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
