Chapter XXVIII: Introduction (9)

If Lambert had no other title to fame than the fact of his having formulated, in his sixteenth year, such a psychological dictum as this:--"The events which bear witness to the action of the human race, and are the outcome of its intellect, have causes by which they are preconceived, as our actions are accomplished in our mind before they are reproduced by the outer man; presentiments or predictions are the perception of these causes"--I think we may deplore in him a genius equal to Pascal, Lavoisier, or Laplace. His chimerical notions about angels perhaps overruled his work too long; but was it not in trying to make gold that the alchemists unconsciously created chemistry? At the same time, Lambert, at a later period, studied comparative anatomy, physics, geometry, and other sciences bearing on his discoveries, and this was undoubtedly with the purpose of collecting facts and submitting them to analysis--the only torch that can guide us through the dark places of the most inscrutable work of nature. He had too much good sense to dwell among the clouds of theories which can all be expressed in a few words. In our day, is not the simplest demonstration based on facts more highly esteemed than the most specious system though defended by more or less ingenious inductions? But as I did not know him at the period of his life when his cogitations were, no doubt, the most productive of results, I can only conjecture what the bent of his work must have been from that of his first efforts of thought.

It is easy to see where his _Treatise on the Will_ was faulty. Though gifted already with the powers which characterize superior men, he was but a boy. His brain, though endowed with a great faculty for abstractions, was still full of the delightful beliefs that hover around youth. Thus his conception, while at some points it touched the ripest fruits of his genius, still, by many more, clung to the smaller elements of its germs. To certain readers, lovers of poetry, what he chiefly lacked must have been a certain vein of interest.

But his work bore the stamp of the struggle that was going on in that noble Spirit between the two great principles of Spiritualism and Materialism, round which so many a fine genius has beaten its way without ever daring to amalgamate them. Louis, at first purely Spiritualist, had been irresistibly led to recognize the Material conditions of Mind. Confounded by the facts of analysis at the moment when his heart still gazed with yearning at the clouds that floated in Swedenborg's heaven, he had not yet acquired the necessary powers to produce a coherent system, compactly cast in a piece, as it were. Hence certain inconsistencies that have left their stamp even on the sketch here given of his first attempts. Still, incomplete as his work may have been, was it not the rough copy of a science of which he would have investigated the secrets at a later time, have secured the foundations, have examined, deduced, and connected the logical sequence?

* * * * *

Six months after the confiscation of the _Treatise on the Will_ I left school. Our parting was unexpected. My mother, alarmed by a feverish attack which for some months I had been unable to shake off, while my inactive life induced symptoms of _coma_, carried me off at four or five hours' notice. The announcement of my departure reduced Lambert to dreadful dejection.

"Shall I ever see you again?" said he in his gentle voice, as he clasped me in his arms. "You will live," he went on, "but I shall die. If I can, I will come back to you."

Only the young can utter such words with the accent of conviction that gives them the impressiveness of prophecy, of a pledge, leaving a terror of its fulfilment. For a long time indeed I vaguely looked for the promised apparition. Even now there are days of depression, of doubt, alarm, and loneliness, when I am forced to repel the intrusion of that sad parting, though it was not fated to be the last.

When I crossed the yard by which we left, Lambert was at one of the refectory windows to see me pass. By my request my mother obtained leave for him to dine with us at the inn, and in the evening I escorted him back to the fatal gate of the college. No lover and his mistress ever shed more tears at parting.

"Well, good-bye; I shall be left alone in this desert!" said he, pointing to the playground where two hundred boys were disporting themselves and shouting. "When I come back half dead with fatigue from my long excursions through the fields of thought, on whose heart can I rest? I could tell you everything in a look. Who will understand me now?--Good-bye! I could wish I had never met you; I should not know all I am losing."

"And what is to become of me?" said I. "Is not my position a dreadful one. _I_ have nothing here to uphold me!" and I slapped my forehead.

He shook his head with a gentle gesture, gracious and sad, and we parted.

At that time Louis Lambert was about five feet five inches in height; he grew no more. His countenance, which was full of expression, revealed his sweet nature. Divine patience, developed by harsh usage, and the constant concentration needed for his meditative life, had bereft his eyes of the audacious pride which is so attractive in some faces, and which had so shocked our masters. Peaceful mildness gave charm to his face, an exquisite serenity that was never marred by a tinge of irony or satire; for his natural kindliness tempered his conscious strength and superiority. He had pretty hands, very slender, and almost always moist. His frame was a marvel, a model for a sculptor; but our iron-gray uniform, with gilt buttons and knee-breeches, gave us such an ungainly appearance that Lambert's fine proportions and firm muscles could only be appreciated in the bath. When we swam in our pool in the Loir, Louis was conspicuous by the whiteness of his skin, which was unlike the different shades of our schoolfellows' bodies mottled by the cold, or blue from the water. Gracefully formed, elegant in his attitudes, delicate in hue, never shivering after his bath, perhaps because he avoided the shade and always ran into the sunshine, Louis was like one of those cautious blossoms that close their petals to the blast and refuse to open unless to a clear sky. He ate little, and drank water only; either by instinct or by choice he was averse to any exertion that made a demand on his strength; his movements were few and simple, like those of Orientals or of savages, with whom gravity seems a condition of nature.

