpit and begun what he chose to call, "an effort for the salvation of souls," had he preached such a soul stirring sermon.
"Live right, live right, I say!" he screamed at the top of his voice. "How many of you are there as you sit here before me, that have done evil unto thy neighbor; have made some one unhappy; have cast a soul into grief and eternal anguish? ”

“ No other principle, or passion, hath for its end the misery of our fellow-creatures. But malice and revenge meditates evil itself; and to do mischief, to be the author of misery, is the very thing which gratifies the passion: this is what it directly tends towards, as its proper design. ”

“ He took her by the hand and drew her gently towards him. “Does your whole being recoil so from evil, my Paula? What will you do in this wicked world? What will you say to the sinner when you meet him—as you must?” ”

“ Every husband, every father, every brother, feared and loathed him as the incarnation of the Evil one—in their mean, narrow, tedious nauseating philosophy they held him as a perjured villain of the deepest dye, steeped in utterest infamy! ”

“ In the intervals of kneeling with them as "miserable sinners," one finds oneself speculating upon them, their possible faults and virtues, joys and sorrows, hopes and fears, watching the unknown faces, and trying to read thereon the records of a common humanity. ”

“ I had to bear the sunken glare of his fierce crow-footed eyes if I wanted to know; and so I bore it, reflecting how much certain forms of evil are akin to madness, derived from intense egoism, inflamed by resistance, tearing the soul to pieces, and giving factitious vigour to the body. ”

“ Let loose the wildest imagination into the realms of wildest wickedness, and yet they dared not, as they feared God, to credit for a moment the union of such appalling and such paltry guilt, in that man who now trembled not before them, but who seemed cut off from all the sensibilities of this life by the scythe of Misery that had shorn him down! ”

“ Why am I called upon to do this, oh cruel, most cruel destiny? Cannot I fly from the horrid scene? Cannot I rather run a dagger into my heart? But no, 'tis plain my fate is ordained, sealed, fixed! and in vain I struggle,—I must fulfil the task appointed for me! ”

“ In every lunatic asylum we find the collecting instinct developing itself in an equally absurd way. Certain patients will spend all their time picking pins from the floor and hoarding them. Others collect bits of thread, buttons, or rags, and prize them exceedingly. Now, 'the Miser' par excellence of the popular imagination and of melodrama, the monster of squalor and misanthropy, is simply one of these mentally deranged persons. ”

“ Then suddenly, and as if it had been so all the time, every hole, far and near, and there were hundreds of them, seemed to possess its face, coming and going rapidly, all fixing on him glances of malice and hatred: all hard-eyed and evil and sharp. ”

“ Their delight is in the love of evil. This is their life. The miseries of hell they would gladly escape; but from those vile lusts, they have no wish to be delivered, and with these, the miseries that they suffer, are necessarily and inseparably connected. ”

“ No gleam of goodness throughout the whole for the heart to cling to,—no thought of remorseful penitence,—no spark of noble feeling; nothing but vice,—low, grovelling, brutal vice,—from the moment the curtain rises to display the obscene spectacle, to that which sees it fall between the fictitious infamy on one side, and the real impurity left on the other! ”

“ The majority of the guests, as is the custom with people thoroughly and profoundly sick at heart, were anxious to make their own woes the theme of discussion, and prove themselves most excellent in anguish. The misanthropist went deep into the philosophy of evil, and wandered about in the darkness, with now and then a gleam of discolored light hovering on ghastly shapes and horrid scenery. ”

“ All this may awaken in us contempt and disgust; but if we consider these figures in themselves as realities, and compare them with the evil figures of our drama, we find that they are mere venial sinners—light, fickle, amorous, fibbing—very human in their faults; human, trifling, mild, not at all monstrous, like all the art products of the Renaissance. ”

