The Wisdom of the Heart

  Victory over the earth, that is Seraphita’s cry. The Universe, she says, belongs to him who will, who can, who knows how to pray. “Sinai and Golgotha are not here nor there. The angel is crucified everywhere, and in every sphere.”

  At this point in the narrative it is written: “On a sudden HE sat up to die!”

  In the final chapter, rising heavenward, Balzac gives the clue to the spiritual cosmogony; “from the most vast to the smallest of the worlds, and from the smallest sphere to the minutest atom of the creation that constitutes it, each thing was an individual, and yet all was one.” Such is the aspect from above, whither Seraphita is led by the Guardian Angel. Minna and Wilfrid, accompanying her part of the way, through the miracle of faith, are permitted a glimpse of the higher spheres wherein they see reflected the nakedness of their own souls. So great was their joy, it is recounted, “that they felt an ardent desire to rush back into the mire of the universe, to endure trial there, so as to be able some day to utter at the sacred gate the answer spoken by the glorified Spirit.” In the descent the “exiles” are privileged to look upon the rotting splendor of those who lorded it over the world—the conquerors and warriors, the learned and the rich. WHAT DO YE HERE IN MOTIONLESS RANKS? Wilfrid shouts again and again. As they open their robes to reveal the bodies which are eaten away, corrupt and falling to dust, Wilfrid exclaims wrathfully: “Ye lead the nations to death. Ye have defiled the earth, perverted the Word, prostituted justice. . . . Do ye think there is justification in showing your wounds? I shall warn those of my brethren who still can hear the Voice, that they may slake their thirst at the springs you have hidden.”

  At this the gentle Minna turns to him and says: “Let us save our strength for prayer. It is not your mission to be a prophet, nor a redeemer, nor an evangelist. We are as yet only on the margin of the lowest sphere. . . .”

  Outside the first summer of the nineteenth century was in all its glory.

  BALZAC AND HIS DOUBLE

  IN HIS book on St. Francis of Assisi, Chesterton endeavors to put his finger on the weakness of that sect whose members styled themselves “the true sons of St. Francis’’—the Fraticelli—and whose goal it was to carry out the complete program of St. Francis. “What was the matter with these people,” writes Chesterton, “was that they were mystics; mystics and nothing else but mystics; mystics and not Christians; mystics and not men. They rotted away because, in the most exact sense, they would not listen to reason. And St. Francis, however wild and romantic his gyrations, always hung on to reason by one invisible and indestructible hair.’’ In the History of Magic by Eliphas Levi we have a similar indictment of the mystics; they are condemned and vituperated because they are extremists. In his autobiographical study called Louis Lambert, Balzac, who was a believer in the esoteric doctrine—too catholic a spirit to be a Catholic—gives us a picture of the conflict between the angel in man and the flesh which throws a different light upon the dangers which are supposed to attend the mystic in his unbridled desire for union with the infinite all.

  Who was Louis Lambert? He was not only, as the story relates, le copain, the chum, the alter ego, he was Balzac’s own real self, the angelic self which was killed in the struggle with the world. At that moment in Louis Lambert’s life when, as Balzac says, he perceived in him “the struggle of the mind reacting on itself,” he adds—“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.” When in his fifteenth year he parts from his double at the College of Vendôme, he says: “You will live, but I shall die. If I can, I will come back to you.” In the story he does come back, to find Louis mad, but in life he never came back. In taking leave of himself in this strangely prophetic manner it is interesting to note that Balzac immediately proceeds to give a physical description of his double, an exact description, including Louis’ height, adding significantly: “he grew no more!” In the midst of his narrative, in an interlude of two short paragraphs wherein he makes a transition from the known life of his double to the subsequent and imagined life of the mystic who rotted away in the flesh, Balzac remarks that in describing Louis’ boyhood he is depicting “the unknown life to which I owe the only happy hours, the only pleasant memories, of my early days. Excepting these two years I have had nothing but annoyances and weariness.”

  The book is an attempt on Balzac’s part to justify himself not only to the world, but to himself. It is a study of the ordeal and crucifixion of a genius, a defense of the real Balzac whom the world refused to acknowledge. It is an outcry against the critics for failing to discern in the novelist the more important attribute; of thinker, visionary, prophet. (Referring to Louis Lambert he says, “I think we may deplore in him a genius equal to Pascal, Lavoisier or Laplace.” And elsewhere in the book: “his philosophical speculations ought undoubtedly to gain him recognition as one of the great thinkers who have appeared at wide intervals among men to reveal to them the bare skeleton of some science to come. . . .”) But it was above all the failure to detect “the angel” which reduced Balzac to despair and moved him to write this harrowing study of frustration. In the story it is the angel, which, at the price of reason and sanity, is finally liberated; but in life it is the angel which is destroyed in order that the artist may triumph. What Chesterton said of St. Francis was also true of Balzac—he too had the ability to hang on to reason by that one invisible and indestructible hair. But was it worth it? If Louis Lambert may be said to succumb to madness—and even this admission is questionable, if one reads Balzac’s judgment carefully—he, Balzac, the man of indomitable courage and will, certainly succumbed to a worse fate. He succumbed to fame and glory. The soaring ambitions of genius brought him nothing but trials and tribulations, brought him to the grave prematurely, at the very moment when he had hoped to sit back and reap the harvest of his tremendous labors. Even the great love, to which he struggled for seventeen years to give a solid, secure pediment, was snatched from him. He had given her in marriage the living cadaver of himself.

