which can be overthrown by a few glasses of rum? How conceive of
immaterial faculties which matter can conquer, and whose exercise
is suspended by a grain of opium? How imagine that we shall be
able to feel when we are bereft of the vehicles of sensation? Why
must God perish if matter can be proved to think? Is the vitality
of matter in its innumerable manifestations--the effect of its
instincts--at all more explicable than the effects of the mind? Is
not the motion given to the worlds enough to prove God's
existence, without our plunging into absurd speculations suggested
by pride? And if we pass, after our trials, from a perishable
state of being to a higher existence, is not that enough for a
creature that is distinguished from other creatures only by more
perfect instincts? If in moral philosophy there is not a single
principle which does not lead to the absurd, or cannot be
disproved by evidence, is it not high time that we should set to
work to seek such dogmas as are written in the innermost nature of
things? Must we not reverse philosophical science?
"We trouble ourselves very little about the supposed void that
must have pre-existed for us, and we try to fathom the supposed
void that lies before us. We make God responsible for the future,
but we do not expect Him to account for the past. And yet it is
quite as desirable to know whether we have any roots in the past
as to discover whether we are inseparable from the future.
"We have been Deists or Atheists in one direction only.
"Is the world eternal? Was the world created? We can conceive of
no middle term between these two propositions; one, then, is true
and the other false! Take your choice. Whichever it may be, God,
as our reason depicts Him, must be deposed, and that amounts to
denial. The world is eternal: then, beyond question, God has had
it forced upon Him. The world was created: then God is an
impossibility. How could He have subsisted through an eternity,
not knowing that He would presently want to create the world? How
could He have failed to foresee all the results?
"Whence did He derive the essence of creation? Evidently from
Himself. If, then, the world proceeds from God, how can you
account for evil? That Evil should proceed from Good is absurd. If
evil does not exist, what do you make of social life and its laws?
On all hands we find a precipice! On every side a gulf in which
reason is lost! Then social science must be altogether
reconstructed.
"Listen to me, uncle; until some splendid genius shall have taken
account of the obvious inequality of intellects and the general
sense of humanity, the word God will be constantly arraigned, and
Society will rest on shifting sands. The secret of the various
moral zones through which man passes will be discovered by the
analysis of the animal type as a whole. That animal type has
hitherto been studied with reference only to its differences, not
to its similitudes; in its organic manifestations, not in its
faculties. Animal faculties are perfected in direct transmission,
in obedience to laws which remain to be discovered. These
faculties correspond to the forces which express them, and those
forces are essentially material and divisible.
"Material faculties! Reflect on this juxtaposition of words. Is
not this a problem as insoluble as that of the first communication
of motion to matter--an unsounded gulf of which the difficulties
were transposed rather than removed by Newton's system? Again, the
universal assimilation of light by everything that exists on earth
demands a new study of our globe. The same animal differs in the
tropics of India and in the North. Under the angular or the
vertical incidence of the sun's rays nature is developed the same,
but not the same; identical in its principles, but totally
dissimilar in its outcome. The phenomenon that amazes our eyes in
the zoological world when we compare the butterflies of Brazil
with those of Europe, is even more startling in the world of Mind.
A particular facial angle, a certain amount of brain convolutions,
are indispensable to produce Columbus, Raphael, Napoleon, Laplace,
or Beethoven; the sunless valley produces the cretin--draw your
own conclusions. Why such differences, due to the more or less
ample diffusion of light to men? The masses of suffering humanity,
more or less active, fed, and enlightened, are a difficulty to be
accounted for, crying out against God.
"Why in great joy do we always want to quit the earth? whence
comes the longing to rise which every creature has known or will
know? Motion is a great soul, and its alliance with matter is just
as difficult to account for as the origin of thought in man. In
these days science is one; it is impossible to touch politics
independent of moral questions, and these are bound up with
scientific questions. It seems to me that we are on the eve of a
great human struggle; the forces are there; only I do not see the
General.
"November 25.
"Believe me, dear uncle, it is hard to give up the life that is in
us without a pang. I am returning to Blois with a heavy grip at my
heart; I shall die then, taking with me some useful truths. No
personal interest debases my regrets. Is earthly fame a guerdon to
those who believe that they will mount to a higher sphere?
