by Henry Miller
Here, embedded in the midst of a work which was only too obviously destined to be neglected by the great majority of his admirers, Balzac, like one of those medieval masons at work on a cathedral, leaves the visible evidence of his secret initiation into the mysteries. In the very next breath, as though to give the clue to the high importance of this passage, he mentions Dante’s Divine Comedy, which is the mystic cathedral of words that enshrines the great Rosicrucian mystery of the Middle Ages. But why he should have said that “Dante had perhaps some slight intuition of those spheres which begin in the world of torment and rise, circle on circle, to the highest heaven,” baffles me. Why “slight” intuition? Was he appalled by Dante’s audacity? Had he too recently fallen under the dominion of the “Buddha of the North,” as he styles Swedenborg? He was no doubt highly familiar with Dante’s work. In The Exiles, the last of the three studies which make up Le Livre Mystique, he records an episode in Dante’s life which occurred during his stay in Paris whilst attending the lectures given at the old School of the Four Nations by the celebrated Sigier, “the most noted doctor of Mystical Theology of the University of Paris.” But possibly the real due to this apparent “slight” is given in what follows upon the theory of the angels, viz., the role of love. To Lambert, says Balzac, “pure love—love as we dream of it in youth—was the coalescence of two angelic natures. Nothing could exceed the fervency with which he longed to meet a woman angel. And who better than he could inspire or feel love?” Strangely enough, though Louis Lambert is destined to meet and to be loved by precisely the angelic creature he sought in his dreams, the union is tragically aborted and Louis is robbed of the fruits of his yearning. The interval which marks the short separation in time between the appearance of Louis Lambert and Seraphita is not the merely natural one attributed to artistic ripening, but rather it seems to me, a time difference (of infinite duration or brevity) as between one incarnation and another. As a human being, Louis Lambert had not earned the right to be wedded to an angel in the flesh. His madness, which breaks out on the eve of the wedding, seems at first more like the voluntary assumption of a Purgatorial role, in preparation for the higher union which is to take place when Louis, reincarnated as Seraphita-Seraphitus, elects to espouse Heaven. “The fortuitous separation of our two natures,” which is one of the phrases Balzac employs in describing Louis’ pathologic condition, is an occurrence familiar to Hindus and Tibetans, and the causes ascribed by them differ considerably from the scientific explanations offered us by the psychopathologist. The cataleptic states which signalled Louis’ sudden swerve from “pure idealism to the most intense sensualism” were as familiar to Balzac as the epileptic attacks described by Dostoievski. “The excitement to which he had been wound up by the anticipation of acute physical enjoyment, enhanced by a chaste life and a highly-strung soul, had no doubt led to these attacks, of which the results are as little known as the cause,” says Balzac. “What was really extraordinary,” he comments significantly, “is that Louis should not have had several previous attacks, since his habits of rapt thought and the character of his mind would predispose him to them.” This, of course, Balzac is able to say without fear of refutation because he is speaking from intimate experience. The walking somnambulist who was returned to his parents at the age of fourteen was well qualified to speak on the relation between ecstasy and catalepsy. Says Louis Lambert: “Deep meditation and rapt ecstasy are perhaps the undeveloped germs of catalepsy.” This in the course of a discussion of their favorite subject, for as Balzac writes, the two of them “went crazy over catalepsy.”
However, what is truly extraordinary, in my opinion, is that Balzac himself did not succumb to madness. The study of Louis Lambert’s morbid degeneration is really the story of Balzac’s own narrow escape. Endowed with extraordinary vitality, he succeeded somehow in holding on to reason by that one invisible, indestructible hair. But by all the logic of fate and circumstance he should have perished like his double. It is the classic fate of the genius in modern times. Deprived of the maternal affection which a sensitive, precocious child demands, incarcerated like a leper in the educational penitentiary of the College of Vendôme, his unusual gifts unrecognized by his educators, condemned to the tower for long periods, like a convict, having no one to commune with but his imaginary double, experiencing all the terrors of schizophrenia, the miracle is that Balzac survived the ordeal even as well as he did. The story has a triple significance. In the ordinary child the result would be insanity, or psychosis; in the budding genius the result is a transmutation of suffering permitting us a work of art (I refer to his complete works) which is typical only of the art of the Western world, that is to say, an art which is at once a tribute to the imperishable angel in man and a prophecy of the fate which lies in store for a people whose culture is founded on the persecution and suppression of the highest types. With Louis Lambert there perished a seer; only the artist survived, in the person of Balzac. But the loss is irreparable. Not even the discovery of a companion, another angelic creature like himself, could preserve the better half of Balzac from dying. Towards the end of the book, when he is discussing Louis’ case with the aged uncle, he chooses his words most carefully. Was not Louis’ malady, he asks, perhaps the result of possessing a too highly organized nature? “If,” he says, “he is really a victim of the malady as yet unstudied in all its aspects, which is known simply as madness, I am inclined to attribute it to his passion. His studies and his mode of life had strung his powers and faculties to a degree of energy beyond which the least further strain was too much for nature; Love was enough to crack them, or to raise them to a new form of expression which we are maligning perhaps, by ticketing it without due knowledge. In fact, he may perhaps have regarded the joys of marriage as an obstacle to the perfection of his inner man and his flight towards spiritual spheres.”