  Just as Seraphita was written for Madame Hanska, his ideal love, so Louis Lambert was written for his “Dilecta,” Madame de Bemy, who had been to him not only a devoted mistress, but a mother as well, for Balzac had never known a mother’s love. Da Vinci had two mothers; Goethe had the best mother a genius could possibly have; but Balzac was deprived of an affection and tenderness which he needed possibly more than either Goethe or da Vinci. His life at the College of Vendôme was a nightmare. Reserved, secretive, oversensitive, precocious, misunderstood by masters and pupils alike, he became indifferent to the world about and was forced to retire into himself—to commune with the angels. This sense of loneliness developed with the years, despite the fame and renown which he tasted early in his career. In his letters he refers frequently to a secret which no one, not even Madame Hanska, to whom he confesses this on occasion, will ever penetrate. At the very threshold of his career, in the year 1828, he writes that there are people who die without the doctor’s ever being able to say what it was that carried them off. The lack of maternal tenderness, the estrangement, the hatred which was shown him by his mother, left an indelible mark upon him. His incarceration in the College of Vendôme only served to stimulate the already premature development of his spiritual nature; the man lagged behind. In fact, the man in him was never fully realized. Balzac, throughout his life, not only felt himself to be an exile and a prisoner, but deliberately made his life a prison, in order to punish himself for a crime which he had never committed. His dismal failure as a writer, throughout the years of apprenticeship when he signed false names to his work, testifies not only to the slow development common to great geniuses but points also to the powers of frustration born of his crippled affections.

  In Louis Lambert Balzac gives us the genesis of a giant moth doomed to perish in a flame of light. To grasp the true significance of this study it should be borne in mi
nd not only that the poet was murdered at school (where all the poets are murdered!) but that the date, June-July, 1832, given for this story, represents his thirty-third year! Long before the great financial disaster, which served him as an excuse to make himself a Martyr of Work, Balzac realized that he was destined for a Purgatorial existence. In that harrowing letter which Louis Lambert writes from his miserable garret in Paris, Balzac gives the clue to his own secret hopes and disillusionment. “Compelled to live in himself alone,” he writes, “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 vegetative life which he was forbidden to enjoy Balzac had tasted as a boy; it was this normal desire for natural growth, for a growth which would have altered the whole tenor of his life, which might have permitted him to become a seer rather than a novelist, it was this hunger for the opportunity to permit his real self to flower, that militated against his early development as a writer. The real Balzac is absent from the first forty volumes; it is a ghost writing. The real Balzac is still enwrapped in the chrysalis which he had spun about himself in the College of Vendôme. What a tragic, fateful moment it was when, as a boy of fourteen, Balzac was returned to his parents by the masters of the College as a walking somnambulist, an embryonic monster of thought suffering from a “congestion de lumière.” Even when he throws himself into life, when outwardly he seems to be fulfilling the role of a young man who is in love, who is acquiring a vocation, who is studying life, the spell in which he had wrapped himself is so strong that he has no sense of his gifts, still less of his destiny, but struggles like a worm in its cocoon in order to liberate himself from his self-imposed prison. The young man who makes his appearance in the world, who conquers by a single glance of his magnetic eye, is simply the ghost which, by sheer force of will, succeeds in bursting the wrappings of a dormant soul. In Louis Lambert Balzac depicts himself as the dreamer who succeeds in detaching himself from his body. In seeking to violate the laws of nature his triumph is nullified, because, as he is later to know from experience, in order to overcome the world it is first necessary to accept it. As an artist he does overcome the world, by making it “transparent,” but to become the artist he had first to understand the submission of the will. The submission or surrender of the artist is only the first step in the path of renunciation. That Balzac realized the nature of the conflict in himself is evident from the work which follows shortly after Louis Lambert—Seraphita. Between the themes of these two books there is a void which can be likened to a desert in which psychologically, or spiritually, the whole of Balzac’s life is passed. Unlike the saints and mystics whom he revered, Balzac never returned from the desert. His immense production is simply a monologue, a wilderness of the soul’s anguish in which the wanderer is lost.

