Louis Lambert

Certain men, having had a glimpse of some phenomena of the natural working of the Being of Action, were, like Swedenborg, carried away above this world by their ardent soul, thirsting for poetry, and filled with the Divine Spirit.  Thus, in their ignorance of the causes and their admiration of the facts, they pleased their fancy by regarding that inner man as divine, and constructing a mystical universe.  Hence we have angels!  A lovely illusion which Lambert would never abandon, cherishing it even when the sword of his logic was cutting off their dazzling wings.

“Heaven,” he would say, “must, after all, be the survival of our perfected faculties, and hell the void into which our unperfected faculties are cast away.”

But how, then, in the ages when the understanding had preserved the religious and spiritualist impressions, which prevailed from the time of Christ till that of Descartes, between faith and doubt, how could men help accounting for the mysteries of our nature otherwise than by divine interposition?  Of whom but of God Himself could sages demand an account of an invisible creature so actively and so reactively sensitive, gifted with faculties so extensive, so improvable by use, and so powerful under certain occult influences, that they could sometimes see it annihilate, by some phenomenon of sight or movement, space in its two manifestations—­Time and Distance—­of which the former is the space of the intellect, the latter is physical space?  Sometimes they found it reconstructing the past, either by the power of retrospective vision, or by the mystery of a palingenesis not unlike the power a man might have of detecting in the form, integument, and embryo in a seed, the flowers of the past, and the numberless variations of their color, scent, and shape; and sometimes, again, it could be seen vaguely foreseeing the future, either by its apprehension of final causes, or by some phenomenon of physical presentiment.

Other men, less poetically religious, cold, and argumentative—­quacks perhaps, but enthusiasts in brain at least, if not in heart —­recognizing some isolated examples of such phenomena, admitted their truth while refusing to consider them as radiating from a common centre.  Each of these was, then, bent on constructing a science out of a simple fact.  Hence arose demonology, judicial astrology, the black arts, in short, every form of divination founded on circumstances that were essentially transient, because they varied according to men’s temperament, and to conditions that are still completely unknown.

But from these errors of the learned, and from the ecclesiastical trials under which fell so many martyrs to their own powers, startling evidence was derived of the prodigious faculties at the command of the Being of Action, which, according to Lambert, can abstract itself completely from the Being of Reaction, bursting its envelope, and piercing walls by its potent vision; a phenomenon known to the Hindoos, as missionaries tell us, by the name of Tokeiad; or again, by another faculty, can grasp in the brain, in spite of its closest convolutions, the ideas which are formed or forming there, and the whole of past consciousness.

“If apparitions are not impossible,” said Lambert, “they must be due to a faculty of discerning the ideas which represent man in his purest essence, whose life, imperishable perhaps, escapes our grosser senses, though they may become perceptible to the inner being when it has reached a high degree of ecstasy, or a great perfection of vision.”

I know—­though my remembrance is now vague—­that Lambert, by following the results of Mind and Will step by step, after he had established their laws, accounted for a multitude of phenomena which, till then, had been regarded with reason as incomprehensible.  Thus wizards, men possessed with second sight, and demoniacs of every degree—­the victims of the Middle Ages—­became the subject of explanations so natural, that their very simplicity often seemed to me the seal of their truth.  The marvelous gifts which the Church of Rome, jealous of all mysteries, punished with the stake, were, in Louis’ opinion, the result of certain affinities between the constituent elements of matter and those of mind, which proceed from the same source.  The man holding a hazel rod when he found a spring of water was guided by some antipathy or sympathy of which he was unconscious; nothing but the eccentricity of these phenomena could have availed to give some of them historic certainty.

Sympathies have rarely been proved; they afford a kind of pleasure which those who are so happy as to possess them rarely speak of unless they are abnormally singular, and even then only in the privacy of intimate intercourse, where everything is buried.  But the antipathies that arise from the inversion of affinities have, very happily, been recorded when developed by famous men.  Thus, Bayle had hysterics when he heard water splashing, Scaliger turned pale at the sight of water-cress, Erasmus was thrown into a fever by the smell of fish.  These three antipathies were connected with water.  The Duc d’Epernon fainted at the sight of a hare, Tycho-Brahe at that of a fox, Henri III. at the presence of a cat, the Marechal d’Albret at the sight of a wild hog; these antipathies were produced by animal emanations, and often took effect at a great distance.  The Chevalier de Guise, Marie de Medici, and many other persons have felt faint at seeing a rose even in a painting.  Lord Bacon, whether he were forewarned or no of an eclipse of the moon, always fell into a syncope while it lasted; and his vitality, suspended while the phenomenon lasted was restored as soon as it was over without his feeling any further inconvenience.  These effects of antipathy, all well authenticated, and chosen from among many which history has happened to preserve, are enough to give a clue to the sympathies which remain unknown.