As a rule, he disliked everything that resembled any special care for his person. He commonly sat with his head a little inclined to the left, and so constantly rested his elbows on the table, that the sleeves of his coats were soon in holes.

To this slight picture of the outer man I must add a sketch of his moral qualities, for I believe I can now judge him impartially.

Though naturally religious, Louis did not accept the minute practices of the Roman ritual; his ideas were more intimately in sympathy with Saint Theresa and Fenelon, and several Fathers and certain Saints, who, in our day, would be regarded as heresiarchs or atheists. He was rigidly calm during the services. His own prayers went up in gusts, in aspirations, without any regular formality; in all things he gave himself up to nature, and would not pray, any more than he would think, at any fixed hour. In chapel he was equally apt to think of God or to meditate on some problem of philosophy.

To him Jesus Christ was the most perfect type of his system. _Et Verbum caro factum est_ seemed a sublime statement intended to express the traditional formula of the Will, the Word, and the Act made visible. Christ's unconsciousness of His Death--having so perfected His inner Being by divine works, that one day the invisible form of it appeared to His disciples--and the other Mysteries of the Gospels, the magnetic cures wrought by Christ, and the gift of tongues, all to him confirmed his doctrine. I remember once hearing him say on this subject, that the greatest work that could be written nowadays was a History of the Primitive Church. And he never rose to such poetic heights as when, in the evening, as we conversed, he would enter on an inquiry into miracles, worked by the power of Will during that great age of faith. He discerned the strongest evidence of his theory in most of the martyrdoms endured during the first century of our era, which he spoke of as _the great era of the Mind_.

"Do not the phenomena observed in almost every instance of the torments so heroically endured by the early Christians for the establishment of the faith, amply prove that Material force will never prevail against the force of Ideas or the Will of man?" he would say. "From this effect, produced by the Will of all, each man may draw conclusions in favor of his own."

I need say nothing of his views on poetry or history, nor of his judgment on the masterpieces of our language. There would be little interest in the record of opinions now almost universally held, though at that time, from the lips of a boy, they might seem remarkable. Louis was capable of the highest flights. To give a notion of his talents in two words, he could have written _Zadig_ as wittily as Voltaire; he could have thought out the Dialogue between Sylla and Eucrates as powerfully as Montesquieu. His rectitude of character made him desire above all else in a work that it should bear the stamp of utility; at the same time, his refined taste demanded novelty of thought as well as of form. One of his most remarkable literary observations, which will serve as a clue to all the others, and show the lucidity of his judgment, is this, which has ever dwelt in my memory, "The Apocalypse is written ecstasy." He regarded the Bible as a part of the traditional history of the antediluvian nations which had taken for its share the new humanity. He thought that the mythology of the Greeks was borrowed both from the Hebrew Scriptures and from the sacred Books of India, adapted after their own fashion by the beauty-loving Hellenes.

"It is impossible," said he, "to doubt the priority of the Asiatic Scriptures; they are earlier than our sacred books. The man who is candid enough to admit this historical fact sees the whole world expand before him. Was it not on the Asiatic highland that the few men took refuge who were able to escape the catastrophe that ruined our globe--if, indeed, men had existed before that cataclysm or shock? A serious query, the answer to which lies at the bottom of the sea. The anthropogony of the Bible is merely a genealogy of a swarm escaping from the human hive which settled on the mountainous slopes of Thibet between the summits of the Himalaya and the Caucasus.

"The character of the primitive ideas of that horde called by its lawgiver the people of God, no doubt to secure its unity, and perhaps also to induce it to maintain his laws and his system of government--for the Books of Moses are a religious, political, and civil code--that character bears the authority of terror; convulsions of nature are interpreted with stupendous power as a vengeance from on high. In fact, since this wandering tribe knew none of the ease enjoyed by a community settled in a patriarchal home, their sorrows as pilgrims inspired them with none but gloomy poems, majestic but blood-stained. In the Hindoos, on the contrary, the spectacle of the rapid recoveries of the natural world, and the prodigious effects of sunshine, which they were the first to recognize, gave rise to happy images of blissful love, to the worship of Fire and of the endless personifications of reproductive force. These fine fancies are lacking in the Book of the Hebrews. A constant need of self-preservation amid all the dangers and the lands they traversed to reach the Promised Land engendered their exclusive race-feeling and their hatred of all other nations.

"These three Scriptures are the archives of an engulfed world. Therein lies the secret of the extraordinary splendor of those languages and their myths. A grand human history lies beneath those names of men and places, and those fables which charm us so irresistibly, we know not why. Perhaps it is because we find in them the native air of renewed humanity."

Thus, to him, this threefold literature included all the thoughts of man. Not a book could be written, in his opinion, of which the subject might not there be discerned in its germ. This view shows how learnedly he had pursued his early studies of the Bible, and how far they had led him. Hovering, as it were, over the heads of society, and knowing it solely from books, he could judge it coldly.

"The law," said he, "never puts a check on the enterprises of the rich and great, but crushes the poor, who, on the contrary, need protection."