  It was only when the artist in him awakened, when he had accepted his duality, understood his role, that Balzac, by a prodigious metamorphosis, succeeded in making the world itself into a chrysalis and, from the depths of his imagination, gathers the wings which will permit him to fly beyond the world while remaining ever securely imprisoned in it. When he says of Louis Lambert that “the point to 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,” did he not mean that in his stupendous vegetative slumber he had exhausted the whole world of the intellect, that though still a boy, he nevertheless stood on the frontier of a new way of life? And that as a man he was condemned to be a prisoner of the age in which he was born? What is the meaning of the words which follow on the above? “Though as yet he [Louis Lambert] 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?” What gulf? Had he already franchised the barriers of his living tomb? All his life Balzac was promising to bring forth an essay on “les forces humaines.” All his life he struggles to deliver the secret of that imaginary document which Louis Lambert wrote at college—Traité sur la Volonté—and which was destroyed by the ignorant and insensitive headmaster. In La Peau de Chagrin (wherein we also have glimpses of his boyhood) he again gives expression to his obsession when he writes that he believed he had a great thought to express, a system to establish, a science to elucidate. Of the visions which he had at school he says that they gave to his eyes the faculty of seeing the intimate, the quintessential nature of things. Through them his heart was prepared “pour les magies.” And then he adds, as a final tribute to the effect of these sublime visions: “they inscribed in my brain a book wherein I could read what I had to express; they gave to my lips the power of spontaneous utterance.” “From the very beginning,” says Ernst-Robert Curtius, “Balzac’s life is dominated by a mystic star, by a ray of light emanating from the higher worlds.” It is with this vision of greater things, this vision of a life as yet unknown to us, that Balzac progresses through the world, devouring everything in sight, creating a vast panorama peopled with his own figures, and yet eternally dissatisfied, because nothing the earth had to offer could compensate for that life which he was denied. The Treatise on the Will, which is symbolically destroyed by the ignorant headmaster, never materializes into the promised essay “sur les forces humaines,” unless, as one well might, we consider La Comédie Humaine itself as an elaborate elucidation of the subject. The embryonic Balzac, who eventually became a Colossus, was a living travesty of the Will. In Seraphita he reveals the true function of the Will: it is the desire to rise, to go beyond the limits of the self, to expand in the Infinite Self.

  Balzac, the writer, deflected his great will in order to subjugate the world. Both the Poet and the Pythagoras in him were doomed: the Colossus was engulfed in the sands of his own creation. The whole vast edifice of his work appears, ultimately, like a Gargantuan effort to bury the secret which gnawed at his vitals. At the age of twenty-three, still inchoate, still paralyzed, though aware of the possession of a tremendous force, he writes to his “Dilecta” concerning the doctrines of Leibnitz, arrested by the thought that everything in the world, organic and inorganic, is possessed with life. He avers that even marble may be said to have ideas—“extraordinarily confused, however.” He confides that he too would like to obtain “solidity, durability, immobility.” It was from this crude block of marble, Curtius writes, that the gigantic edifice of La Comédie Humaine had to be hewn. This is tantamount to saying that it was created out of the will rather than the flame. For Balzac the Will was supreme—“le roi des fluides,” as he put it. It was the Will which enabled him to bridge the gulf which had opened in himself and into which he flung his great work.

  His whole life was a contradiction of his philosophy: it was the most stupid, aborted life that any intelligent man ever lived. What a strange tribute it is that he makes to his double in Louis Lambert! After making a cryptic acknowledgment of his indebtedness to his alter ego, he says: “and this is not all I have borrowed from him . . . this present volume is intended as a modest monument, a broken column, to commemorate the life of the man who bequeathed to me all he had to leave—his thoughts.” In Seraphita he gives us his opinion of the grand edifice which he created. “Books are human actions in death,” he says. From this solid, durable, unshakeable edifice, from the crude block of marble out of which his great work was fashioned, the real Balzac never emerged. Of the three great stages on the mystic path he knew only the first two, and these in reverse order—la vie purgative et la vie illuminative. La vie unitive, which is the grand theme pervading his works, he never knew. Like Pythagoras he knew the secret of number: like Virgil he foresaw a world to come; like Dante he proclaimed the inner doctrine, and in the book which is least known of all his work, Seraphita, he gave us this doctrine, and there it lies buried. His intuition was cosmic, his will was titan-like, his e
nergy inexhaustible, his nature truly protean, and yet he was unable to emancipate himself. The study of society and the psychology of the individual, which form the material of the novel in European literature, served to create the illusory world of facts and things which dominate the neurotic life that began with the 19th century and is now reaching its end in the drama of schizophrenia. At the back of it is the Will, reducing through the powers of analysis all life to ashes. Balzac was himself aware of the disease which is killing us. It is the mind which is poisoning us, he says somewhere. “La vie est un feu qu’il faut couvrir de cendres; penser, c’est ajouter la flamme au feu.” Dostoievski gave expression to the conflict even more forcibly. Indeed, it is with him that the novel comes to an end, for after him there are no longer any individuals to write about, nor is there any longer a society which may be said to possess a body. Proust and Joyce epitomize the dissolution of our world in their great epics. With Lawrence the novel becomes a vehicle for the Apocalyptic visions which will occupy us for the next few hundred years, as our world fades out in blood and tears.