Knowing Balzac’s life as we do, are we not to infer that this desire for perfection, coupled with an uncontrollable passion, prevented him from realizing the joys of marriage? The truth is that it was desire at war with itself which frustrated Balzac. Louis, though chaste, succumbs to his sensual nature. Balzac, also capable of great chastity, succumbs to his inordinate passion for power and recognition. Whereas Louis Lambert succumbs to the devil, as it were, by ignoring the physical part of his being, Seraphita, who, as I hinted before, might be regarded as the subsequent incarnation of this strange being, triumphs over the demons in every Shape and Species! Seraphita knows evil; Louis is ignorant of it. Louis Lambert evinces neither lust nor hatred—at the most, an indignant, silent scorn for his persecutors. With Dante, to take a familiar example, we traverse every region of Hell, are confronted with every form of evil. It is the audacious and sane solution later propounded through the poetic genius of Blake. It is acceptance, total acceptance, of every phase of life. Only thus is there, or can there be, any spiral evolution, involution, or devolution possible. The path is the same for God as for man, the same for the vegetable as for the star. Balzac never fully accepted life; he struggled, as we know from the endless stories about him, first against sleep, the restorative agency, second against death, the mystery which he longed to embrace. Crucified by passion and desire, he represents, like Beethoven, the very incarnation of a restless, tortured spirit. In his living he denied his own philosophy: he split and foundered on the antagonism of his own being. Of Louis Lambert he says that the latter had even reached the point of “preparing to perform on himself the operation to which Origen believed he owed his talents.” It is only when Balzac perceives the deep meaning of castration, when he realizes the real nature of his conflict, that he is able to conceive of a creature more evolved, a being burned by the fires of temptation, the one he calls Seraphita, in whom the male and female halves of our being are truly wedded, one in whom good and evil are so balanced that the real transition into a higher state of being is made possible. In this lofty conception of the essential nature of man Balzac leaps forward to a realization which it may yet requir
e thousands of years to justify but which is undeniably true and inevitable. Like Dostoievski, Balzac discerned the coming of a dawn in which the very essence of man’s nature would be profoundly altered; Lawrence had a similar vision when he proclaimed the advent of the era of the Holy Ghost. It is an idea which astrologers associate with the Aquarian Age which, according to some, we entered about the time of Balzac’s birth, which again is coincident with the time in which the story of Seraphita is laid. “Outside,” he says, at the conclusion of that book, “the first summer of the new century was in all its glory.” But inside the seed was blossoming into life—the seed of that future which now seems so black, but wherein man will find salvation through his own efforts. The whole emphasis, with Lawrence, Dostoievski and Balzac, is on the creative powers of man. In them, in their vision of the world to come, the Christ spirit is seen to be triumphant. The Saviour is dead, they seem to cry, long live the Saviours! And the saviour of man, as every creative spirit knows, is man.
It is worth noting here the comparison which Spengler makes between Dostoievski and Tolstoi. “Dostoievski is a saint,” says he, “Tolstoi only a revolutionary. To Dostoievski’s Christianity the next thousand years will belong. . . . Tolstoi is the former Russia, Dostoievski the coming Russia. He [Dostoievski] has passed beyond both Petrinism and revolution, and from his future he looks back over them as from afar. His soul is apocalyptic, yearning, desperate, but of his future certain. . . . ‘Conservative’ and ‘revolutionary’ were terms of the West that left him indifferent. Such a soul as his can look beyond everything that we call social, for the things of this world seem to it so unimportant as not to be worth improving. No genuine religion aims at improving the world of facts, and Dostoievski, like every primitive Russian, is fundamentally unaware of that world and lives in a second, metaphysical world beyond.”
