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: