Chapter 3

Then, too, Jean Valjean is misjudged, and by those who should have trusted him as they trusted God. We find it hard to be patient with Marius, and are not patient with Cossette. Her selfishness is not to be condoned. Her contrition and her tears come too late. Though Valjean forgives her, we do not forgive her. She deserves no forgiveness. Marius's honor was of the amateur order, lacking depth and breadth. He was superficial, judging by hearing rather than by eyes and heart. We have not patience to linger with his wife and him, but push past them to the hero spirit, whom they have not eyes to see nor hearts to understand. Jean Valjean misjudged, and by Marius and Cossette! Impossible! Javert may do that; Fantine, not knowing him, may do that, but once knowing him she had as lief distrusted day to bring the light as to have distrusted him. Misjudged, and by those he loved most, suffered for, more than died for! Poor Valjean! This wakes our pity and our tears. Before, we have watched him, and have felt the tug of battle on him; now the mists fall, and we put our hands before our eyes and weep. This saint of God misjudged by those for whom he lives! Yet this is no solitary pathos. Were all hearts' history known, we should know how many died misjudged. All Jean Valjean does has been misinterpreted. We distrust more and more circumstantial evidence. It is hideous. No jury ought to convict a man on evidence of circumstances. Too many tragedies have been enacted because of such. Marius thought he was discerning and of a sensitive honor. He thought it evident that Jean Valjean had slain Javert, and had slain Monsieur Madeleine, whose fortune he has offered as Cossette's marriage portion. Poor Jean Valjean! You a murderer, a marauder--you! Marius acts with frigid honor. Valjean will not live with Marius and Cossette, being too sensitive therefor, perceiving himself distrusted by Marius, but comes to warm his hands and heart at the hearth of Cossette's presence; and he is stung when he sees no fire in the reception-room. The omission he can not misinterpret. He goes again, and the chairs are removed. Marius may have honor, but his honor is cruel, like an inquisitor with rack and thumbscrew; and then Jean Valjean goes no more, but day by day suns his heart by going far enough to look at the house where Cossette is--no more; then his eyes are feverish to catch sight of her habitation as parched lips drink at desert springs. Misjudged! O, that is harder to bear than all his hurts!

Then we will not say of Valjean, "He has conscience," but rather, we will say, "He is conscience." Valjean's struggle with conscience is one of the majestic chapters of the world's literature, presenting, as it does, the worthiest and profoundest study of Christian conscience given by any dramatist since Christ opened a new chapter for conscience in the soul. Monsieur Madeleine, the mayor, is rich, respected, honored, is a savior of society, sought out by the king for political preferment. One shadow tracks him like a nightmare. Javert is on his track, instinct serving him for reason. At last, Javert himself thinks Jean Valjean has been found; for a man has been arrested, is to be tried, will doubtless be convicted, seeing evidence is damning. Now, Monsieur Madeleine, mayor of M----, your fear is all but ended. An anodyne will be administered to your pain. Jean Valjean has known many a struggle. He thought his fiercest battles fought; but all his yesterdays of conflict are as play contests and sham battles matched with this. Honor, usefulness, long years of service, love, guardianship of Cossette, and fealty to a promise given a dying mother--all beckon to him. He is theirs; and has he not suffered enough? More than enough. Let this man alone, that is all. Let him alone! He sees it. Joy shouts in his heart, "Javert will leave me in quiet." "Let us not interfere with God," and his resolution is formed. But conscience looks into his face. Ha! the bishop, too, is beside him. Conscience speaks, and is saying, "Let the real Valjean go and declare himself." This is duty. Conscience speaks, and his words are terrible, "Go, declare thyself." Jean Valjean's sin is following him. That evening he had robbed Petit Gervais; therefore he is imperiled. Sin finds man out. But the fight thickens, and Valjean thinks to destroy the mementos of his past, and looks fearfully toward the door, bolted as it is, and gathers from a secret closet his old blue blouse, an old pair of trousers, an old haversack, and a great thorn stick, and incontinently flings them into the flames. Then, noticing the silver candlesticks, the bishop's gifts, "These, too, must be destroyed," he says, and takes them in his hands, and stirs the fire with one of the candlesticks, when he hears a voice clamoring, "Jean Valjean! Jean Valjean! Jean Valjean!" Conscience and a battle, but the battle was not lost; for you see him in the prisoners' dock, declaring, "I am Jean Valjean;" and those of the court dissenting, he persisted, declared his recognition of some galley prisoners, urging still, "I am Jean Valjean; you see clearly that I am Jean Valjean;" and those who saw and heard him were dazed; and he said: "All who are here think me worthy of pity, do you not? Do you not? Great God! When I think of what I was on the point of doing, I think myself worthy of envy;" and he was gone. And next, Javert is seizing him fiercely, brutally, imperiously, as a criminal for whom there is no regard. With this struggle of conscience and its consequent victory, "The Charge of the Light Brigade" becomes tawdry and garish. The sight moves us as the majestic minstrelsy of seas in tempest. No wonder that they who looked at Valjean, as he stood declaring himself to be the real Valjean, were blinded with a great light.

And his heart is so hungry, and his loyalty to God so urgent and so conquering. Jean Valjean has suffered much. Ulysses, buffeted by wars and stormy seas, has had a life of calm as compared with this new hero. Ulysses' battles were from without; Valjean's battles were from within. But if he has suffered greatly, he has also been greatly blessed. Struggle for goodness against sin is its own reward. We do not give all and get nothing. There are compensations. Recompense of reward pursues goodness as foam a vessel's track. If Jean Valjean loved Cossette with a passion such as the angels know; if she was his sun, and made the spring, there was a sense in which Cossette helped Valjean. There was response, not so much in the return of love as in that he loved her; and his love for her helped him in his dark hours, helped him when he needed help the most, helped him on with God. He needs her to love, as our eyes need the fair flowers and the blue sky. His life was not empty, and God had not left himself without witness in Jean Valjean's life; for he had had his love for Cossette.

But he is bereft. Old age springs on him suddenly, as Javert had done in other days. He has, apparently without provocation, passed from strength to decrepitude. Since he sees Cossette no more, he has grown gray, stooped, decrepit. There is no morning now, since he does not see Cossette. You have seen him walking to the corner to catch sight of her house. How feeble he is! Another day, walking her way, but not so far; and the next, and the next, walking; but the last day he goes scarce beyond his own threshold. And now he can not go down the stairs; now he is in his own lonely room, alone. He sees death camping in his silent chamber, but feels no fright. No, no! rather,

"Death, like a friend's voice from a distant field Approaching, called. * * * * * * For sure no gladlier does the stranded wreck See, through the gray skirts of a lifting squall, The boat that bears the hope of life approach To save the life despaired of, than he saw Death dawning on him, and the close of all."

But Cossette, Cossette! To see her once. Just once, only once! To touch her hand--O that were heaven! But he says to his heart, "I shall not touch her hand, and I shall not see her face--no more, no more!" And the little garments he brought her when he took her from her slavery with the Thenardiers, there they are upon his bed, where he can touch them, as if they were black tresses of the woman he had loved and lost. The bishop's candlesticks are lit. He is about to die, and writes in his poor, sprawling fashion to Cossette--writes to her. He fronts her always, as the hills front the dawn. He ceases, and sobs like a breaking heart. O! "She is a smile that has passed over me. I shall never see her again!" And the door dashes open; Marius and Cossette are come. Joy, joy to the old heart! Jean Valjean thinks it is heaven's morning. Marius has discovered that Jean Valjean is not his murderer, but his savior; that he has, at imminent peril of his life, through the long, oozy quagmire of the sewer, with his giant strength, borne him across the city, saved him; and now, too late, Marius began to see in Jean Valjean "a strangely lofty and saddened form," and has come to take this great heart home. But God will do that himself. Jean Valjean is dying. He looks at Cossette as if he would take a look which would endure through eternity, kisses a fold of her garment, and half articulates, "It--is--nothing to die;" then suddenly rises, walks to the wall, brings back a crucifix, lays it near his hand. "The Great Martyr," he says; fondles Marius and Cossette; sobs to Cossette, "Not to see you broke my heart;" croons to himself, "You love me;" puts his hands upon their heads in a caress, saying, "I do not see clearly now." Later he half whispered, "I see a light!" And a man and woman are raining kisses on a dead man's hands. And on that blank stone, over a nameless grave in the cemetery of Pere la Chaise, let some angel sculptor chisel, "Here lies Jean Valjean, Hero."