His kind heart did not therefore allow him to sympathize in political ideas; his system led rather to the passive obedience of which Jesus set the example. During the last hours of my life at Vendome, Louis had ceased to feel the spur to glory; he had, in a way, had an abstract enjoyment of fame; and having opened it, as the ancient priests of sacrifice sought to read the future in the hearts of men, he had found nothing in the entrails of his chimera. Scorning a sentiment so wholly personal: "Glory," said he, "is but beatified egoism."

Here, perhaps, before taking leave of this exceptional boyhood, I may pronounce judgment on it by a rapid glance.

A short time before our separation, Lambert said to me:

"Apart from the general laws which I have formulated--and this, perhaps, will be my glory--laws which must be those of the human organism, the life of man is Movement determined in each individual by the pressure of some inscrutable influence--by the brain, the heart, or the sinews. All the innumerable modes of human existence result from the proportions in which these three generating forces are more or less intimately combined with the substances they assimilate in the environment they live in."

He stopped short, struck his forehead, and exclaimed: "How strange! In every great man whose portrait I have remarked, the neck is short. Perhaps nature requires that in them the heart should be nearer to the brain!"

Then he went on:

"From that, a sum-total of action takes its rise which constitutes social life. The man of sinew contributes action or strength; the man of brain, genius; the man of heart, faith. But," he added sadly, "faith sees only the clouds of the sanctuary; the Angel alone has light."

So, according to his own definitions, Lambert was all brain and all heart. It seems to me that his intellectual life was divided into three marked phases.

Under the impulsion, from his earliest years, of a precocious activity, due, no doubt, to some malady--or to some special perfection--of organism, his powers were concentrated on the functions of the inner senses and a superabundant flow of nerve-fluid. As a man of ideas, he craved to satisfy the thirst of his brain, to assimilate every idea. Hence his reading; and from his reading, the reflections that gave him the power of reducing things to their simplest expression, and of absorbing them to study them in their essence. Thus, the advantages of this splendid stage, acquired by other men only after long study, were achieved by Lambert during his bodily childhood: a happy childhood, colored by the studious joys of a born poet.

The point which most thinkers reach at last was to him the starting-point, whence his brain was to set out one day in search of new worlds of knowledge. Though as yet he knew it not, he had made for himself the most exacting life possible, and the most insatiably greedy. Merely to live, was he not compelled to be perpetually casting nutriment into the gulf he had opened in himself? Like some beings who dwell in the grosser world, might he not die of inanition for want of feeding abnormal and disappointed cravings? Was not this a sort of debauchery of the intellect which might lead to spontaneous combustion, like that of bodies saturated with alcohol?

I had seen nothing of this first phase of his brain-development; it is only now, at a later day, that I can thus give an account of its prodigious fruit and results. Lambert was now thirteen.

I was so fortunate as to witness the first stage of the second period. Lambert was cast into all the miseries of school-life--and that, perhaps, was his salvation--it absorbed the superabundance of his thoughts. After passing from concrete ideas to their purest expression, from words to their ideal import, and from that import to principles, after reducing everything to the abstract, to enable him to live he yearned for yet other intellectual creations. Quelled by the woes of school and the critical development of his physical constitution, he became thoughtful, dreamed of feeling, and caught a glimpse of new sciences--positively masses of ideas. Checked in his career, and not yet strong enough to contemplate the higher spheres, he contemplated his inmost self. I then perceived in him the struggle of the Mind reacting on itself, and trying to detect the secrets of its own nature, like a physician who watches the course of his own disease.

At this stage of weakness and strength, of childish grace and superhuman powers, Louis Lambert is the creature who, more than any other, gave me a poetical and truthful image of the being we call an angel, always excepting one woman whose name, whose features, whose identity, and whose life I would fain hide from all the world, so as to be sole master of the secret of her existence, and to bury it in the depths of my heart.

* * * * *

The third phase I was not destined to see. It began when Lambert and I were parted, for he did not leave college till he was eighteen, in the summer of 1815. He had at that time lost his father and mother about six months before. Finding no member of his family with whom his soul could sympathize, expansive still, but, since our parting, thrown back on himself, he made his home with his uncle, who was also his guardian, and who, having been turned out of his benefice as a priest who had taken the oaths, had come to settle at Blois. There Louis lived for some time; but consumed ere long by the desire to finish his incomplete studies, he came to Paris to see Madame de Stael, and to drink of science at its highest fount. The old priest, being very fond of his nephew, left Louis free to spend his whole little inheritance in his three years' stay in Paris, though he lived very poorly. This fortune consisted of but a few thousand francs.

Lambert returned to Blois at the beginning of 1820, driven from Paris by the sufferings to which the impecunious are exposed there. He must often have been a victim to the secret storms, the terrible rage of mind by which artists are tossed to judge from the only fact his uncle recollected, and the only letter he preserved of all those which Louis Lambert wrote to him at that time, perhaps because it was the last and the longest.

