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"You who suffer because you
love, love still more. To die of love is to live by it...Love!
A dark and starry transfiguration is mingled with that torment.
There is ecstacy in the agony."
--Victor Hugo- Les Miserables(Saint
Denis, Book V,iv)
Romanticism emerged in the 19th century and stressed
the importance of feeling and imagination over the conventional
literary forms and subjects. Imagination was praised over reason,
emotion over logic, and intuition over science. It allowed Romantic
writers to create works of greater sensibility and passion than
ever existed up to that time. Victor Hugo
was one such writer who he broke free from the conservative restrictions
of the classical style in his timeless masterpiece, Les
Miserables, casting themes of redemption and love against
a backdrop of war and revolution. His characters continue to
remain with us because they represent the heights and depths
that humans can rise or sink to. In Cosette and Marius, Hugo
captured the Romantic's vision of Love. It is pure and ideal,
and what starts out as an interest turns quickly into an obsession,
a necessity as vital as air or water. Marius falls in love with
Cosette from afar, through glimpses in a garden where she goes
daily with her father. He writes her a letter that expresses
with a poets tongue and a philosopher's depth all the stirrings
of his heart and later enters her garden under the cloak of night,
and with great difficulty, woos her with fragmented speech, sweet
only in their sincerity. But her heart is inclined towards him
even before he speaks. And in a garden beneath a tree under the
nighttime sky:
"They confided to each
other in an ideal intimacy, which nothing could augment, their
most secret and most mysterious thoughts. They related to each
other, with candid faith in their illusions, all that love, youth,
and the remains of childhood which still lingered about them,
suggested to their minds. Their two hearts poured themselves
out into each other in such wise, that at the expiration of a
quarter of an hour, it was the young man who had the young girl's
soul, and the young girl who had the young man's soul."
And it is only at the end of
this that they ask the other's name. This excerpt may seem to
suggest that the Romantic's definition of love is overblown and
ostentatious, but ideal love is only ideal to those who have
never experienced it. To those who have, the expression of a
thousand sentiments in a breath or a glance is a familiar thing,
and there are times when silence is favored over words not because
there is a lack of things to say, but because the many things
that can be said can not be contained in mere words. Hugo waxes
poetic on the definition of love, but in the end, the Romantics
would argue that Love is not a thing of the mind, but of the
heart, a feeling, only the lovers themselves can feel.
This situation is idealized in
literature of the 19th Century, however, the real life aspect
of courtship is quite different in the Bourgeois
society.
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