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.
"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.