To begin with the story. Louis one evening was at the Theatre-Francais, seated on a bench in the upper gallery, near to one of the pillars which, in those days, divided off the third row of boxes. On rising between the acts, he saw a young woman who had just come into the box next him. The sight of this lady, who was young, pretty, well dressed, in a low bodice no doubt, and escorted by a man for whom her face beamed with all the charms of love, produced such a terrible effect on Lambert's soul and senses, that he was obliged to leave the theatre. If he had not been controlled by some remaining glimmer of reason, which was not wholly extinguished by this first fever of burning passion, he might perhaps have yielded to the almost irresistible desire that came over him to kill the young man on whom the lady's looks beamed. Was not this a reversion, in the heart of the Paris world, to the savage passion that regards women as its prey, an effect of animal instinct combining with the almost luminous flashes of a soul crushed under the weight of thought? In short, was it not the prick of the penknife so vividly imagined by the boy, felt by the man as the thunderbolt of his most vital craving--for love?

And now, here is the letter that depicts the state of his mind as it was struck by the spectacle of Parisian civilization. His feelings, perpetually wounded no doubt in that whirlpool of self-interest, must always have suffered there; he probably had no friend to comfort him, no enemy to give tone to his life. Compelled to live in himself alone, having no one to share his subtle raptures, he may have hoped to solve the problem of his destiny by a life of ecstasy, adopting an almost vegetative attitude, like an anchorite of the early Church, and abdicating the empire of the intellectual world.

This letter seems to hint at such a scheme, which is a temptation to all lofty souls at periods of social reform. But is not this purpose, in some cases, the result of a vocation? Do not some of them endeavor to concentrate their powers by long silence, so as to emerge fully capable of governing the world by word or by deed? Louis must, assuredly, have found much bitterness in his intercourse with men, or have striven hard with Society in terrible irony, without extracting anything from it, before uttering so strident a cry, and expressing, poor fellow, the desire which satiety of power and of all earthly things has led even monarchs to indulge!

And perhaps, too, he went back to solitude to carry out some great work that was floating inchoate in his brain. We would gladly believe it as we read this fragment of his thoughts, betraying the struggle of his soul at the time when youth was ending and the terrible power of production was coming into being, to which we might have owed the works of the man.

This letter connects itself with the adventure at the theatre. The incident and the letter throw light on each other, body and soul were tuned to the same pitch. This tempest of doubts and asseverations, of clouds and of lightnings that flash before the thunder, ending by a starved yearning for heavenly illumination, throws such a light on the third phase of his education as enables us to understand it perfectly. As we read these lines, written at chance moments, taken up when the vicissitudes of life in Paris allowed, may we not fancy that we see an oak at that stage of its growth when its inner expansion bursts the tender green bark, covering it with wrinkles and cracks, when its majestic stature is in preparation--if indeed the lightnings of heaven and the axe of man shall spare it?

This letter, then, will close, alike for the poet and the philosopher, this portentous childhood and unappreciated youth. It finishes off the outline of this nature in its germ. Philosophers will regret the foliage frost-nipped in the bud; but they will, perhaps, find the flowers expanding in regions far above the highest places of the earth.

"PARIS, _September-October 1819_.

"DEAR UNCLE,--I shall soon be leaving this part of the
world, where I could never bear to live. I find no one
here who likes what I like, who works at my work, or is
amazed at what amazes me. Thrown back on myself, I eat
my heart out in misery. My long and patient study of
Society here has brought me to melancholy conclusions,
in which doubt predominates.

"Here, money is the mainspring of everything. Money is
indispensable, even for going without money. But though
that dross is necessary to any one who wishes to think
in peace, I have not courage enough to make it the sole
motive power of my thoughts. To make a fortune, I must
take up a profession; in two words, I must, by
acquiring some privilege of position or of
self-advertisement, either legal or ingeniously
contrived, purchase the right of taking day by day out
of somebody else's purse a certain sum which, by the
end of the year, would amount to a small capital; and
this, in twenty years, would hardly secure an income of
four or five thousand francs to a man who deals
honestly. An advocate, a notary, a merchant, any
recognized professional, has earned a living for his
later days in the course of fifteen or sixteen years
after ending his apprenticeship.

"But I have never felt fit for work of this kind. I
prefer thought to action, an idea to a transaction,
contemplation to activity. I am absolutely devoid of
the constant attention indispensable to the making of a
fortune. Any mercantile venture, any need for using
other people's money would bring me to grief, and I
should be ruined. Though I have nothing, at least at
the moment, I owe nothing. The man who gives his life
to the achievement of great things in the sphere of
intellect, needs very little; still, though twenty sous
a day would be enough, I do not possess that small
income for my laborious idleness. When I wish to
cogitate, want drives me out of the sanctuary where my
mind has its being. What is to become of me?

"I am not frightened at poverty. If it were not that
beggars are imprisoned, branded, scorned, I would beg,
to enable me to solve at my leisure the problems that
haunt me. Still, this sublime resignation, by which I
might emancipate my mind, through abstracting it from
the body, would not serve my end. I should still need
money to devote myself to certain experiments. But for
that, I would accept the outward indigence of a sage
possessed of both heaven and earth. A man need only
never stoop, to remain lofty in poverty. He who
struggles and endures, while marching on to a glorious
end, presents a noble spectacle; but who can have the
strength to fight here? We can climb cliffs, but it is
unendurable to remain for ever tramping the mud.
Everything here checks the flight of a spirit that
strives towards the future.

