Louis Lambert — Honoré de Balzac, trans. Katharine Prescott Wormeley

_“The character of the primitive ideas of that horde, called by its lawgiver the people of God, no doubt to secure its unity, and perhaps also to induce it to maintain his laws and his system of government—for the Books of Moses are a religious, political, and civil code—that character bears the authority of terror; convulsions of nature are interpreted with stupendous power as a vengeance from

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on high. In fact, since this wandering tribe knew none of the ease enjoyed by a community settled in a patriarchal home, their sorrows as pilgrims inspired them with none but gloomy poems, majestic but blood-stained. In the Hindoos, on the contrary, the spectacle of the rapid recoveries of the natural world, and the prodigious effects of sunshine, which they were the first to recognize, gave rise to happy images of blissful love, to the worship of Fire and of the endless personifications of reproductive force. These fine fancies are lacking in the Book of the ©

Hebrews. A constant need of self-preservation amid all the dangers and the lands they traversed to reach the Promised Land engendered their exclusive race-feeling and their hatred of all other nations.

‘These three Scriptures are the archives of an engulfed world. Therein lies the secret of the extraordinary splendor of those languages and their myths. A grand human history lies beneath those names of men and places, and those fables which charm us so irresistibly, we know not why. Perhaps it is because we find in them the native air of renewed humanity.”

Thus, to him, this threefold literature included all the thoughts of man. Not a book could be written, in his opinion, of which the subject might not there be discerned in its germ. This view shows how learnedly he had pursued his early studies of the Bible, and how far they had led him. Hovering, as it were, over the heads of society, and knowing it solely from books, he could judge it coldly.

““The law,’’ said he, ‘tnever puts a check on the enterprises of the rich and great, but crushes the poor, who, on the contrary, need protection.”’

His kind heart did not therefore allow him to sympathize

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in political ideas; his system led rather to the passive obedience of which Jesus set the example. During the last hours of my life at Vendome, Louis had ceased to feel the spur to glory; he had, in a way, had an abstract enjoyment of fame; and having opened it, as the ancient priests of sacrifice sought to read the future in the hearts of men, he had found nothing in the entrails of his chimera. Scorning a sentiment so wholly personal: ‘‘Glory,’ he, ‘‘is but beatified egoism.”’ : Here, perhaps, before taking leave of this exceptional boyhood, I may pronounce judgment on it by a rapidp. 7 said glance.

A short time before our separation, Lambert said to me:

‘* Apart from the general laws which I have formulated— and this, perhaps, will be my glory—laws which must be those of the human organism, the life of man is Movement determined in each individual by the pressure of some inscrutable influence—by the brain, the heart, or the sinews. All the innumerable modes of human existence result from the proportions in which these three generating forces are more or less intimately combined with the substances they assimilate in the environment they live in.”’

He stopped short, struck his forehead, and exclaimed: **How strange! In every great man whose portrait I have remarked the neck is short. Perhaps nature requires that in them the heart should be nearer to the brain!”’

Then he went on: