CHAPTER X.
AN OUTSIDER'S VIEW OF MEN AND THINGS.
Man has a notion of revenging himself on that which pleases him. Hencethe contempt felt for the comedian.
This being charms me, diverts, distracts, teaches, enchants, consolesme; flings me into an ideal world, is agreeable and useful to me. Whatevil can I do him in return? Humiliate him. Disdain is a blow from afar.Let us strike the blow. He pleases me, therefore he is vile. He servesme, therefore I hate him. Where can I find a stone to throw at him?Priest, give me yours. Philosopher, give me yours. Bossuet,excommunicate him. Rousseau, insult him. Orator, spit the pebbles fromyour mouth at him. Bear, fling your stone. Let us cast stones at thetree, hit the fruit and eat it. "Bravo!" and "Down with him!" To repeatpoetry is to be infected with the plague. Wretched playactor, we willput him in the pillory for his success. Let him follow up his triumphwith our hisses. Let him collect a crowd and create a solitude. Thus itis that the wealthy, termed the higher classes, have invented for theactor that form of isolation, applause.
The crowd is less brutal. They neither hated nor despised Gwynplaine.Only the meanest calker of the meanest crew of the meanest merchantman,anchored in the meanest English seaport, considered himself immeasurablysuperior to this amuser of the "scum," and believed that a calker is assuperior to an actor as a lord is to a calker.
Gwynplaine was, therefore, like all comedians, applauded and kept at adistance. Truly, all success in this world is a crime, and must beexpiated. He who obtains the medal has to take its reverse side as well.
For Gwynplaine there was no reverse. In this sense, both sides of hismedal pleased him. He was satisfied with the applause, and content withthe isolation. In applause he was rich, in isolation happy.
To be rich in his low estate means to be no longer wretchedly poor--tohave neither holes in his clothes, nor cold at his hearth, nor emptinessin his stomach. It is to eat when hungry and drink when thirsty. It isto have everything necessary, including a penny for a beggar. Thisindigent wealth, enough for liberty, was possessed by Gwynplaine. So faras his soul was concerned, he was opulent. He had love. What more couldhe want? Nothing.
You may think that had the offer been made to him to remove hisdeformity he would have grasped at it. Yet he would have refused itemphatically. What! to throw off his mask and have his former facerestored; to be the creature he had perchance been created, handsome andcharming? No, he would never have consented to it. For what would hehave to support Dea? What would have become of that poor child, thesweet blind girl who loved him? Without his rictus, which made him aclown without parallel, he would have been a mountebank, like any other;a common athlete, a picker up of pence from the chinks in the pavement,and Dea would perhaps not have had bread every day. It was with deep andtender pride that he felt himself the protector of the helpless andheavenly creature. Night, solitude, nakedness, weakness, ignorance,hunger, and thirst--seven yawning jaws of misery--were raised aroundher, and he was the St. George fighting the dragon. He triumphed overpoverty. How? By his deformity. By his deformity he was useful, helpful,victorious, great. He had but to show himself, and money poured in. Hewas a master of crowds, the sovereign of the mob. He could do everythingfor Dea. Her wants he foresaw; her desires, her tastes, her fancies, inthe limited sphere in which wishes are possible to the blind, hefulfilled. Gwynplaine and Dea were, as we have already shown, Providenceto each other. He felt himself raised on her wings; she felt herselfcarried in his arms. To protect the being who loves you, to give whatshe requires to her who shines on you as your star, can anything besweeter? Gwynplaine possessed this supreme happiness, and he owed it tohis deformity. His deformity had raised him above all. By it he hadgained the means of life for himself and others; by it he had gainedindependence, liberty, celebrity, internal satisfaction and pride. Inhis deformity he was inaccessible. The Fates could do nothing beyondthis blow in which they had spent their whole force, and which he hadturned into a triumph. This lowest depth of misfortune had become thesummit of Elysium. Gwynplaine was imprisoned in his deformity, but withDea. And this was, as we have already said, to live in a dungeon ofparadise. A wall stood between them and the living world. So much thebetter. This wall protected as well as enclosed them. What could affectDea, what could affect Gwynplaine, with such a fortress around them? Totake from him his success was impossible. They would have had to deprivehim of his face. Take from him his love. Impossible. Dea could not seehim. The blindness of Dea was divinely incurable. What harm did hisdeformity do Gwynplaine? None. What advantage did it give him? Everyadvantage. He was beloved, notwithstanding its horror, and perhaps forthat very cause. Infirmity and deformity had by instinct been drawntowards and coupled with each other. To be beloved, is not thateverything? Gwynplaine thought of his disfigurement only with gratitude.He was blessed in the stigma. With joy he felt that it was irremediableand eternal. What a blessing that it was so! While there were highwaysand fairgrounds, and journeys to take, the people below and the skyabove, they would be sure to live, Dea would want nothing, and theyshould have love. Gwynplaine would not have changed faces with Apollo.To be a monster was his form of happiness.
