People are all glad to shut their
eyes; and it gives them a very simple pleasure when they can
forget that our laws commit a million individual injustices,
to be once roughly just in the general; that the bread that
we eat, and the quiet of the family, and all that embellishes
life and makes it worth having, have to be purchased by death
- by the deaths of animals, and the deaths of men wearied out
with labour, and the deaths of those criminals called tyrants
and revolutionaries, and the deaths of those revolutionaries
called criminals. It is to something of all this that Victor
Hugo wishes to open men's eyes in LES MISERABLES; and this
moral lesson is worked out in masterly coincidence with the
artistic effect. The deadly weight of civilisation to those
who are below presses sensibly on our shoulders as we read.
A sort of mocking indignation grows upon us as we find
Society rejecting, again and again, the services of the most
serviceable; setting Jean Valjean to pick oakum, casting
Galileo into prison, even crucifying Christ. There is a
haunting and horrible sense of insecurity about the book.
The terror we thus feel is a terror for the machinery of law,
that we can hear tearing, in the dark, good and bad between
its formidable wheels with the iron stolidity of all
machinery, human or divine. This terror incarnates itself
sometimes and leaps horribly out upon us; as when the
crouching mendicant looks up, and Jean Valjean, in the light
of the street lamp, recognises the face of the detective; as
when the lantern of the patrol flashes suddenly through the
darkness of the sewer; or as when the fugitive comes forth at
last at evening, by the quiet riverside, and finds the police
there also, waiting stolidly for vice and stolidly satisfied
to take virtue instead.
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