“ The sentiments are so affectionate and so innocent—the characters of the subordinate agents in this strange drama are clothed in the light of such a mild and gentle mind—the pictures of domestic manners are of the most simple and attaching character: the father’s is irresistible and deep. Nor are the crimes and malevolence of the single Being, though indeed withering and tremendous, the offspring of any unaccountable propensity to evil, but flow irresistibly from certain causes fully adequate to their production. They are the children, as it were, of Necessity and Human Nature. ”

“ And when the heaviest stripes do fall,
'Tis where they're wanted most of all,
Miserable sinners!
Look round about your city,
Miserable sinners!
Arouse to shame and pity,
Miserable sinners!
Pray: but use brush and limewash pail;
Fast: but feed those for want who fail;
Bow down, gude town, to ask for grace
But bow with cleaner hands and face,
Miserable sinners! ”

“ But the sinking of the school-master in the laird seemed to work ill for the man, and good only for the land. I say seemed, because what we call degeneracy is often but the unveiling of what was there all the time; and the evil we could become, we are. If I have in me the tyrant or the miser, there he is, and such am I—as surely as if the tyrant or the miser were even now visible to the wondering dislike of my neighbors. ”

“ Thus the dogma of the fall is not simply the expression of a special and transitory state of human reason and morality: it is the spontaneous confession, in symbolic phrase, of this fact as astonishing as it is indestructible, the culpability, the inclination to evil, of our race. Curse upon me a sinner! cries on every hand and in every tongue the conscience of the human race. ”

“ Contracted inside the shell of this foolish prepossession we miss half the interest and wonder of the world we inhabit, and—thinking of ourselves all the while as an honest and merciful fellow—we play an unimaginable devil to our unhappy neighbours. ”

“ Could the countless unselfish ones, the sufferers, “the great despisers,” who bore so many miseries, that we, their descendants, might pass gaudy and comfortable days—could they but know how golden a thing their misery purchased, the memory of the old torture and the old injustice would be soothing and gentle like a charity. ”

“ If sinners, like ourselves, they will cast up to us our common pleasures and our example, which, perhaps, have been the first rock upon which their innocence split: if just, as they had believed us to be children of light, ah! they will reproach to us their good opinion abused and their friendship seduced. ”

“ Thy reason is of higher value than thy house, or land, or money, and yet thou wilt not cast them away so easily! Had God made thee an idiot, or mad and lunatic, thy case had been to be pitied: but to make thyself mad, and despise thy manhood, deserveth punishment. It is the saying of Basil; Involuntary madness deserveth compassion, but voluntary madness, the sharpest whips. ”

“ I see no need of changing fool to varlet, nor, if a change were necessary, can I guess how it should certainly be known that varlet is the true word. A miserable world is a parenthetical exclamation, frequent among melancholy men, and natural to Jaques at the sight of a fool, or at the hearing of reflections on the fragility of life. ”

“ Were really the power in the village,
And often you asked me
“What is the use of knowing the evil in the world?”
I am out of your way now, Spoon River,
Choose your own good and call it good.
For I could never make you see
That no one knows what is good
Who knows not what is evil ”

“ There's some scandal about everybody. We're all sinners—if you want to call it sin to follow your most sacred instincts.
"Why should you be afraid of a little gossip or a few jokes or a little abuse from a few hypocrites? They're all sinners—worse than you, too, most of them, if the truth were known. ”

“ He had seen similar evils to those which we have seen and suffered. “There is an evil which I have seen under the sun as an error which proceedeth from the ruler: folly is set in great dignity, and the rich sit in low place. I have seen servants upon horses, and princes walking as servants upon the earth.” ”

“ Let those that make mischief, by slandering, tale-bearing, misrepresenting their neighbours, and spreading ill-natured characters and stories, dread the consequence of it, and think how sad their condition will be when all the mischief they have been accessory to shall be made to return upon themselves. ”

“ We are by nature kind and generous, vengeful only when insulted, cruel only when affronted. We are true to those that trust us; and we have heard the invocations of thy father the sage Mithrasp, who wisely worships not only the Origin of Good, but that which is called the Source of Evil. ”