"I am by no means in love with the two syllables _Lam_ and _bert_;
whether spoken with respect or with contempt over my grave, they
can make no change in my ultimate destiny. I feel myself strong
and energetic; I might become a power; I feel in myself a life so
luminous that it might enlighten a world, and yet I am shut up in
a sort of mineral, as perhaps indeed are the colors you admire on
the neck of an Indian bird. I should need to embrace the whole
world, to clasp and re-create it; but those who have done this,
who have thus embraced and remoulded it began--did they not?--by
being a wheel in the machine. I can only be crushed. Mahomet had
the sword; Jesus had the cross; I shall die unknown. I shall be at
Blois for a day, and then in my coffin.
"Do you know why I have come back to Swedenborg after vast studies
of all religions, and after proving to myself, by reading all the
works published within the last sixty years by the patient
English, by Germany, and by France, how deeply true were my
youthful views about the Bible? Swedenborg undoubtedly epitomizes
all the religions--or rather the one religion--of humanity. Though
forms of worship are infinitely various, neither their true
meaning nor their metaphysical interpretation has ever varied. In
short, man has, and has had, but one religion.
"Sivaism, Vishnuism, and Brahmanism, the three primitive creeds,
originating as they did in Thibet, in the valley of the Indus, and
on the vast plains of the Ganges, ended their warfare some
thousand years before the birth of Christ by adopting the Hindoo
Trimourti. The Trimourti is our Trinity. From this dogma Magianism
arose in Persia; in Egypt, the African beliefs and the Mosaic law;
the worship of the Cabiri, and the polytheism of Greece and Rome.
While by this ramification of the Trimourti the Asiatic myths
became adapted to the imaginations of various races in the lands
they reached by the agency of certain sages whom men elevated to
be demi-gods--Mithra, Bacchus, Hermes, Hercules, and the rest
--Buddha, the great reformer of the three primeval religions, lived
in India, and founded his Church there, a sect which still numbers
two hundred millions more believers than Christianity can show,
while it certainly influenced the powerful Will both of Jesus and
of Confucius.
"Then Christianity raised her standard. Subsequently Mahomet fused
Judaism and Christianity, the Bible and the Gospel, in one book,
the Koran, adapting them to the apprehension of the Arab race.
Finally, Swedenborg borrowed from Magianism, Brahmanism, Buddhism,
and Christian mysticism all the truth and divine beauty that those
four great religious books hold in common, and added to them a
doctrine, a basis of reasoning, that may be termed mathematical.
"Any man who plunges into these religious waters, of which the
sources are not all known, will find proofs that Zoroaster, Moses,
Buddha, Confucius, Jesus Christ, and Swedenborg had identical
principles and aimed at identical ends.
"The last of them all, Swedenborg, will perhaps be the Buddha of
the North. Obscure and diffuse as his writings are, we find in
them the elements of a magnificent conception of society. His
Theocracy is sublime, and his creed is the only acceptable one to
superior souls. He alone brings man into immediate communion with
God, he gives a thirst for God, he has freed the majesty of God
from the trappings in which other human dogmas have disguised Him.
He left Him where He is, making His myriad creations and creatures
gravitate towards Him through successive transformations which
promise a more immediate and more natural future than the Catholic
idea of Eternity. Swedenborg has absolved God from the reproach
attaching to Him in the estimation of tender souls for the
perpetuity of revenge to punish the sin of a moment--a system of
injustice and cruelty.
"Each man may know for himself what hope he has of life eternal,
and whether this world has any rational sense. I mean to make the
attempt. And this attempt may save the world, just as much as the
cross at Jerusalem or the sword at Mecca. These were both the
offspring of the desert. Of the thirty-three years of Christ's
life, we only know the history of nine; His life of seclusion
prepared Him for His life of glory. And I too crave for the
desert!"
Notwithstanding the difficulties of the task, I have felt it my duty to
depict Lambert's boyhood, the unknown life to which I owe the only happy
hours, the only pleasant memories, of my early days. Excepting during
those two years I had nothing but annoyances and weariness. Though some
happiness was mine at a later time, it was always incomplete.
