The Wisdom of the Heart

by Henry Miller

  “Werther,” says Balzac, “is a slave of desire; Louis Lambert was an enslaved soul.” A tremendous admission, shattering, if Balzac is to be identified, as he intended, with his double. Despite the most gigantic efforts ever man made, the real Balzac did not grow an inch from the time he left his prison at Vendôme to enter the world. Adopting the Purgatorial life, after having experienced the joys and splendors of illumination, taking up his cross and nailing himself to it, he nevertheless was refused the reward of blossoming into a miraculous rose. He knew—he gave expression to it several times in his work—that the real miracle happens within, yet he persisted in looking for it without. His life was devoid of joy or hope; he is the symbol of the convict condemned to a life of hard labor. At that stage of division wherein he detects the angel in Louis Lambert he erects the tombstone over his own grave. As Louis Lambert he sinks deeper and deeper into the world of Maya; as Balzac he sinks into the morass of the world of things, the world of desire which is inappeasable. Louis Lambert gives up the struggle with the world in order to commune with the angels, but unlike Swedenborg, he forgets to leave the door open. Balzac struggles with the world in order to down the angel in himself. He rails and fumes against the world for its inability or unwillingness to understand and appreciate him, but the confusion he precipitated was of his own making. His life was as disordered, confused and chaotic as the bedeviled proofs of his manuscripts, the like of which the world has never seen, except in the work of the insane. He beclouded the real issue with a smoke screen of words; he fought like a madman to blind his own eyes to the path which he was ordained to follow. The world has been kind and at the same time cruel to him, in the very measure of duality and antagonism which he created. It has accepted him as one of the greatest of human geniuses; it has remained ignorant of the real goal which he set himself. He wanted fame, glory, recognition: he received them. He wanted riches, possessions, power over men: he obtained all of these. He wanted to create a world of his own: he did. But the true life which he secretly desired to live was denied him—because one cannot have one foot in one world and the other in another. He had not learned the lesson of Renunciation: he had renounced the world, not to abdicate, but to conquer. In his moments of illumination he perceived the truth, but he was never able to live according to his vision. For him, as he permits Seraphita to say with blinding clarity, it is true that it was a Light such as kills the man who is not prepared to receive it. Towards the end of the book he “comes back” to Louis and as he watches him with uncanny tenseness, waiting eagerly for a word to fall from his lips after the unbearable suspense of prolonged silence, what is it he puts in Louis’ mouth as the first utterance? THE ANGELS ARE WHITE! The effect of this utterance, when the reader comes upon it in the natural course of the narrative, is indescribable. Even the illusion of being himself affected by these words is dissipated by the stark reality which Balzac gives them. It is like saying truth is truth! THE ANGELS ARE WHITE—this is the utmost Balzac can think to say in his assumed madness, after days, weeks and months of standing at the mantelpiece rubbing one leg against the other and piercing with dead eyes the veils of the Infinite. The angels are white! It is madder than anything Nijinsky wrote in his diary. It is pure madness, white as the light itself, and yet so thoroughly sane that it seems like a Euclidean statement of identity. It is the reduction of all his Pythagorean wisdom to an image which is hallucinating. Number, substance, weight, measure, motion—all are consumed here to give an image which is more meaningful than meaning itself.