This fragment of Lambert’s investigations, which I remember from among his essays, will throw a light on the method on which he worked.  I need not emphasize the obvious connection between this theory and the collateral sciences projected by Gall and Lavater; they were its natural corollary; and every more or less scientific brain will discern the ramifications by which it is inevitably connected with the phrenological observations of one and the speculations on physiognomy of the other.

Mesmer’s discovery, so important, though as yet so little appreciated, was also embodied in a single section of this treatise, though Louis did not know the Swiss doctor’s writings—­which are few and brief.

A simple and logical inference from these principles led him to perceive that the will might be accumulated by a contractile effort of the inner man, and then, by another effort, projected, or even imparted, to material objects.  Thus the whole force of a man must have the property of reacting on other men, and of infusing into them an essence foreign to their own, if they could not protect themselves against such an aggression.  The evidence of this theorem of the science of humanity is, of course, very multifarious; but there is nothing to establish it beyond question.  We have only the notorious disaster of Marius and his harangue to the Cimbrian commanded to kill him, or the august injunction of a mother to the Lion of Florence, in historic proof of instances of such lightning flashes of mind.  To Lambert, then, Will and Thought were living forces; and he spoke of them in such a way as to impress his belief on the hearer.  To him these two forces were, in a way, visible, tangible.  Thought was slow or alert, heavy or nimble, light or dark; he ascribed to it all the attributes of an active agent, and thought of it as rising, resting, waking, expanding, growing old, shrinking, becoming atrophied, or resuscitating; he described its life, and specified all its actions by the strangest words in our language, speaking of its spontaneity, its strength, and all its qualities with a kind of intuition which enabled him to recognize all the manifestations of its substantial existence.

“Often,” said he, “in the midst of quiet and silence, when our inner faculties are dormant, when a sort of darkness reigns within us, and we are lost in the contemplation of things outside us, an idea suddenly flies forth, and rushes with the swiftness of lightning across the infinite space which our inner vision allows us to perceive.  This radiant idea, springing into existence like a will-o’-the-wisp, dies out never to return; an ephemeral life, like that of babes who give their parents such infinite joy and sorrow; a sort of still-born blossom in the fields of the mind.  Sometimes an idea, instead of springing forcibly into life and dying unembodied, dawns gradually, hovers in the unknown limbo of the organs where it has its birth; exhausts us by long gestation, develops, is itself fruitful, grows outwardly in all the grace of youth and the promising attributes of a long life; it can endure the closest inspection, invites it, and never tires the sight; the investigation it undergoes commands the admiration we give to works slowly elaborated.  Sometimes ideas are evolved in a swarm; one brings another; they come linked together; they vie with each other; they fly in clouds, wild and headlong.  Again, they rise up pallid and misty, and perish for want of strength or of nutrition; the vital force is lacking.  Or again, on certain days, they rush down into the depths to light up that immense obscurity; they terrify us and leave the soul dejected.

“Ideas are a complete system within us, resembling a natural kingdom, a sort of flora, of which the iconography will one day be outlined by some man who will perhaps be accounted a madman.

“Yes, within us and without, everything testifies to the livingness of those exquisite creations, which I compare with flowers in obedience to some unutterable revelation of their true nature!

“Their being produced as the final cause of man is, after all, not more amazing than the production of perfume and color in a plant.  Perfumes are ideas, perhaps!

“When we consider the line where flesh ends and the nail begins contains the invisible and inexplicable mystery of the constant transformation of a fluid into horn, we must confess that nothing is impossible in the marvelous modifications of human tissue.

“And are there not in our inner nature phenomena of weight and motion comparable to those of physical nature?  Suspense, to choose an example vividly familiar to everybody, is painful only as a result of the law in virtue of which the weight of a body is multiplied by its velocity.  The weight of the feeling produced by suspense increases by the constant addition of past pain to the pain of the moment.

“And then, to what, unless it be to the electric fluid, are we to attribute the magic by which the Will enthrones itself so imperiously in the eye to demolish obstacles at the behest of genius, thunders in the voice, or filters, in spite of dissimulation, through the human frame?  The current of that sovereign fluid, which, in obedience to the high pressure of thought or of feeling, flows in a torrent or is reduced to a mere thread, and collects to flash in lightnings, is the occult agent to which are due the evil or the beneficent efforts of Art and Passion—­intonation of voice, whether harsh or suave, terrible, lascivious, horrifying or seductive by turns, thrilling the heart, the nerves, or the brain at our will; the marvels of the touch, the instrument of the mental transfusions of a myriad artists, whose creative fingers are able, after passionate study, to reproduce the forms of nature; or, again, the infinite gradations of the eye from dull inertia to the emission of the most terrifying gleams.

“By this system God is bereft of none of His rights.  Mind, as a form of matter, has brought me a new conviction of His greatness.”

After hearing him discourse thus, after receiving into my soul his look like a ray of light, it was difficult not to be dazzled by his conviction and carried away by his arguments.  The Mind appeared to me as a purely physical power, surrounded by its innumerable progeny.  It was a new conception of humanity under a new form.

