Les miserables (Abridged) - Victor Hugo [472]
With so gloomy a design this great work is still full of life and light and love. The portrait of the good Bishop is one of the most agreeable things in modern literature. The whole scene at Montfermeil is full of the charm that Hugo knows so well how to throw about children. Who can forget the passage where Cosette, sent out at night to draw water, stands in admiration before the illuminated booth and the huckster behind “lui faisait un peu l‘effet d’etre le Père éternal?” The pathos of the forlorn sabot laid trustingly by the chimney in expectation of the Santa Claus that was not, takes us fairly by the throat; there is nothing in Shakespeare that touches the heart more nearly. The loves of Cosette and Marius are very pure and pleasant, and we cannot refuse our affection to Gavroche, although we may make a mental reservation of our profound disbelief in his existence. Take it for all in all, there are few books in the world that can be compared with it.
—from Cornhill Magazine (August 1874)
NEWELL DWIGHT HILLIS
Victor Hugo’s “Les Misérables” represents the first attempt in fiction to show that if sin dims the divine image, conscience disturbs the soul with sore discontent, while Christ never despairs of making bad men good, but toils ever on until publican and outcast alike stand forth, clothed in every courage, every heroism, and every virtue, being of goodness all compact.
—from Great Books as Life-Teachers: Studies of
Character Real and Ideal (1898)
GEORGE MCLEAN HARPER
It has always been impossible for [Hugo‘s] English and American critics to find common ground. Matthew Arnold, for example, could say of him, in that apparently casual and parenthetical manner which veils some of his most audacious assumptions, that if the French were more at home in the higher regions of poetry “they would perceive with us that M. Victor Hugo, for instance, or Sir Walter Scott, may be a great romance-writer, and may yet be by no means a great poet.” In the eyes of Mr. Swinburne, Hugo was “the greatest Frenchman of all time,” “the greatest poet of the century,” “the spiritual sovereign of the nineteenth century,”—no less! Mr. Dowden, in an eloquent and sympathetic essay, considers chiefly Victor Hugo’s public aspect,—his relation to politics, his patriotism, his character as a representative Frenchman. Throughout at least the early half of Hugo’s career a large part of our public knew him as a dramatist and romancer almost exclusively. And yet, of the eminent French writers who, in this hundredth year from his birth, are estimating his place and importance in their literature, it is unlikely that many will take his romances into very serious account, or treat his dramas as if they possessed much vital and intrinsic excellence. Already, too, as in the case of Coleridge, it is being said of Victor Hugo that his value lies in the innovations which he made and the impulse he gave to other writers as much as in the power or the beauty of his works.
—from The Atlantic Monthly (February 1902)
Questions
1. Les Misérables has many coincidental encounters among the characters, all of which have large and dramatic consequences. Do these coincidences shake our faith in Hugo’s aesthetic integrity, or do they work in a way that redeems it?
2. Realism is a method; it creates the illusion of a fidelity of word to thing, of a direct relation between the novel’s words and observable reality. But realism is not the only way of getting at the truth—think, for example, of Franz Kafka’s metaphorical writing. Is Hugo a realist, an occasional realist, or something else?
3. Does Hugo strive to represent observable reality or to present fictional events that illustrate a system of religious belief?
4. Would the novel have been more satisfying if Hugo had