  In the limited illustrated edition of the book published by Dent, London, there is, in addition to the asinine preface by George Saintsbury, an etching of Louis inspired by this phrase. I mention it because I was astonished, after having read the story several times, to find on flipping the pages that the artist had portrayed Louis in a manner absolutely different from that which I had imagined from memory. In my own mind I always saw Louis standing at the mantelpiece in a trance, but—looking like a horse! On re-reading Balzac’s description of him, as he appeared at this moment, I find that my image is fairly correct. But what strikes me now is that the person I really had in mind, Louis’ double, as it were, is Nijinsky. And this is not really so strange as it may at first seem. For if ever there was a flesh and blood image of Balzac’s extraordinary lunatic it is the dancer Nijinsky. He too left the earth while still alive, never to return again. He too became a horse equipped with chimerical wings. The horse, let us not forget, even when he has no wings, flies. So too, every genius, when he is truly inspired, mounts the winged steed to write his name in the heavens. How often, in reading Nijinsky’s Diary, have I thought of Mademoiselle de Villenoix’s words! “Louis,” says this guardian angel who never deserted her lover, “must no doubt appear to be mad, but he is not, if the term mad ought only to be used in speaking of those whose brain is for some unknown cause diseased, and who can show no reason in their actions. Everything in my husband is perfectly balanced. He has succeeded in detaching himself from his body and discerns us under some other aspect—what it is, I know not. . . . To other men he seems insane; to me, living as I do in his mind, his ideas are quite lucid. I follow the road his spirit travels; and though I do not know every turning, I can reach the goal with him.” Wholly aside from the question of whether Louis Lambert was mad or not, aside from the question of what constitutes madness, which will always remain a mystery, the attitude preserved throughout by this guardian angel is in itself worthy of the deepest attention. Perhaps, in depicting the devotion of this extraordinary woman, Balzac was stressing the great need for affection, understanding, sympathy and recognition which every artist demands and which Balzac more than most men stood in want of all his life. In one of his letters, I believe it is, he says that he has known neither a spring nor a summer, but that he looked forward to enjoying a ripe autumn. He looked forward above all to a consummation of his labors through love. Over and over again, in his writings, we have this announcement of a tremendous hope. Immediately he saw Mademoiselle de Villenoix Louis “discerned the angel within.” “His passion,” says Balzac, “became a gulf into which he threw everything.” In his first letter to her, a letter doubtless very similar to the early ones which Balzac wrote Madame Hanska, Louis expressed himself thus: “. . . my life will be in your hands, for I love you; and to me, the hope of being loved is life!” And then, as Balzac must himself have felt when he was wooing Madame Hanska, Louis adds: “If you had rejected me, all was over for me.”

  Here let me give a rapid summary of the narrative, as it is given in the book. . . .

  Louis Lambert is the son of a poor tanner, an only child who is adored by his parents.* The parents, being of modest means, are unable to pay the sum required to obtain a substitute for their son, as substitutes for the army at that time (the early nineteenth century) were scarce. The only means of evading conscription was to have Louis become a priest. And so, at ten years of age, Louis is sent to his maternal uncle, a parish priest in a small town on the Loire, not far from Blois. In the second paragraph of his story Balzac launches into an account of Louis’ passion for books. He began, it would seem, at the age of five by reading the Old and the New Testaments. . . “and these two books, including so many books, had sealed his fate.” During the school holidays Louis devours everything in sight, “feeding indiscriminately on religious works, history, philosophy and physics.” For lack of other material he often turns to the dictionaries. “The analysis of a word, its physiognomy and history, would be to Lambert matter for long dreaming . . . What a fine book might be written of the life and adventures of a word!” Of the two words which Balzac singles out for mention, curiously, one is “true” and the other “flight.” In three years Louis Lambert had assimilated the contents of all that was worth reading in his uncle’s library. His memory was prodigious. “He remembered with equal exactitude the ideas he had derived from reading, and those which had occurred to him in the course of meditation or conversation. Indeed, he had eve
ry form of memory—for places, for names, for words, things and faces. He not only recalled any object at will, but he saw them in his mind, situated, lighted and colored as he had originally seen them . . . He could remember, as he said, not merely the position of a sentence in the book where he had met with it, but the frame of mind he had been in at remote dates. . . .” Louis is depicted as one who “had transferred all his activities to thinking,” as one who was drawn towards the mysteries, one fascinated by the abyss. He had a “taste for the things of heaven,” a predilection, Balzac remarks, which was disastrous, if Louis’ life is to be measured by ordinary standards. After the Bible came the reading of Saint Theresa and Madame Guyon. “This line of study, this peculiar taste, elevated his heart, purified, ennobled it, gave him an appetite for the divine nature, and suggested to him the almost womanly refinement of feeling which is instinctive in great men. . . .” At fourteen Louis leaves his uncle to enter the College of the Oratorians at Vendôme, where he was maintained at the expense of Madame de Staël who, forbidden to come within forty leagues of Paris, was in the habit of spending several months of her banishment on an estate near Vendôme. Impressed by the boy’s unusual powers of mind Madame de Staël hoped to save Louis from the necessity of serving either the Emperor or the Church. During the three years he spent at the College, however, Louis never heard a word from his benefactress. Madame de Staël, in fact, dies on the very day that Louis, who had set out on foot from Blois to see her, arrived in Paris.