I have been diffuse, I know; but in default of entering into the whole
wide heart and brain of Louis Lambert--two words which inadequately
express the infinite aspects of his inner life--it would be almost
impossible to make the second part of his intellectual history
intelligible--a phase that was unknown to the world and to me, but of
which the mystical outcome was made evident to my eyes in the course
of a few hours. Those who have not already dropped this volume, will, I
hope, understand the events I still have to tell, forming as they do
a sort of second existence lived by this creature--may I not say this
creation?--in whom everything was to be so extraordinary, even his end.
When Louis returned to Blois, his uncle was eager to procure him some
amusement; but the poor priest was regarded as a perfect leper in that
godly-minded town. No one would have anything to say to a revolutionary
who had taken the oaths. His society, therefore, consisted of a
few individuals of what were then called liberal or patriotic, or
constitutional opinions, on whom he would call for a rubber of whist or
of boston.
At the first house where he was introduced by his uncle, Louis met a
young lady, whose circumstances obliged her to remain in this circle, so
contemned by those of the fashionable world, though her fortune was such
as to make it probable that she might by and by marry into the highest
aristocracy of the province. Mademoiselle Pauline de Villenoix was sole
heiress to the wealth amassed by her grandfather, a Jew named Salomon,
who, contrary to the customs of his nation, had, in his old age, married
a Christian and a Catholic. He had only one son, who was brought up in
his mother's faith. At his father's death young Salomon purchased what
was known at that time as a _savonnette a vilain_ (literally _a cake of
soap for a serf_), a small estate called Villenoix, which he contrived
to get registered with a baronial title, and took its name. He died
unmarried, but he left a natural daughter, to whom he bequeathed the
greater part of his fortune, including the lands of Villenoix. He
appointed one of his uncles, Monsieur Joseph Salomon, to be the girl's
guardian. The old Jew was so devoted to his ward that he seemed
willing to make great sacrifices for the sake of marrying her well. But
Mademoiselle de Villenoix's birth, and the cherished prejudice against
Jews that prevails in the provinces, would not allow of her being
received in the very exclusive circle which, rightly or wrongly,
considers itself noble, notwithstanding her own large fortune and her
guardian's.
Monsieur Joseph Salomon was resolved that if she could not secure
a country squire, his niece should go to Paris and make choice of
a husband among the peers of France, liberal or monarchical; as to
happiness, that he believed he could secure her by the terms of the
marriage contract.
Mademoiselle de Villenoix was now twenty. Her remarkable beauty and
gifts of mind were surer guarantees of happiness than those offered by
money. Her features were of the purest type of Jewish beauty; the oval
lines, so noble and maidenly, have an indescribable stamp of the ideal,
and seem to speak of the joys of the East, its unchangeably blue sky,
the glories of its lands, and the fabulous riches of life there. She had
fine eyes, shaded by deep eyelids, fringed with thick, curled lashes.
Biblical innocence sat on her brow. Her complexion was of the
pure whiteness of the Levite's robe. She was habitually silent and
thoughtful, but her movements and gestures betrayed a quiet grace, as
her speech bore witness to a woman's sweet and loving nature. She had
not, indeed, the rosy freshness, the fruit-like bloom which blush on a
girl's cheek during her careless years. Darker shadows, with here
and there a redder vein, took the place of color, symptomatic of an
energetic temper and nervous irritability, such as many men do not like
to meet with in a wife, while to others they are an indication of the
most sensitive chastity and passion mingled with pride.
As soon as Louis saw Mademoiselle de Villenoix, he discerned the angel
within. The richest powers of his soul, and his tendency to ecstatic
reverie, every faculty within him was at once concentrated in boundless
love, the first love of a young man, a passion which is strong indeed in
all, but which in him was raised to incalculable power by the perennial
ardor of his senses, the character of his ideas, and the manner in which
he lived. This passion became a gulf, into which the hapless fellow
threw everything; a gulf whither the mind dare not venture, since his,
flexible and firm as it was, was lost there. There all was mysterious,
for everything went on in that moral world, closed to most men, whose
laws were revealed to him--perhaps to his sorrow.
