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 require 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