  The life at the College is like a miniature description of Hell. “The punishments originally invented by the Society of Jesus,” says Balzac, “as alarming to the moral as to the physical man, were still in force in all the integrity of the original code.” Visits by the parents were extremely infrequent, holidays away from the school were forbidden; once a pupil entered his prison he never left it until his studies were terminated. The lack of physical comforts, the bad sanitation, the meager prison diet, the frequent beatings, the refined tortures inflicted by masters and pupils alike, the stupidity and bigotry of the life, the isolation, all tended to demoralize and devitalize any one with promise, and particularly a sensitive being, such as Louis Lambert. Balzac describes himself as then being twelve years of age. What the effect of such a life must have been, for his sensitive soul, can best be understood by the description of his emotions upon hearing the announcement of Louis’ arrival at the College. “I can compare it with nothing but my first reading of Robinson Crusoe,” he says. From the first he felt sympathy (sic!) with the boy whose temperament had some points of likeness to his own. “At last I was to have a companion in daydreams and meditations!” In this naked description of the split in his psyche Balzac reveals to us the true nature of his liberation. At last! Like a cry of desperation.*

  The physical description of Louis Lambert which Balzac gives at this point is remarkable for the resemblance to his own self. He speaks glowingly of “the prophetic brow,” of the extraordinary eyes which bespoke the existence of a soul. Though he had not the ordinary strength which permitted him to rival the others in sports, Louis was possessed of a mysterious power of will which he could summon on occasion and which was capable of defying the united strength of his comrades. He speaks of the wealth of ideas, the poetry, that lay hidden in Louis’ brain and heart, commenting on it in strangely revelatory fashion. “It was not till I was thirty years of age, till my experience was matured and condensed, till the flash of an intense illumination had thrown a fresh light upon it, that I was capable of understanding all the bearings of the phenomena which I witnessed at that early time.” The description of Louis’ struggle to preserve a semblance of order, to respond to the petty routine of the institution, to show interest in his studies, or even fear or respect when threatened with punishment, is a remarkable transcription of Balzac’s own struggle with chaos, discipline and convention. It is a description of the innate maladaptation of the man of genius, of his blindness and deafness to everything except what he intuitively knows will nourish him. It is a picture of the anarchist who is later to become a martyr, or a tyrant, a portrait of the Will pure and naked. Even that irritating reproach which he puts in the mouth of the headmaster, the phrase which is forever startling Louis from his reveries, is significant since it is the tacit reproach which the world in its hatred and envy of the man of genius always makes: “You are doing nothing!” Balzac takes pains to make it clear that whenever Louis was accused of doing nothing he was probably most active in his own right way. It was from these seeming spells of inertia that Balzac’s brilliant and devastating ideas were born. Subsequently, in expanding on Louis’ philosophical speculations, he elucidates this cogently. There are two beings in us, he says—the Inner one, the Being of Action, and the External one, the Being of Reaction. The whole philosophy of duality enunciated through Louis Lambert is an effort on the part of Balzac, the artist, to establish a totality or acceptance of life. It is Balzac’s own dynamic, positive interpretation of what we know as Tao. It runs counter to the whole European trend of metaphysics, which is purely intellectual and idealistic, and ends in a cul de sac.

