MISENO, ma-sa'nep, Cape, Italy, a promon tory forming the west side of the Bay of Poz zuoli (ancient Cumw), 10 miles southwest of Naples. On it are the ruins of the ancient city of Misenum, destroyed by the Saracens, 890 A.D., which Augustus made one of the principal naval stations of the Romans.
MISgRABLES, Les, la me'za'raibl, by Victor Hugo, is by universal consent one of the great novels of the world. Heralded since 1854 as designed to be a sort of social gospel, written almost wholly in exile by one whose political intransigence had attracted general re gard, the work, extending to 10 volumes, ap peared simultaneously in as many languages (3 April to 30 June 1862) and has since been in constant and wide circulation in many lands. It was Hugo's first novel since 'Notre-Dame,> 31 years before. That had been an evocation of the past. Here his eyes were on the pres ent, his heart in the future. To profound compassion for the sufferings of the unfortu nate he joined a sturdy faith in the possibilities of moral regeneration and social reform through a realizing sense of human brother hood. (So long,o he says, in a preface, gas there shall exist, through the fault of our laws and customs, a social condemnation that creates artificial hells in the midst of our civilization and complicates a divine destiny by human fatalism; so long as the three problems of the century,— the degradation of man by the pro letariat, the fall of woman by hunger, the ar rested development of the child by ignorance,— are not solved; so as social asphyxia is possible in any place—in other words and in a wider aspect, so long as there shall be on earth ignorance and misery, books like this cannot be useless" The first of the three problems is here impersonated in Jean Valjean, the second in Fantine, the third in her unfa thered daughter, Cosette.
In structure 'Les Miserables) is loose jointed, discursive, straying too readily into by paths of antiquarian lore, political reminis cence, philological speculation scientific con jecture, sociological visions. Hugo is apt to proclaim some commonplace with oratorical emphasis, as though it were a revelation of social salvation. He is apt to overcharge his characters till they become hardly human em bodiments of some abstract quality, it may be mercy and forgiveness as in Bishop Myriel, untempered social justice as in Javert, political intransigence as in Enjolras, unmitigated cun ning and cruel greed as in Thernadier. But through all there is a sincere and intense if vague emotion, a deep pulsing sympathy, a splendid indignation at the ignoble and base degradations of outworn institutions and con ventions, an unfailing force of moral convic tion, a glowing eloquence, that make it easy to pass by, if not to forget, the occasional cyclo pean lack of humor and the passages of puerile insipidity that are in strange contrast to others of impassioned and beautiful lyric appeal.
Hugo is a social optimist, often grand, never petty, though sometimes grandiose. Its foibles apart, 'Les Miserables) is a noble plea for more practical recognition of the brotherhood of man, for more charity in judging the tempted, the wretched and the fallen. Jean Valjean, whose struggle for social reintegration is the connecting thread of the 10 volumes, is a dis charged convict contending against social and legal proscriptions that must have driven him back to the galleys whence he came, had not Bishop Myricl redeemed him with the gift of the silver which he had stolen. He makes him self respected and beloved. But a petty theft remains unexpiated, and rather than see an other suffer on account of it he surrenders him self again to prison. But first he lightens the last hours of Fantine, once a symbol of joy, 'innocence floating on error? now the dying mother of Cosette, whom she has in desperation consigned to the mercies of Thernadier and now commits to the heart of Valjean. Here ends (Fantine? the first of the novel's five parts, to be remembered especially for Bishop Myriel, said to be essentially Monsignor de Miollis, a former bishop of Digne. The sec ond part, (Cosette,n opens with a justly famed picture of Waterloo, whence the scoundrel camp-follower Thernadier, a plunderer of corpses, had saved for his own base ends Colonel Pontmercy, father of Marius, the romantically predestined husband of Cosette, and apparently reminiscent of Hugo's own. Then it tells of Valjean's life in the galleys and of his escape, how he was pursued by justice incarnate in Javert, how he rescued Cosette from Thernadier and himself found refuge as a convent gardener, with reminiscences of Hugo's own childhood at Les Feuillantines. (Marius;> the third part, is concerned mainly with the restless political agitation among those dissatisfied with the results of the Revo lution of 1830. Marius is what Hugo thought he himself might have been. The charm of this part is in the very genial account of the Parisian gamin, Gavroche. Part 4, 'Saint Denis? has a brilliant account of the great barricade and riot of 5 June 1832, with the touching death of Gavroche and the first bud - dings of the love of Marius and Cosette. 'Jean Valjean? the fifth part, is especially not able for its account of the rescue of the wounded Marius by Valjean and their passage through the sewers, of the despairing suicide of the baffled Javert, of Thernadier's uninten tional enlightenment of Marius as to his real debt to Valjean and for the very beautiful pic ture of the redeemed convict's august end.
'Les Miserables' has been abridged by 0. B. Super (Boston 1903), and well translated by C. E. Wilbour Library,) 1909) and others. Consult Bire, (V. Hugo apres 1852> (Vol. I, pp. 126-153), and, for summar ized contemporary criticism, Bersaucourt, Pamphlets contre V. (pp. 227-279, 1912).