"I should not be afraid of myself in a desert cave; I
am afraid of myself here. In the desert I should be
alone with myself, undisturbed; here man has a thousand
wants which drag him down. You go out walking, absorbed
in dreams; the voice of the beggar asking an alms
brings you back to this world of hunger and thirst. You
need money only to take a walk. Your organs of sense,
perpetually wearied by trifles, never get any rest. The
poet's sensitive nerves are perpetually shocked, and
what ought to be his glory becomes his torment; his
imagination is his cruelest enemy. The injured workman,
the poor mother in childbed, the prostitute who has
fallen ill, the foundling, the infirm and aged--even
vice and crime here find a refuge and charity; but the
world is merciless to the inventor, to the man who
thinks. Here everything must show an immediate and
practical result. Fruitless attempts are mocked at,
though they may lead to the greatest discoveries; the
deep and untiring study that demands long concentration
of every faculty is not valued here. The State might
pay talent as it pays the bayonet; but it is afraid of
being taken in by mere cleverness, as if genius could
be counterfeited for any length of time.

"Ah, my dear uncle, when monastic solitude was
destroyed, uprooted from its home at the foot of
mountains, under green and silent shade, asylums ought
to have been provided for those suffering souls who, by
an idea, promote the progress of nations or prepare
some new and fruitful development of science."

"_September 20th._

"The love of study brought me hither, as you know. I
have met really learned men, amazing for the most part;
but the lack of unity in scientific work almost
nullifies their efforts. There is no Head of
instruction or of scientific research. At the Museum a
professor argues to prove that another in the Rue
Saint-Jacques talks nonsense. The lecturer at the
College of Medicine abuses him of the College de
France. When I first arrived, I went to hear an old
Academician who taught five hundred youths that
Corneille was a haughty and powerful genius; Racine,
elegiac and graceful; Moliere, inimitable; Voltaire,
supremely witty; Bossuet and Pascal, incomparable in
argument. A professor of philosophy may make a name by
explaining how Plato is Platonic. Another discourses on
the history of words, without troubling himself about
ideas. One explains AEschylus, another tells you that
communes were communes, and neither more nor less.
These original and brilliant discoveries, diluted to
last several hours, constitute the higher education
which is to lead to giant strides in human knowledge.

"If the Government could have an idea, I should suspect
it of being afraid of any real superiority, which, once
roused, might bring Society under the yoke of an
intelligent rule. Then nations would go too far and too
fast; so professors are appointed to produce
simpletons. How else can we account for a scheme devoid
of method or any notion of the future?

"The _Institut_ might be the central government of the
moral and intellectual world; but it has been ruined
lately by its subdivision into separate academies. So
human science marches on, without a guide, without a
system, and floats haphazard with no road traced out.

"This vagueness and uncertainty prevails in politics as
well as in science. In the order of nature means are
simple, the end is grand and marvelous; here in
science, as in government, the means are stupendous,
the end is mean. The force which in nature proceeds at
an equal pace, and of which the sum is constantly being
added to itself--the A+A from which everything is
produced--is destructive in society. Politics, at the
present time, place human forces in antagonism to
neutralize each other, instead of combining them to
promote their action to some definite end.

"Looking at Europe alone, from Caesar to Constantine,
from the puny Constantine to the great Attila, from the
Huns to Charlemagne, from Charlemagne to Leo X., from
Leo X. to Philip II., from Philip II. to Louis XIV.;
from Venice to England, from England to Napoleon, from
Napoleon to England, I see no fixed purpose in
politics; its constant agitation has led to no
progress.

"Nations leave witnesses to their greatness in
monuments, and to their happiness in the welfare of
individuals. Are modern monuments as fine as those of
the ancients? I doubt it. The arts, which are the
direct outcome of the individual, the products of
genius or of handicraft, have not advanced much. The
pleasures of Lucullus were as good as those of Samuel
Bernard, of Beaujon, or of the King of Bavaria. And
then human longevity has diminished.

"Thus, to those who will be candid, man is still the
same; might is his only law, and success his only
wisdom.

"Jesus Christ, Mahomet, and Luther only lent a
different hue to the arena in which youthful nations
disport themselves.

"No development of politics has hindered civilization,
with its riches, its manners, its alliance of the
strong against the weak, its ideas, and its delights,
from moving from Memphis to Tyre, from Tyre to Baalbek,
from Tadmor to Carthage, from Carthage to Rome, from
Rome to Constantinople, from Constantinople to Venice,
from Venice to Spain, from Spain to England--while no
trace is left of Memphis, of Tyre, of Carthage, of
Rome, of Venice, or Madrid. The soul of those great
bodies has fled. Not one of them has preserved itself
from destruction, nor formulated this axiom: When the
effect produced ceases to be in a ratio to its cause,
disorganization follows.

"The most subtle genius can discover no common bond
between great social facts. No political theory has
ever lasted. Governments pass away, as men do, without
handing down any lesson, and no system gives birth to
a system better than that which came before it. What
can we say about politics when a Government directly
referred to God perished in India and Egypt; when the
rule of the Sword and of the Tiara are past; when
Monarchy is dying; when the Government of the People
has never been alive; when no scheme of intellectual
power as applied to material interests has ever proved
durable, and everything at this day remains to be done
all over again, as it has been at every period when man
has turned to cry out, 'I am in torment!'