II

Some Words on Loving Shakespeare

What a soul wants is to feel itself of service. Life's chances seem drunk up like the dews from morning flowers in burning summer times. To risk literary adventure after these centuries of thinking and saying (and such thinking and such saying!), requires the audacity of a simpleton or the boldness of the old discoverers. Every patch of literary ground seems occupied, as those fertile valleys lifting from sea-levels along a shining stream to the far hills and fair. So much has been said on Shakespeare, and he has stung men to such profound and fertile sayings, that to speak of him seems an impertinence. I have never seen an essay on Shakespeare I have not run to read. Whoever holds the cup, I will drain it dry, if filled with wine from this rare vintage. Practically all our great writers have dreamed of him, and told their dreams; and many a writer who makes no claim to greatness has done the same. Some people you can not keep your eyes off of; and of these Shakespeare is one. Who has n't talked of him? When Alfred Tennyson lay dying in the white moonlight, his son tells how he held the play of Cymbeline in his dying hands, as was fitting, seeing he had held it in his living hands through many golden years. Than this dying tribute, Shakespeare never had more gracious compliment paid his genius. Who passes Shakespeare in his library without a caress of eye or hand? I would apologize if I were guilty of such a breach of literary etiquette. Boswell's Johnson edited Shakespeare; and Charles Lamb and Goethe and DeQuincey and Coleridge and Taine and Lowell and Carlyle and Emerson have written of him, some of them greatly. I wonder Macaulay kept hands from him, but probably because he was the historian of action rather than letters; and after reading what these have said, how can one be but silenced?

But it has seemed to me that, while there was a wilderness of writing about Shakespeare as a genius and as a whole, there was co-operative dearth of writings on the individual dramas. Authors content themselves with writing on the dramatist, and neglect to write upon the dramas. If this be true, may there not be an unoccupied plot of ground where a late-comer may pitch tent, as under the hemlocks by some babbling water, and feel himself in some real way proprietary? I have discovered a growing feeling in my thought that enough has not been said, and can not be said, about the Macbeths and Tempests and Lears and Hamlets.

Shakespeare is too massive to be discussed in an hour. One essay will not suffice for him. He is as a mountain, whose majesty and multitudinous beauty, meaning, and magnitude and impress, must be gotten by slow processes in journeying about it through many days. Who sits under its pines at noon, lies beside its streams for rest, walks under its lengthening shadows as under a cloud, and has listened to the voices of its waterfalls, thrilling the night and calling to the spacious firmament as if with intent to be heard "very far off," has thus learned the mountain, vast of girth, kingly in altitude, perpetual in sovereignty. We study a world's circumference by segments; nor let us suppose we can do other by this cosmopolitan Shakespeare. He, so far as touches our earth horizon, is ubiquitous. Looking at him sum-totally, we _feel_ his mass, and say we have looked upon majesty. But as a mountain is, in circumference and altitude, always beckoning us on, as if saying, "My summit is not far away, but near," and so spurring our laggard steps to espouse the ascent, and toiling on, on, still on, a little further--only a little further--till heart and flesh all but fail and faint, but for the might of will, we fall to rise again, and try once more, till we fall upon the summit, and lie on thresholds leading to the stars. The mountain understated its magnitude to us--not of intent, but in simple modesty. I think it did not itself know its mass. Greatness has a subtle self-depreciation; and we shall come to know our huge Shakespeare only by approaching him on foot. He must be studied in fragments. His plays, if I may be pardoned for coining a word, need not an omnigraph, but monographs. Let Shakespeare be, and give eye and ear to his history, comedy, tragedy; and when we have done with them, one by one, we shall discover how the aggregated mass climbs taller than highest mountains. This method, in tentative fashion, I propose to apply in some studies in this volume, or other volumes, believing that the company of those who love Shakespeare can never be large enough for his merits, and that many are kept away from the witchery of him because they do not well know the fine art of approaching him. I would, therefore, be a doorkeeper, and throw some doors wide open, that men and women may unhindered enter. This essay aims to stand as a porter at the gate. We shall never overestimate Shakespeare, because we can not. Some men and things lie beyond the danger of hyperbole. No exaggeration is possible concerning them, seeing they transcend all dreams. Space can not be conceived by the most luxuriant imagination, holding, as it does, all worlds, and capable of holding another universe besides, and with room to spare. Clearly, we can not overestimate space. Thought and vocabulary become bankrupt when they attempt this bewildering deed. Genius is as immeasurable as space. Shakespeare can not be measured. We can not go about him, since life fails, leaving the journey not quite well begun. Yet may we attempt what can not be performed, because each attempt makes us worthy, and we are measured, not by what we achieve, but by what we attempt, as Lowell writes:

"Grandly begin! Though thou have time But for one line, be that sublime: Not failure, but low aim, is crime."

The eaglet's failure in attempted flight teaches him to outsoar clouds. We are not so greatly concerned that we find the sources of the Nile as that we search for them. In this lie our triumph and reward.