Thus, as we said before, destiny had given him all, even to overflowing.He who had been rejected had been preferred.
He was so happy that he felt compassion for the men around him. Hepitied the rest of the world. It was, besides, his instinct to lookabout him, because no one is always consistent, and a man's nature isnot always theoretic; he was delighted to live within an enclosure, butfrom time to time he lifted his head above the wall. Then he retreatedagain with more joy into his loneliness with Dea, having drawn hiscomparisons. What did he see around him?
What were those living creatures of which his wandering life showed himso many specimens, changed every day? Always new crowds, always the samemultitude, ever new faces, ever the same miseries. A jumble of ruins.Every evening every phase of social misfortune came and encircled hishappiness.
The Green Box was popular.
Low prices attract the low classes. Those who came were the weak, thepoor, the little. They rushed to Gwynplaine as they rushed to gin. Theycame to buy a pennyworth of forgetfulness. From the height of hisplatform Gwynplaine passed those wretched people in review. His spiritwas enwrapt in the contemplation of every succeeding apparition ofwidespread misery. The physiognomy of man is modelled by conscience, andby the tenor of life, and is the result of a crowd of mysteriousexcavations. There was never a suffering, not an anger, not a shame, nota despair, of which Gwynplaine did not see the wrinkle. The mouths ofthose children had not eaten. That man was a father, that woman amother, and behind them their families might be guessed to be on theroad to ruin. There was a face already marked by vice, on the thresholdof crime, and the reasons were plain--ignorance and indigence. Anothershowed the stamp of original goodness, obliterated by social pressure,and turned to hate. On the face of an old woman he saw starvation; onthat of a girl, prostitution. The same fact, and although the girl hadthe resource of her youth, all the sadder for that! In the crowd werearms without tools; the workers asked only for work, but the work waswanting. Sometimes a soldier came and seated himself by the workmen,sometimes a wounded pensioner; and Gwynplaine saw the spectre of war.Here Gwynplaine read want of work; there man-farming, slavery. Oncertain brows he saw an indescribable ebbing back towards animalism, andthat slow return of man to beast, produced on those below by the dullpressure of the happiness of those above. There was a break in the gloomfor Gwynplaine. He and Dea had a loophole of happiness; the rest wasdamnation. Gwynplaine felt above him the thoughtless trampling of thepowerful, the rich, the magnificent, the great, the elect of chance.Below he saw the pale faces of the disinherited. He saw himself and Dea,with their little happiness, so great to themselves, between two worlds.That which was above went and came, free, joyous, dancing, tramplingunder foot; above him the world which treads, below the world which istrodden upon. It is a fatal fact, and one indicating a profound socialevil, that light sho
uld crush the shadow! Gwynplaine thoroughly graspedthis dark evil. What! a destiny so reptile? Shall a man drag himselfthus along with such adherence to dust and corruption, with such vicioustastes, such an abdication of right, or such abjectness that one feelsinclined to crush him under foot? Of what butterfly is, then, thisearthly life the grub?
What! in the crowd which hungers and which denies everywhere, and beforeall, the questions of crime and shame (the inflexibility of the lawproducing laxity of conscience), is there no child that grows but to bestunted, no virgin but matures for sin, no rose that blooms but for theslime of the snail?
His eyes at times sought everywhere, with the curiosity of emotion, toprobe the depths of that darkness, in which there died away so manyuseless efforts, and in which there struggled so much weariness:families devoured by society, morals tortured by the laws, woundsgangrened by penalties, poverty gnawed by taxes, wrecked intelligenceswallowed up by ignorance, rafts in distress alive with the famished,feuds, dearth, death-rattles, cries, disappearances. He felt the vagueoppression of a keen, universal suffering. He saw the vision of thefoaming wave of misery dashing over the crowd of humanity. He was safein port himself, as he watched the wreck around him. Sometimes he laidhis disfigured head in his hands and dreamed.
What folly to be happy! How one dreams! Ideas were born within him.Absurd notions crossed his brain.
Because formerly he had succoured an infant, he felt a ridiculous desireto succour the whole world. The mists of reverie sometimes obscured hisindividuality, and he lost his ideas of proportion so far as to askhimself the question, "What can be done for the poor?" Sometimes he wasso absorbed in his subject as to express it aloud. Then Ursus shruggedhis shoulders and looked at him fixedly. Gwynplaine continued hisreverie.
"Oh; were I powerful, would I not aid the wretched? But what am I? Anatom. What can I do? Nothing."
He was mistaken. He was able to do a great deal for the wretched. Hecould make them laugh; and, as we have said, to make people laugh is tomake them forget. What a benefactor on earth is he who can bestowforgetfulness!