When an accident threw me in the way of his uncle, the good man showed
me into the room which Lambert had at that time lived in. I wanted to
find some vestiges of his writings, if he should have left any. There
among his papers, untouched by the old man from that fine instinct of
grief that characterized the aged, I found a number of letters, too
illegible ever to have been sent to Mademoiselle de Villenoix. My
familiarity with Lambert's writing enabled me in time to decipher the
hieroglyphics of this shorthand, the result of impatience and a frenzy
of passion. Carried away by his feelings, he had written without being
conscious of the irregularity of words too slow to express his thoughts.
He must have been compelled to copy these chaotic attempts, for the
lines often ran into each other; but he was also afraid perhaps of not
having sufficiently disguised his feelings, and at first, at any rate,
he had probably written his love-letters twice over.
It required all the fervency of my devotion to his memory, and the sort
of fanaticism which comes of such a task, to enable me to divine
and restore the meaning of the five letters that here follow. These
documents, preserved by me with pious care, are the only material
evidence of his overmastering passion. Mademoiselle de Villenoix had no
doubt destroyed the real letters that she received, eloquent witnesses
to the delirium she inspired.
The first of these papers, evidently a rough sketch, betrays by its
style and by its length the many emendations, the heartfelt alarms,
the innumerable terrors caused by a desire to please; the changes of
expression and the hesitation between the whirl of ideas that beset a
man as he indites his first love-letter--a letter he never will forget,
each line the result of a reverie, each word the subject of long
cogitation, while the most unbridled passion known to man feels the
necessity of the most reserved utterance, and like a giant stooping to
enter a hovel, speaks humbly and low, so as not to alarm a girl's soul.
No antiquary ever handled his palimpsests with greater respect than
I showed in reconstructing these mutilated documents of such joy and
suffering as must always be sacred to those who have known similar joy
and grief.
I
"Mademoiselle, when you have read this letter, if you ever should
read it, my life will be in your hands, for I love you; and to me,
the hope of being loved is life. Others, perhaps, ere now, have,
in speaking of themselves, misused the words I must employ to
depict the state of my soul; yet, I beseech you to believe in the
truth of my expressions; though weak, they are sincere. Perhaps I
ought not thus to proclaim my love. Indeed, my heart counseled me
to wait in silence till my passion should touch you, that I might
the better conceal it if its silent demonstrations should
displease you; or till I could express it even more delicately
than in words if I found favor in your eyes. However, after having
listened for long to the coy fears that fill a youthful heart with
alarms, I write in obedience to the instinct which drags useless
lamentations from the dying.
"It has needed all my courage to silence the pride of poverty, and
to overleap the barriers which prejudice erects between you and
me. I have had to smother many reflections to love you in spite of
your wealth; and as I write to you, am I not in danger of the
scorn which women often reserve for profession of love, which they
accept only as one more tribute of flattery? But we cannot help
rushing with all our might towards happiness, or being attracted
to the life of love as a plant is to the light; we must have been
very unhappy before we can conquer the torment, the anguish of
those secret deliberations when reason proves to us by a thousand
arguments how barren our yearning must be if it remains buried in
our hearts, and when hopes bid us dare everything.
"I was happy when I admired you in silence; I was so lost in the
contemplation of your beautiful soul, that only to see you left me
hardly anything further to imagine. And I should not now have
dared to address you if I had not heard that you were leaving.
What misery has that one word brought upon me! Indeed, it is my
despair that has shown me the extent of my attachment--it is
unbounded. Mademoiselle, you will never know--at least, I hope you
may never know--the anguish of dreading lest you should lose the
only happiness that has dawned on you on earth, the only thing
that has thrown a gleam of light in the darkness of misery. I
understood yesterday that my life was no more in myself, but in
you. There is but one woman in the world for me, as there is but
one thought in my soul. I dare not tell you to what a state I am
reduced by my love for you. I would have you only as a gift from
yourself; I must therefore avoid showing myself to you in all the
attractiveness of dejection--for is it not often more impressive
to a noble soul than that of good fortune? There are many things I
may not tell you. Indeed, I have too lofty a notion of love to
taint it with ideas that are alien to its nature. If my soul is
worthy of yours, and my life pure, your heart will have a
sympathetic insight, and you will understand me!
