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have remedied that. But that is not what the story says. By an immense solitary effort Jean Valjean had been able to change. He is a new man, but the new man, at the moment of promised happiness, only encounters a new pursuer, sterner than Javert: “To be happy we must never understand what duty is; once we understand it, it is implacable.” None of this resembles progressive doctrine.
    Still, it must have been Hugo’s asserted faith in the deity of Progress—always written with a capital, like God’s name—that let him record without palliation the unhappiness, the mass misery, of the nation. And it was the wretched not of the earth but of France that weighed so heavy on him. How would he have been able to write of their suffering unless at the same time he had been able to offer the reader—and perhaps, above all, himself—the consolation of belief in a gradual improvement through the movement of History? His belief in historical progress was inseparable from his belief in France as the appointed successor to Greece and Rome in the sacred role of leader of nations. “La révolution française est un geste de Dieu,” he shouts in fierce italics, as if defying any contradiction. The manifest destiny of France to lead and inspire was identified by Hugo with his own mission to the nation as seer and epic novelist.
    Hence the hymns to Progress issuing as if from the choir loft to temper the lesson of barbarity, greed, and fatuous ignorance being read and absorbed below. Hence also that passion for instruction, for the imparting of factual knowledge that impels him, for instance, to write twenty-two pages on argot, the pretext being the introduction of the street môme, Gavroche. The descent of Jean Valjean into the Parisian sewer system excuses a four-page essay called “The Intestine of Leviathan,” which is full of information and meritorious ideas, for example on the advantages for the municipality of using human excrement as fertilizer—an anticipation of today’s ecological thinking that unfortunately still remains “only” an idea. Hugo was an extremely intelligent and far-sighted man, and to know this of himself was to feel the duty of sharing. He has an obligation, fired by public spirit, to tell us the history of the Bernardine Order of nuns (Cosette is being harbored in the convent), to explain which Parisian cemeteries are disaffected and which are still in use (Jean Valjean, alias Monsieur Fauchelevent, is about to be buried alive), even to leap ahead to analyze the revolution of 1848, which took place nine years after the events we are reading about.
    His ambition to get everything in, to make this book the Book, reflected a kind of evangelical zeal which he had in common with most of the serious novelists of his century. One thinks of Balzac’s excursus on the paper industry (Les illusions perdues), of Tolstoy on Pierre’s Freemasonry, of Dostoievsky on the Russian monk, of Manzoni on St. Charles Borromeo and on the daily mortality figures of the great plague of 1630 in Milan. Melville on whaling or George Eliot on the discoveries of Bichat in the field of medical pathology. For our own century, we may think of Proust on Venice, on Vermeer, on the newly introduced telephone system, but more emphatically, perhaps, of Joyce in Finnegans Wake, which he, too, aspired to make the Book embracing the whole of human history and its tongues in a perfect spiralling form. Though public spirit as an animating force was no longer evident (in fact the reverse) in either Joyce or Proust, the ambition to produce a single compendious sacred writing survived, and we may even find it today in an author like Pynchon (Gravity’s Rainbow) .
    Of course not all novels were so informative; one reminds oneself of Jane Austen, who is to the novel as Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads were to The Prelude. One must remember, too, that the novel of travel and exploration was a popular species by itself catering to a growing thirst