LETTER TO M. DAELLI
Publisher of the Italian translation of Les Miserables
in Milan.
HAUTEVILLE-HOUSE, October 18, 1862.
You are right, sir, when you tell me that Les
Miserables is
written for all nations. I do not know whether it will be
read by all, but I wrote it for all. It is addressed to England
as well as to Spain, to Italy as well as to France, to Germany
as well as to Ireland, to Republics which have slaves as well
as to Empires which have serfs. Social problems overstep
frontiers. The sores of the human race, those great sores
which cover the globe, do not halt at the red or blue lines
traced upon the map. In every place where man is ignorant
and despairing, in every place where woman is sold for bread,
wherever the child suffers for lack of the book which should
instruct him and of the hearth which should warm him, the
book of Les Miserables knocks at the door and says:
"Open
to me, I come for you."
At the hour of civilization through which we are now
passing,
and which is still so sombre, the miserable's name is
Man; he is agonizing in all climes, and he is groaning in all
languages.
Your Italy is no more exempt from the evil than is our
France. Your admirable Italy has all miseries on the face of
it. Does not banditism, that raging form of pauperism, inhabit
your mountains? Few nations are more deeply eaten
by that ulcer of convents which I have endeavored to fathom.
In spite of your possessing Rome, Milan, Naples, Palermo,
Turin, Florence, Sienna, Pisa, Mantua, Bologna, Ferrara,
Genoa, Venice, a heroic history, sublime ruins, magnificent
ruins, and superb cities, you are, like ourselves, poor. You
are covered with marvels and vermin. Assuredly, the sun of
Italy is splendid, but, alas, azure in the sky does not prevent
rags on man.
Like us, you have prejudices, superstitions, tyrannies,
fanaticisms,
blind laws lending assistance to ignorant customs.
You taste nothing of the present nor of the future without a
flavor of the past being mingled with it. You have a barbarian,
the monk, and a savage, the lazzarone. The social question
is the same for you as for us. There are a few less deaths
from hunger with you, and a few more from fever; your
social hygiene is not much better than ours; shadows, which
are Protestant in England, are Catholic in Italy; but, under
different names, the vescovo is identical with the
bishop, and
it always means night, and of pretty nearly the same quality.
To explain the Bible badly amounts to the same thing as to
understand the Gospel badly.
Is it necessary to emphasize this? Must this melancholy
parallelism be yet more completely verified? Have you not
indigent persons? Glance below. Have you not parasites?
Glance up. Does not that hideous balance, whose two scales,
pauperism and parasitism, so mournfully preserve their
mutual equilibrium, oscillate before you as it does before us?
Where is your army of schoolmasters, the only army which
civilization acknowledges?
Where are your free and compulsory schools? Does every
one know how to read in the land of Dante and of Michael
Angelo? Have you made public schools of your barracks?
Have you not, like ourselves, an opulent war-budget and a
paltry budget of education? Have not you also that passive
obedience which is so easily converted into soldierly obedience?
military establishment which pushes the regulations to
the extreme of firing upon Garibaldi; that is to say, upon
the living honor of Italy? Let us subject your social order
to examination, let us take it where it stands and as it stands,
let us view its flagrant offences, show me the woman and the
child. It is by the amount of protection with which these
two feeble creatures are surrounded that the degree of
civilization
is to be measured. Is prostitution less heartrending in
Naples than in Paris? What is the amount of truth that
springs from your laws, and what amount of justice springs
from your tribunals? Do you chance to be so fortunate as to
be ignorant of the meaning of those gloomy words: public
prosecution, legal infamy, prison, the scaffold, the executioner,
the death penalty? Italians, with you as with us, Beccaria
is dead and Farinace is alive. And then, let us scrutinize
your state reasons. Have you a government which comprehends
the identity of morality and politics? You have reached
the point where you grant amnesty to heroes! Something
very similar has been done in France. Stay, let us pass
miseries in review, let each one contribute his pile, you are as
rich as we. Have you not, like ourselves, two condemnations,
religious condemnation pronounced by the priest, and social
condemnation decreed by the judge? Oh, great nation of
Italy, thou resemblest the great nation of France! Alas!
our brothers, you are, like ourselves,
Miserables.
From the depths of the gloom wherein you dwell, you do
not see much more distinctly than we the radiant and distant
portals of Eden. Only, the priests are mistaken. These
holy portals are before and not behind us.
I resume. This book, Les Miserables, is no less
your mirror
than ours. Certain men, certain castes, rise in revolt against
this book, — I understand that. Mirrors, those revealers of
the truth, are hated; that does not prevent them from being
of use.
As for myself, I have written for all, with a profound
love
for my own country, but without being engrossed by France
more than by any other nation. In proportion as I advance
in life, I grow more simple, and I become more and more
patriotic for humanity.
This is, moreover, the tendency of our age, and the law of
radiance of the French Revolution; books must cease to be
exclusively French, Italian, German, Spanish, or English, and
become European, I say more, human, if they are to correspond
to the enlargement of civilization.
Hence a new logic of art, and of certain requirements of
composition which modify everything, even the conditions,
formerly narrow, of taste and language, which must grow
broader like all the rest.
In France, certain critics have reproached me, to my great
delight, with having transgressed the bounds of what they
call "French taste"; I should be glad if this eulogium were
merited.
In short, I am doing what I can, I suffer with the same universal
suffering, and I try to assuage it, I possess only the
puny forces of a man, and I cry to all: "Help me!"
This, sir, is what your letter prompts me to say; I say it
for you and for your country. If I have insisted so strongly,
it is because of one phrase in your letter. You write: —
"There are Italians, and they are numerous, who say:
'This book, Les Miserables, is a French book. It does
not concern us. Let the French read it as a history, we read it as
a romance.'" — Alas! I repeat, whether we be Italians or
Frenchmen, misery concerns us all. Ever since history has
been written, ever since philosophy has meditated, misery has
been the garment of the human race; the moment has at
length arrived for tearing off that rag, and for replacing, upon
the naked limbs of the Man-People, the sinister fragment of
the past with the grand purple robe of the dawn.
If this letter seems to you of service in enlightening
some minds and in dissipating some prejudices, you are at
liberty to publish it, sir. Accept, I pray you, a renewed
assurance of my very distinguished sentiments.
VICTOR HUGO.