Louis Lambert

“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 concentrations 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 school-master; 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 the 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 explained 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 re-create 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 these 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 only one 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.

Mademoiselle de Villenoix was now twenty.  Her remarkable beauty and gifts of mind were surer guarantees of happiness than those offered by money.  Her features were of the purest type of Jewish beauty; the oval lines, so noble and maidenly, have an indescribable stamp of the ideal, and seem to speak of the joys of the East, its unchangeably blue sky, the glories of its lands, and the fabulous riches of life there.  She had fine eyes, shaded by deep eyelids, fringed with thick, curled lashes.  Biblical innocence sat on her brow.  Her complexion was of the pure whiteness of the Levite’s robe.  She was habitually silent and thoughtful, but her movements and gestures betrayed a quiet grace, as her speech bore witness to a woman’s sweet and loving nature.  She had not, indeed, the rosy freshness, the fruit-like bloom which blush on a girl’s cheek during her careless years.  Darker shadows, with here and there a redder vein, took the place of color, symptomatic of an energetic temper and nervous irritability, such as many men do not like to meet with in a wife, while to others they are an indication of the most sensitive chastity and passion mingled with pride.

As soon as Louis saw Mademoiselle de Villenoix, he discerned the angel within.  The richest powers of his soul, and his tendency to ecstatic reverie, every faculty within him was at once concentrated in boundless love, the first love of a young man, a passion which is strong indeed in all, but which in him was raised to incalculable power by the perennial ardor of his senses, the character of his ideas, and the manner in which he lived.  This passion became a gulf, into which the hapless fellow threw everything; a gulf whither the mind dare not venture, since his, flexible and firm as it was, was lost there.  There all was mysterious, for everything went on in that moral world, closed to most men, whose laws were revealed to him —­perhaps to his sorrow.

When an accident threw me in the way of his uncle, the good man showed me into the room which Lambert had at that time lived in.  I wanted to find some vestiges of his writings, if he should have left any.  There among his papers, untouched by the old man from that fine instinct of grief that characterized the aged, I found a number of letters, too illegible ever to have been sent to Mademoiselle de Villenoix.  My familiarity with Lambert’s writing enabled me in time to decipher the hieroglyphics of this shorthand, the result of impatience and a frenzy of passion.  Carried away by his feelings, he had written without being conscious of the irregularity of words too slow to express his thoughts.  He must have been compelled to copy these chaotic attempts, for the lines often ran into each other; but he was also afraid perhaps of not having sufficiently disguised his feelings, and at first, at any rate, he had probably written his love-letters twice over.

It required all the fervency of my devotion to his memory, and the sort of fanaticism which comes of such a task, to enable me to divine and restore the meaning of the five letters that here follow.  These documents, preserved by me with pious care, are the only material evidence of his overmastering passion.  Mademoiselle de Villenoix had no doubt destroyed the real letters that she received, eloquent witnesses to the delirium she inspired.

The first of these papers, evidently a rough sketch, betrays by its style and by its length the many emendations, the heartfelt alarms, the innumerable terrors caused by a desire to please; the changes of expression and the hesitation between the whirl of ideas that beset a man as he indites his first love-letter—­a letter he never will forget, each line the result of a reverie, each word the subject of long cogitation, while the most unbridled passion known to man feels the necessity of the most reserved utterance, and like a giant stooping to enter a hovel, speaks humbly and low, so as not to alarm a girl’s soul.

No antiquary ever handled his palimpsests with greater respect than I showed in reconstructing these mutilated documents of such joy and suffering as must always be sacred to those who have known similar joy and grief.