  At any rate, it was the “Poet-and-Pythagoras,” as he styles his twin self, who was crushed by the educational routine, “as gold is crushed into round coin under the press.” They were an idle and incorrigible pair who could neither play ball, nor run races, nor walk on stilts. “Aliens from the pleasures enjoyed by the others, we were outcasts, sitting forlorn under a tree in the playing-ground.” “The eagle that needed the world to feed him,” he adds, “was shut up between four narrow dirty walls. And thus Louis Lambert’s life became ‘an ideal life’ in the strictest meaning of the words.”

  At eighteen, having lost his parents, Louis leaves college. He makes his home with his uncle who, having been turned out of his benefice, had come to settle at Blois. There Louis lives for some time, but consumed by a desire to complete his studies, he goes to Paris “to drink of science at its highest fount.” The few thousand francs which he had inherited vanish during his three years in Paris. At the age of twenty-three he returns to Blois, driven out “by sufferings to which the impecunious are exposed there.” In a long letter to his uncle, written at intervals during his sojourn in Paris, Louis pours out his impressions and experiences. It is no doubt a transcript of Balzac’s own experiences upon first coming to Paris. Back in Blois, at the first house to which he is introduced by his uncle, Louis meets a Mademoiselle Pauline de Villenoix, a young and beautiful Jewess, the richest heiress in Blois. Louis falls madly in love with her at first sight. Three years after Louis’ return to Blois Balzac encounters the aged uncle in the diligence, while on his way to that town, and through him learns that Louis, on the eve of his announced wedding to Mademoiselle de Villenoix, had gone mad. The uncle, who had taken Louis to Paris to be examined by the eminent physicians of that city, was informed that the malady was incurable. The physicians had advised that Louis “be left in perfect solitude, and that he should always live in a cool room with a subdued light.” His fiancée insists on devoting herself to him nevertheless. She removes him to her chateau at Villenoix, where Balzac, two years later, arrives to visit them. Louis does not recognize his old chum, and after a prolonged effort to get him to break the silence, the only words he utters are—“the angels are white.” Before leaving, Balzac obtains from Louis’ devoted companion a few fragments of his thoughts (given as an appendix) which she had written down. Louis Lambert dies at the age of twenty-eight in his true love’s arms.

  The cornerstone of Louis Lambert’s philosophy, by which he explained everything, was his theory of the angels. This theory, which Balzac borrowed from Swedenborg, is worth giving in its entirety, for it is this view of man which Balzac later raises to apotheosis in Seraphita. It is the highest expression of the duality which he sensed in his own nature and which he transmuted through art. . . .

  “In each of us there are two distinct beings. According to Swedenborg, the angel is an individual in whom the inn
er being conquers the external being. If a man desires to earn his call to be an angel, as soon as his mind reveals to him his twofold existence, he must strive to foster the delicate angelic essence that exists within him. If, for lack of a lucid apprehension of his destiny, he allows bodily action to predominate, instead of confirming his intellectual being, all his powers will be absorbed in the use of his external senses, and the angel will slowly perish by the materialization of both natures. [Which is precisely what happened to Balzac!] In the contrary case, if he nourishes his inner being with the aliment needful to it, the soul triumphs over matter and strives to get free. [In this Louis Lambert failed, but Seraphita succeeded!]

  “When they separate by the act of what we call death, the angel, strong enough then to cast off its wrappings, survives and begins its real life. The infinite variety which differentiates individual men can only be explained by this twofold existence which, again, is proved and made intelligible by that variety.

  “In point of fact, the wide distance between a man whose torpid intelligence condemns him to evident stupidity, and one who, by the exercise of his inner life, has acquired the gift of some power, allows us to suppose that there is as great a difference between men of genius and other beings as there is between the blind and those who see. This hypothesis, since it extends creation beyond all limits, gives us, as it were, the clue to heaven. The beings who, here on earth, are apparently mingled without distinction, are there distributed, according to their inner perfection, in distinct spheres whose speech and manners have nothing in common. In the invisible world, as in the real world, if some native of the lower spheres comes, all unworthy, into a higher sphere, not only can he never understand the customs and language there, but his mere presence paralyzes the voice and hearts of those who dwell therein.”