"The code, which is considered Napoleon's greatest
achievement, is the most Draconian work I know of.
Territorial subdivision carried out to the uttermost,
and its principle confirmed by the equal division of
property generally, must result in the degeneracy of
the nation and the death of the Arts and Sciences. The
land, too much broken up, is cultivated only with
cereals and small crops; the forests, and consequently
the rivers, are disappearing; oxen and horses are no
longer bred. Means are lacking both for attack and for
resistance. If we should be invaded, the people must be
crushed; it has lost its mainspring--its leaders. This
is the history of deserts!

"Thus the science of politics has no definite
principles, and it can have no fixity; it is the spirit
of the hour, the perpetual application of strength
proportioned to the necessities of the moment. The man
who should foresee two centuries ahead would die on the
place of execution, loaded with the imprecations of the
mob, or else--which seems worse--would be lashed with
the myriad whips of ridicule. Nations are but
individuals, neither wiser nor stronger than man, and
their destinies are identical. If we reflect on man, is
not that to consider mankind?

"By studying the spectacle of society perpetually
storm-tossed in its foundations as well as in its
results, in its causes as well as in its actions, while
philanthropy is but a splendid mistake, and progress is
vanity, I have been confirmed in this truth: Life is
within and not without us; to rise above men, to
govern them, is only the part of an aggrandized
schoolmaster; and those men who are capable of rising
to the level whence they can enjoy a view of the world
should not look at their own feet."

"_November 4th._

"I am no doubt occupied with weighty thoughts, I am on
the way to certain discoveries, an invincible power
bears me toward a luminary which shone at an early age
on the darkness of my moral life; but what name can I
give to the power that ties my hands and shuts my
mouth, and drags me in a direction opposite to my
vocation? I must leave Paris, bid farewell to the books
in the libraries, those noble centres of illumination,
those kindly and always accessible sages, and the
younger geniuses with whom I sympathize. Who is it that
drives me away? Chance or Providence?

"The two ideas represented by those words are
irreconcilable. If Chance does not exist, we must admit
fatalism, that is to say, the compulsory co-ordination
of things under the rule of a general plan. Why then do
we rebel? If man is not free, what becomes of the
scaffolding of his moral sense? Or, if he can control
his destiny, if by his own freewill he can interfere
with the execution of the general plan, what becomes of
God?

"Why did I come here? If I examine myself, I find the
answer: I find in myself axioms that need developing.
But why then have I such vast faculties without being
suffered to use them? If my suffering could serve as an
example, I could understand it; but no, I suffer
unknown.

"This is perhaps as much the act of Providence as the
fate of the flower that dies unseen in the heart of the
virgin forest, where no one can enjoy its perfume or
admire its splendor. Just as that blossom vainly sheds
its fragrance to the solitude, so do I, here in a
garret, give birth to ideas that no one can grasp.

"Yesterday evening I sat eating bread and grapes in
front of my window with a young doctor named Meyraux.
We talked as men do whom misfortune has joined in
brotherhood, and I said to him:

"'I am going away; you are staying. Take up my ideas
and develop them.'

"'I cannot!' said he, with bitter regret; 'my feeble
health cannot stand so much work, and I shall die young
of my struggle with penury.'

"We looked up at the sky and grasped hands. We first
met at the Comparative Anatomy course, and in the
galleries of the Museum, attracted thither by the same
study--the unity of geological structure. In him this
was the presentiment of genius sent to open a new path
in the fallows of intellect; in me it was a deduction
from a general system.

"My point is to ascertain the real relation that may
exist between God and man. Is not this a need of the
age? Without the highest assurance, it is impossible to
put bit and bridle on the social factions that have
been let loose by the spirit of scepticism and
discussion, and which are now crying aloud: 'Show us a
way in which we may walk and find no pitfalls in our
way!'

"You will wonder what comparative anatomy has to do
with a question of such importance to the future of
society. Must we not attain to the conviction that man
is the end of all earthly means before we ask whether
he too is not the means to some end? If man is bound up
with everything, is there not something above him with
which he again is bound up? If he is the end-all of the
unexplained transmutations that lead up to him, must he
not be also the link between the visible and invisible
creations?

"The activity of the universe is not absurd; it must
tend to an end, and that end is surely not a social
body constituted as ours is! There is a fearful gulf
between us and heaven. In our present existence we can
neither be always happy nor always in torment; must
there not be some tremendous change to bring about
Paradise and Hell, two images without which God cannot
exist to the mind of the vulgar? I know that a
compromise was made by the invention of the Soul; but
it is repugnant to me to make God answerable for human
baseness, for our disenchantments, our aversions, our
degeneracy.