What is the final expression of humanity, according to Balzac? In Seraphita he expresses it thus: “The union of a spirit of love with a spirit of wisdom lifts the creature into the divine state in which the soul is woman and the body man.” This is the final expression of humanity, “in which the spirit is supreme over the form.”
In the case of Louis Lambert the spring of passion is muddied at the source. The conflict in his nature, repressed for so long, bursts out at the most unexpected moment, when, as I have said, he is about to ally himself to the angelic creature of his choice. Did we not know the events of Balzac’s own life the tragedy would seem less convincing. When I express the opinion that Balzac was miraculously spared the fate of his double, I am only saying what Balzac himself implies throughout and what he seems to attest in dedicating his Seraphita to Madame Hanska. At the very threshold of maturity he had found a mother and a mistress in the person of Madame de Berny; he had other loves too, but in none, as he admits, could he find the companionship, the sympathy and the understanding which he demanded of a woman. He was not to find it in Madame Hanska either, for that matter, but because of his great passion for her he was given to find the solution within himself, a solution, be it said, sufficient to carry on, to plunge himself in work, to adapt himself to the world by creating his own world. The partial solution of the artist! Balzac was aware that it was only a partial solution, and reconciled himself to it. Never able to reach the center of his being, he at any rate succeeded in situating himself at a point whence he glimpsed the angel of creation. In Louis Lambert this parallax, or angle of displacement, becomes enormous, because Louis is moved nearer to the point of fixation. Louis’ whole desire is fixed on the beyond—obstinately fixed, one might almost say. Louis’ desire to commune with the angels, perhaps just because it is inflexible and unswerving, entrains a dénouement which is in perfect accordance with the law of consequence: Louis remains fixed and his wings are burned in the blinding light that invades him. Louis’ madness is, like Nijinsky’s, of an exceptional character. If he be a lunatic, he is an extraordinary lunatic! Balzac, be it noted, took pains to portray him as a higher type of man whose motives are pure, whose intelligence is vast. But it is wisdom which Louis lacks, the wisdom of life, which comes from experience. In the Book of the Golden Precepts it is written: “Learn above all to separate Head-learning from Soul-wisdom, the Eye from the Heart doctrine. Yea, ignorance is like unto a closed airless vessel; the soul a bird shut up within. It warbles not, nor can it stir a feather; but the songster mute and torpid sits, and of exhaustion dies.” Louis’ malady was diagnosed and minutely described thousands of years ago; today it is the universal malady. Despite the frenzied activity of the nations of the earth, the songster mute and torpid sits and of exhaustion dies!
Nobody knew better than Balzac that it is the wisdom of the heart which must prevail. He says it over and over again, in brilliant fashion. It is the heart of man which will rule in the ages to come, of that he is certain. But the heart must first be purified! and Louis Lambert, who had never lived, was inevitably destroyed by the very anticipation of a passionate release. “The selfish devotee lives to no purpose. The man who does not go through his appointed work in life has lived in vain. . . . In separation thou becomest the playground of Samvritti, origin of all the world’s delusions.”* The condition which Balzac is loath to call “madness” is really the demonic state of the world, which now horrifies us, and which is really the product of idealism. No century in history can boast of so many madmen, among its superior types, as the one following upon Balzac’s time. The virulence of this widespread disease, which we now recognize as schizophrenia, or to use a vulgar, literal expression—“soul-splitting”—is by no means a new phenomenon in the evolution of man’s psychic being. It was known to the ancients also; it has been described again and again in occult lore; it is familiar to the saint and to the mystic. It might even be regarded as a beneficent punishment, inflicted upon the highest types among us, in order to encourage a wider and deeper exploration of reality. Nothing more vividly resembles what we call “death” than the condition of neurosis. “He who isolates himself,” says Eliphas Levi, “is given over to death thereby, and an eternity of isolation would be eternal death.” No man, however, can give himself over to eternal death! But there is a living death, of which all occultists speak and of which even the most ordinary man has an understanding. In the highest sense, this is not a state to fear or avoid; it is a transitional state, containing promise or doom, according to the way we regard it. It is the moment, brief as a lightning flash or prolonged for a lifetime, in which, confronted by the necessity of a break with the past, we are paralyzed. It is the moment of arrest at the frontier of a new and greater realm of being. The majority of men, unable to seize the import of this new state or condition of mind, relapse, sink, founder and are carried off by the time current. The forward spirits accept the challenge and, even though they perish, remain with us in spirit to fecundate the new form of life.
