CHAPTER X.

AN OUTSIDER’S VIEW OF MEN AND THINGS.

Man has a notion of revenging himself on that which pleases him.  Hence the contempt felt for the comedian.

This being charms me, diverts, distracts, teaches, enchants, consoles me; flings me into an ideal world, is agreeable and useful to me.  What evil 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 serves me, 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 from your mouth at him.  Bear, fling your stone.  Let us cast stones at the tree, hit the fruit and eat it.  “Bravo!” and “Down with him!” To repeat poetry is to be infected with the plague.  Wretched playactor, we will put him in the pillory for his success.  Let him follow up his triumph with our hisses.  Let him collect a crowd and create a solitude.  Thus it is that the wealthy, termed the higher classes, have invented for the actor 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 immeasurably superior to this amuser of the “scum,” and believed that a calker is as superior to an actor as a lord is to a calker.

Gwynplaine was, therefore, like all comedians, applauded and kept at a distance.  Truly, all success in this world is a crime, and must be expiated.  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 his medal pleased him.  He was satisfied with the applause, and content with the isolation.  In applause he was rich, in isolation happy.

To be rich in his low estate means to be no longer wretchedly poor—­to have neither holes in his clothes, nor cold at his hearth, nor emptiness in his stomach.  It is to eat when hungry and drink when thirsty.  It is to have everything necessary, including a penny for a beggar.  This indigent wealth, enough for liberty, was possessed by Gwynplaine.  So far as his soul was concerned, he was opulent.  He had love.  What more could he want?  Nothing.

You may think that had the offer been made to him to remove his deformity he would have grasped at it.  Yet he would have refused it emphatically.  What! to throw off his mask and have his former face restored; to be the creature he had perchance been created, handsome and charming?  No, he would never have consented to it.  For what would he have to support Dea?  What would have become of that poor child, the sweet blind girl who loved him?  Without his rictus, which made him a clown without parallel, he would have been a mountebank, like any other; a common athlete,