"Again, how can we recognize as divine the principle
within us which can be overthrown by a few glasses of
rum? How conceive of immaterial faculties which matter
can conquer, and whose exercise is suspended by a grain
of opium? How imagine that we shall be able to feel
when we are bereft of the vehicles of sensation? Why
must God perish if matter can be proved to think? Is
the vitality of matter in its innumerable
manifestations--the effect of its instincts--at all
more explicable than the effects of the mind? Is not
the motion given to the worlds enough to prove God's
existence, without our plunging into absurd
speculations suggested by pride? And if we pass, after
our trials, from a perishable state of being to a
higher existence, is not that enough for a creature
that is distinguished from other creatures only by more
perfect instincts? If in moral philosophy there is not
a single principle which does not lead to the absurd,
or cannot be disproved by evidence, is it not high time
that we should set to work to seek such dogmas as are
written in the innermost nature of things? Must we not
reverse philosophical science?

"We trouble ourselves very little about the supposed
void that must have pre-existed for us, and we try to
fathom the supposed void that lies before us. We make
God responsible for the future, but we do not expect
Him to account for the past. And yet it is quite as
desirable to know whether we have any roots in the past
as to discover whether we are inseparable from the
future.

"We have been Deists or Atheists in one direction only.

"Is the world eternal? Was the world created? We can
conceive of no middle term between these two
propositions; one, then, is true and the other false!
Take your choice. Whichever it may be, God, as our
reason depicts Him, must be deposed, and that amounts
to denial. The world is eternal: then, beyond question,
God has had it forced upon Him. The world was created:
then God is an impossibility. How could He have
subsisted through an eternity, not knowing that He
would presently want to create the world? How could He
have failed to foresee all the results?

"Whence did He derive the essence of creation?
Evidently from Himself. If, then, the world proceeds
from God, how can you account for evil? That Evil
should proceed from Good is absurd. If evil does not
exist, what do you make of social life and its laws? On
all hands we find a precipice! On every side a gulf in
which reason is lost! Then social science must be
altogether reconstructed.

"Listen to me, uncle; until some splendid genius shall
have taken account of the obvious inequality of
intellects and the general sense of humanity, the word
God will be constantly arraigned, and Society will rest
on shifting sands. The secret of the various moral
zones through which man passes will be discovered by
the analysis of the animal type as a whole. That animal
type has hitherto been studied with reference only to
its differences, not to its similitudes; in its organic
manifestations, not in its faculties. Animal faculties
are perfected in direct transmission, in obedience to
laws which remain to be discovered. These faculties
correspond to the forces which express them, and those
forces are essentially material and divisible.

"Material faculties! Reflect on this juxtaposition of
words. Is not this a problem as insoluble as that of
the first communication of motion to matter--an
unsounded gulf of which the difficulties were
transposed rather than removed by Newton's system?
Again, the universal assimilation of light by
everything that exists on earth demands a new study of
our globe. The same animal differs in the tropics of
India and in the North. Under the angular or the
vertical incidence of the sun's rays nature is
developed the same, but not the same; identical in its
principles, but totally dissimilar in its outcome. The
phenomenon that amazes our eyes in the zoological world
when we compare the butterflies of Brazil with those of
Europe, is even more startling in the world of Mind. A
particular facial angle, a certain amount of brain
convolutions, are indispensable to produce Columbus,
Raphael, Napoleon, Laplace, or Beethoven; the sunless
valley produces the cretin--draw your own conclusions.
Why such differences, due to the more or less ample
diffusion of light to men? The masses of suffering
humanity, more or less active, fed, and enlightened,
are a difficulty to be accounted for, crying out
against God.

"Why in great joy do we always want to quit the earth?
whence comes the longing to rise which every creature
has known or will know? Motion is a great soul, and its
alliance with matter is just as difficult to account
for as the origin of thought in man. In these days
science is one; it is impossible to touch politics
independent of moral questions, and these are bound up
with scientific questions. It seems to me that we are
on the eve of a great human struggle; the forces are
there; only I do not see the General."

"November 25.

"Believe me, dear uncle, it is hard to give up the life
that is in us without a pang. I am returning to Blois
with a heavy grip at my heart; I shall die then, taking
with me some useful truths. No personal interest
debases my regrets. Is earthly fame a guerdon to those
who believe that they will mount to a higher sphere?

"I am by no means in love with the two syllables _Lam_
and _bert_; whether spoken with respect or with
contempt over my grave, they can make no change in my
ultimate destiny. I feel myself strong and energetic; I
might become a power; I feel in myself a life so
luminous that it might enlighten a world, and yet I am
shut up in a sort of mineral, as perhaps indeed are the
colors you admire on the neck of an Indian bird. I
should need to embrace the whole world, to clasp and
recreate it; but those who have done this, who have
thus embraced and remoulded it began--did they not?--by
being a wheel in the machine. I can only be crushed.
Mahomet had the sword; Jesus had the cross; I shall die
unknown. I shall be at Blois for a day, and then in my
coffin.

"Do you know why I have come back to Swedenborg after
vast studies of all religions, and after proving to
myself, by reading all the works published within the
last sixty years by the patient English, by Germany,
and by France, how deeply true were my youthful views
about the Bible? Swedenborg undoubtedly epitomizes all
the religions--or rather the one religion--of humanity.
Though forms of worship are infinitely various, neither
their true meaning nor their metaphysical
interpretation has ever varied. In short, man has, and
has had, but one religion.