In the person of Louis Lambert Balzac gives expression to the great paralyzing fear which beset him when confronted with the sublime duty which his nature had prepared him to obey. His vision, temporarily deflected, shed a fantastic brilliance on the dream world in which he was imprisoned. Louis is made to gaze steadfastly upon the beyond, but with dead orbs. His sight is turned inward. He remains fixed in the hallucinatory state of dream. As the writer, Balzac liberated himself to swim in the ocean of the universal imagination. Only by a miracle was he saved. But he lost his soul! In this realm of the universal imagination, to quote again from Eliphas Levi, we have “the source of all apparitions, all extraordinary visions, and all the intuitive phenomena peculiar to madness or ecstasy. . . . Our brain is a book printed within and without, and with the smallest degree of excitement, the writing becomes blurred, as occurs continually in cases of intoxication and madness. Dream then triumphs over real life and plunges reason in a sleep which knows no waking. . . .”
In the esoteric doctrine there is no “place” which corresponds to our conception of Hell; “Avitchi,” the Buddhist equivalent to our Hell, is a state or condition,
not a locality. And, according to this doctrine, the greatest of all Hells is Myalba, our earth. It is from a firsthand knowledge of this Hell that Balzac wrote his books. When he parts company with Louis at school he is parting company with the angel he had endeavored to nourish. He sees nothing more of Louis, nor does he hear of him again, until the accidental meeting with Louis’ uncle on his way to Blois. The account of his struggles, his deceptions and disillusionment, as he gives it to us in the long letter from Paris, is a description of the torments of Hell. From this ordeal of fire Balzac emerged only partially purified; he never fully accepted the wisdom of the supreme test. His colossal activity as a man of letters is only the reverse of the mute torpor in which his double sits, or stands, without stirring a feather. Torpor and activity are the two faces of the same malady: action proceeds only from a being whose center is at rest. For Balzac, as for the whole modern world, dream triumphed over reason; the dreamer dies of exhaustion in his feverish sleep of meaningless activity. He wrote in a world of the imagination, but he lived in a world of things, amidst a nightmare of bric-a-brac.
When, in Seraphita, rhapsodizing on Swedenborg’s theory of the angels, Balzac appears to be struck by the expression “there are solitary angels,” one feels that he has given this phrase his own special emphasis. This is further enhanced when, shortly afterwards, he remarks: “According to Swedenborg, God did not create angels independently; there are none but those who have been human beings on earth. Thus the earth is the nursery ground for heaven. The angels are not angels by original nature; they are transformed into angels by an intimate union with God which God never refuses, the very essence of God being never negative, but always active.” One knows, that towards his thirtieth year Balzac finally caught a glimpse of the meaning of suffering, that as a writer he chose a path of renunciation which, though partial, enabled him to accept that Hell which a life on earth is for a man of genius. The ways of the earth had not changed, but Balzac himself had changed since that period of youth which he describes in Louis Lambert. By accepting the role of writer, bitter as it was, he was able to work out a partial solution of his lot. When, in the narrative, he comes back to Louis, as he promised he would one day, he finds the angelic being lost to the world. The single self which he had molded into an artist looks back upon the divided self which he formerly was. The angelic youth is swallowed up in dream and illusion; the warrior who battled the world and triumphed, after his fashion, discerns in his counterpart only the husk of his adolescent self. The man who would remain pure and undefiled is turned to day; he is returned to the earth, to Hell, as it were, robbed of the light and splendor of the living soul. Rodin, in wrestling with the problem of immortalizing this conflict in stone, has given eloquent form and expression to the antagonism which lodged in Balzac with sphinx-like tenacity. In that rough-hewn mold of heavy earth, in which Balzac’s soul was imprisoned, the Buddhist drama of Desire was played out in a manner such as we have never witnessed in another European.