Besides all this, may there not be a place for more of what may be named inspirational literature? Henry Van Dyke has coined a happy phrase in giving title to his delightful volume on "The Poetry of Tennyson," calling his papers "Essays in Vital Criticism." I like the thought. Literature is life, always that, in so far as literature is great; for literature tells our human story. Essayist, novelist, poet, are all doing one thing, as are sculptor, painter, architect. Of detail criticism ("dry-as-dust" criticism, to use Carlyle's term) there is much, though none too much, which work requires scholarship and painstaking, and is necessary. Malone is a requirement of Shakespearean study. But, candidly, is verbal, textual criticism the largest, truest criticism? Dust is not man, though man is dust. No geologist's biography of the marble from Carrara, nor a biographer's sketch of the sculptor, will explain the statue, nor do justice to the artist's conception. I, for one, want to feel the poet's pulse-beat, brain-beat, heart-beat. What does he mean? Let us catch this speaker's words. What was that he said? Let me feel sure I have his meaning. We may break a poem up into bits, like pieces of branches picked up in a woodland path; but is this what the poet would have desired? He takes lexicons and changes them into literatures, begins with words, ends with poems. His art was synthetic. He was not a crab, to move backward, but a man, to move forward; and his poetry is not debris, like the broken branch, but is exquisite grace and moving music. Tears come to us naturally, like rain to summer clouds, when we have read his words. Much criticism is dry as desiccated foods, though we can not believe this is the nobler criticism, since God's growing fruit is his best fruit. A tree with climbing saps and tossing branches, fertile in shade and sweet with music, is surely fairer and truer than a dead, uprooted, prostrate, decaying trunk. This, then, would I aspire humbly to do with Shakespeare or another, to help men to his secret; for to admit men to any poet's provinces is nothing other than to introduce them

"To the island valley of Avilion, Where falls not hail nor rain nor any snow, Nor ever wind blows loudly; but it lies Deep-meadowed, happy, fair with orchard lawns, And bowery hollows crowned with summer seas."

There is no trace of exaggeration in saying: Many people frequent theaters ostensibly for the purpose of understanding the great dramatists, and, leading thereto, seeing noted tragedians act Lear, Richard III, Julius Caesar, Hamlet, and at the end of years of attendance have no conception of these dramas as a whole. They had heard one voice among the many; but when the many voices blended, what all meant they can not begin to guess. What playgoer will give a valid analysis of King Lear? Ask him, and his ideas will be chaotic as clouds on a stormy night. Not even the elder Kean is the best interpreter of Shakespeare; for the dramatist reserves that function to himself--Shakespeare is his own best interpreter. Dream over his plays by moonlit nights; pore over his pages till chilly skies grow gray with dawn; read a play without rising from the ingratiating task, and you, not a tragedian, will have a conception of the play. I will rather risk getting at an understanding of beautiful, bewitching Rosalind by reading and rereading "As You Like It," than by all theaters and stage-scenes and players. A dramatist is his own best interpreter. The most discerning critics of the great dramas are not theater-goers. The theater runs to eyes; study runs to thought. In a theater the actor thinks for us; in a study we think for ourselves. For contemporaries of "The Letters of Junius" to attempt guessing who Junius was, was plainly exhilarating as a walk at morning along a country lane. To attempt the interpretation of a Shakespeare's tragedy for yourself is no less so. Believe in your own capabilities, and test your own powers. Conceive of Shakespeare's folk, not as dead and past, but as living. These men and women, among whom we move, are those among whom Shakespeare moved. Ages change customs and costumes, but not characters. Bring Shakespeare down to now, and see how rational his men and women become; and we, as central to his movement, may begin to reckon on the periodicity of souls as of comets. I would have people inherit Shakespeare as they inherit Newton's discoveries or Columbus's new world.

And as we know, we shall learn to trust, Shakespeare. He is uniformly truthful. He may sin against geographical veracity, as when he names Bohemia a maritime province; or he may give Christian reasonings to ancient heathen; but these are _errata_, not falsehoods; and besides, these are mistakes of a colorist, or in background of figure-painting, and do not touch the real province of the dramatist, whose office is not to paint landscapes, but figures--and figures not of physique, but of soul--the delineation of character being the dramatist's business. Here is Shakespeare always accurate. To argue with him savors of petulancy or childish ignorance or egotism. Some people ourselves have met had no sense of character, as some have no sense of color. They do not perceive logical continuity here, as in reasoning, but approach each person as an isolated fact, whereas souls are a series--men repeating men, women repeating women, in large measure, as a child steps in his father's tracks across a field of snow in winter. Other people seem intuitively to read character, being able to shut their eyes and see more than others with eyes open, having a faculty for practical psychology, which is little less than miracle, as in Tennyson, who was not a man among men--being shy as a whip-poor-will, seclusive as flowers which haunt the woodland shadows--yet those reading him must know how accurately he reads the human heart; and his characterization of Guinevere, Pelleas, Bedivere, Enid, the lover in Maud, a Becket, the Princess, Philip, Enoch Arden, and Dora, are, in accuracy, as

"Perfect music unto noble words."