"Sivaism, Vishnuism, and Brahmanism, the three
primitive creeds, originating as they did in Thibet, in
the valley of the Indus, and on the vast plains of the
Ganges, ended their warfare some thousand years before
the birth of Christ by adopting the Hindoo Trimourti.
The Trimourti is our Trinity. From this dogma Magianism
arose in Persia; in Egypt, the African beliefs and the
Mosaic law; the worship of the Cabiri, and the
polytheism of Greece and Rome. While by this
ramification of the Trimourti the Asiatic myths became
adapted to the imaginations of various races in the
lands they reached by the agency of certain sages whom
men elevated to be demi-gods--Mithra, Bacchus, Hermes,
Hercules, and the rest--Buddha, the great reformer of
the three primeval religions, lived in India, and
founded his Church there, a sect which still numbers
two hundred millions more believers than Christianity
can show, while it certainly influenced the powerful
Will both of Jesus and of Confucius.

"Then Christianity raised her standard. Subsequently
Mahomet fused Judaism and Christianity, the Bible and
the Gospel, in one book, the Koran, adapting them to
the apprehension of the Arab race. Finally, Swedenborg
borrowed from Magianism, Brahmanism, Buddhism, and
Christian mysticism all the truth and divine beauty
that those four great religious books hold in common,
and added to them a doctrine, a basis of reasoning,
that may be termed mathematical.

"Any man who plunges into those religious waters, of
which the sources are not all known, will find proofs
that Zoroaster, Moses, Buddha, Confucius, Jesus Christ,
and Swedenborg had identical principles and aimed at
identical ends.

"The last of them all, Swedenborg, will perhaps be the
Buddha of the North. Obscure and diffuse as his
writings are, we find in them the elements of a
magnificent conception of society. His Theocracy is
sublime, and his creed is the only acceptable one to
superior souls. He alone brings man into immediate
communion with God, he gives a thirst for God, he has
freed the majesty of God from the trappings in which
other human dogmas have disguised Him. He left Him
where He is, making His myriad creations and creatures
gravitate towards Him through successive
transformations which promise a more immediate and more
natural future than the Catholic idea of Eternity.
Swedenborg has absolved God from the reproach attaching
to Him in the estimation of tender souls for the
perpetuity of revenge to punish the sin of a moment--a
system of injustice and cruelty.

"Each man may know for himself what hope he has of life
eternal, and whether this world has any rational sense.
I mean to make the attempt. And this attempt may save
the world, just as much as the cross at Jerusalem or
the sword at Mecca. These were both the offspring of
the desert. Of the thirty-three years of Christ's life,
we only know the history of nine; His life of seclusion
prepared Him for His life of glory. And I too crave for
the desert!"

Notwithstanding the difficulties of the task, I have felt it my duty to depict Lambert's boyhood, the unknown life to which I owe the only happy hours, the only pleasant memories, of my early days. Excepting during those two years I had nothing but annoyances and weariness. Though some happiness was mine at a later time, it was always incomplete.

I have been diffuse, I know; but in default of entering into the whole wide heart and brain of Louis Lambert--two words which inadequately express the infinite aspects of his inner life--it would be almost impossible to make the second part of his intellectual history intelligible--a phase that was unknown to the world and to me, but of which the mystical outcome was made evident to my eyes in the course of a few hours. Those who have not already dropped this volume, will, I hope, understand the events I still have to tell, forming as they do a sort of second existence lived by this creature--may I not say this creation?--in whom everything was to be so extraordinary, even his end.

* * * * *

When Louis returned to Blois, his uncle was eager to procure him some amusement; but the poor priest was regarded as a perfect leper in that godly-minded town. No one would have anything to say to a revolutionary who had taken the oaths. His society, therefore, consisted of a few individuals of what were then called liberal or patriotic, or constitutional opinions, on whom he would call for a rubber of whist or of boston.

At the first house where he was introduced by his uncle, Louis met a young lady, whose circumstances obliged her to remain in this circle, so contemned by those of the fashionable world, though her fortune was such as to make it probable that she might by and by marry into the highest aristocracy of the province. Mademoiselle Pauline de Villenoix was sole heiress to the wealth amassed by her grandfather, a Jew named Salomon, who, contrary to the customs of his nation, had, in his old age, married a Christian and a Catholic. He had an only son, who was brought up in his mother's faith. At his father's death young Salomon purchased what was known at that time as a _savonnette a vilain_ (literally _a cake of soap for a serf_), a small estate called Villenoix, which he contrived to get registered with a baronial title, and took its name. He died unmarried, but he left a natural daughter, to whom he bequeathed the greater part of his fortune, including the lands of Villenoix. He appointed one of his uncles, Monsieur Joseph Salomon, to be the girl's guardian. The old Jew was so devoted to his ward that he seemed willing to make great sacrifices for the sake of marrying her well. But Mademoiselle de Villenoix's birth, and the cherished prejudice against Jews that prevails in the provinces, would not allow of her being received in the very exclusive circle which, rightly or wrongly, considers itself noble, notwithstanding her own large fortune and her guardian's.

Monsieur Joseph Salomon was resolved that if she could not secure a country squire, his niece should go to Paris and make choice of a husband among the peers of France, liberal or monarchical; as to happiness, that he believed he could secure her by the terms of the marriage contract.