"It is the fate of man to offer himself to the woman who can make
him believe in happiness; but it is your prerogative to reject the
truest passion if it is not in harmony with the vague voices in
your heart--that I know. If my lot, as decided by you, must be
adverse to my hopes, mademoiselle, let me appeal to the delicacy
of your maiden soul and the ingenuous compassion of a woman to
burn my letter. On my knees I beseech you to forget all! Do not
mock at a feeling that is wholly respectful, and that is too
deeply graven on my heart ever to be effaced. Break my heart, but
do not rend it! Let the expression of my first love, a pure and
youthful love, be lost in your pure and youthful heart! Let it die
there as a prayer rises up to die in the bosom of God!
"I owe you much gratitude: I have spent delicious hours occupied
in watching you, and giving myself up to the faint dreams of my
life; do not crush these long but transient joys by some girlish
irony. Be satisfied not to answer me. I shall know how to
interpret your silence; you will see me no more. If I must be
condemned to know for ever what happiness means, and to be for
ever bereft of it; if, like a banished angel, I am to cherish the
sense of celestial joys while bound for ever to a world of sorrow
--well, I can keep the secret of my love as well as that of my
griefs.--And farewell!
"Yes, I resign you to God, to whom I will pray for you, beseeching
Him to grant you a happy life; for even if I am driven from your
heart, into which I have crept by stealth, still I shall ever be
near you. Otherwise, of what value would the sacred words be of
this letter, my first and perhaps my last entreaty? If I should
ever cease to think of you, to love you whether in happiness or in
woe, should I not deserve my punishment?"
II
"You are not going away! And I am loved! I, a poor, insignificant
creature! My beloved Pauline, you do not yourself know the power
of the look I believe in, the look you gave me to tell me that you
had chosen me--you so young and lovely, with the world at your
feet!
"To enable you to understand my happiness, I should have to give
you a history of my life. If you had rejected me, all was over for
me. I have suffered too much. Yes, my love for you, my comforting
and stupendous love, was a last effort of yearning for the
happiness my soul strove to reach--a soul crushed by fruitless
labor, consumed by fears that make me doubt myself, eaten into by
despair which has often urged me to die. No one in the world can
conceive of the terrors my fateful imagination inflicts on me. It
often bears me up to the sky, and suddenly flings me to earth
again from prodigious heights. Deep-seated rushes of power, or
some rare and subtle instance of peculiar lucidity, assure me now
and then that I am capable of great things. Then I embrace the
universe in my mind, I knead, shape it, inform it, I comprehend it
--or fancy that I do; then suddenly I awake--alone, sunk in
blackest night, helpless and weak; I forget the light I saw but
now, I find no succor; above all, there is no heart where I may
take refuge.
"This distress of my inner life affects my physical existence. The
nature of my character gives me over to the raptures of happiness
as defenceless as when the fearful light of reflection comes to
analyze and demolish them. Gifted as I am with the melancholy
faculty of seeing obstacles and success with equal clearness,
according to the mood of the moment, I am happy or miserable by
turns.
"Thus, when I first met you, I felt the presence of an angelic
nature, I breathed an air that was sweet to my burning breast, I
heard in my soul the voice that never can be false, telling me
that here was happiness; but perceiving all the barriers that
divided us, I understood the vastness of their pettiness, and
these difficulties terrified me more than the prospect of
happiness could delight me. At once I felt the awful reaction
which casts my expansive soul back on itself; the smile you had
brought to my lips suddenly turned to a bitter grimace, and I
could only strive to keep calm, while my soul was boiling with the
turmoil of contradictory emotions. In short, I experienced that
gnawing pang to which twenty-three years of suppressed sighs and
betrayed affections have not inured me.
"Well, Pauline, the look by which you promised that I should be
happy suddenly warmed my vitality, and turned all my sorrows into
joy. Now, I could wish that I had suffered more. My love is
suddenly full-grown. My soul was a wide territory that lacked the
blessing of sunshine, and your eyes have shed light on it. Beloved
providence! you will be all in all to me, orphan as I am, without
a relation but my uncle. You will be my whole family, as you are
my whole wealth, nay, the whole world to me. Have you not bestowed
on me every gladness man can desire in that chaste--lavish--timid
glance?