This brief sketch of the laws which, as Lambert maintained, constitute the formula of our intellect, must suffice to give a notion of the prodigious activity of his spirit feeding on itself.  Louis had sought for proofs of his theories in the history of great men, whose lives, as set forth by their biographers, supply very curious particulars as to the operation of their understanding.  His memory allowed him to recall such facts as might serve to support his statements; he had appended them to each chapter in the form of demonstrations, so as to give to many of his theories an almost mathematical certainty.  The works of Cardan, a man gifted with singular powers of insight, supplied him with valuable materials.  He had not forgotten that Apollonius of Tyana had, in Asia, announced the death of a tyrant with every detail of his execution, at the very hour when it was taking place in Rome; nor that Plotinus, when far away from Porphyrius, was aware of his friend’s intention to kill himself, and flew to dissuade him; nor the incident in the last century, proved in the face of the most incredulous mockery ever known—­an incident most surprising to men who were accustomed to regard doubt as a weapon against the fact alone, but simple enough to believers—­the fact that Alphonzo-Maria di Liguori, Bishop of Saint-Agatha, administered consolations to Pope Ganganelli, who saw him, heard him, and answered him, while the Bishop himself, at a great distance from Rome, was in a trance at home, in the chair where he commonly sat on his return from Mass.  On recovering consciousness, he saw all his attendants kneeling beside him, believing him to be dead:  “My friends,” said he, “the Holy Father is just dead.”  Two days later a letter confirmed the news.  The hour of the Pope’s death coincided with that when the Bishop had been restored to his natural state.

Nor had Lambert omitted the yet more recent adventure of an English girl who was passionately attached to a sailor, and set out from London to seek him.  She found him, without a guide, making her way alone in the North American wilderness, reaching him just in time to save his life.

Louis had found confirmatory evidence in the mysteries of the ancients, in the acts of the martyrs—­in which glorious instances may be found of the triumph of human will, in the demonology of the Middle Ages, in criminal trials and medical researches; always selecting the real fact, the probable phenomenon, with admirable sagacity.

All this rich collection of scientific anecdotes, culled from so many books, most of them worthy of credit, served no doubt to wrap parcels in; and this work, which was curious, to say the least of it, as the outcome of a most extraordinary memory, was doomed to destruction.

Among the various cases which added to the value of Lambert’s Treatise was an incident that had taken place in his own family, of which he had told me before he wrote his essay.  This fact, bearing on the post-existence of the inner man, if I may be allowed to coin a new word for a phenomenon hitherto nameless, struck me so forcibly that I have never forgotten it.  His father and mother were being forced into a lawsuit, of which the loss would leave them with a stain on their good name, the only thing they had in the world.  Hence their anxiety was very great when the question first arose as to whether they should yield to the plaintiff’s unjust demands, or should defend themselves against him.  The matter came under discussion one autumn evening, before a turf fire in the room used by the tanner and his wife.  Two or three relations were invited to this family council, and among others Louis’ maternal great-grandfather, an old laborer, much bent, but with a venerable and dignified countenance, bright eyes, and a bald, yellow head, on which grew a few locks of thin, white hair.  Like the Obi of the Negroes, or the Sagamore of the Indian savages, he was a sort of oracle, consulted on important occasions.  His land was tilled by his grandchildren, who fed and served him; he predicted rain and fine weather, and told them when to mow the hay and gather the crops.  The barometric exactitude of his forecasts was quite famous, and added to the confidence and respect he inspired.  For whole days he would sit immovable in his armchair.  This state of rapt meditation often came upon him since his wife’s death; he had been attached to her in the truest and most faithful affection.

This discussion was held in his presence, but he did not seem to give much heed to it.

“My children,” said he, when he was asked for his opinion, “this is too serious a matter for me to decide on alone.  I must go and consult my wife.”

The old man rose, took his stick, and went out, to the great astonishment of the others, who thought him daft.  He presently came back and said: 

“I did not have to go so far as the graveyard; your mother came to meet me; I found her by the brook.  She tells me that you will find some receipts in the hands of a notary at Blois, which will enable you to gain your suit.”

The words were spoken in a firm tone; the old man’s demeanor and countenance showed that such an apparition was habitual with him.  In fact, the disputed receipts were found, and the lawsuit was not attempted.

This event, under his father’s roof and to his own knowledge, when Louis was nine years old, contributed largely to his belief in Swedenborg’s miraculous visions, for in the course of that philosopher’s life he repeatedly gave proof of the power of sight developed in his Inner Being.  As he grew older, and as his intelligence was developed, Lambert was naturally led to seek in the laws of nature for the causes of the miracle which, in his childhood, had captivated his attention.  What name can be given to the chance which brought within his ken so many facts and books bearing on such phenomena, and made him the principal subject and actor in such marvelous manifestations of mind?

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 minds 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 that 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 which 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 seen 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 Loire, 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 a few 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 not he 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 most 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 this 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 heart.  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 the spirit that strives towards the future.