In his conception of happiness Duhamel reads himself and his own emotions into all things. He avers that the algæ growing in a tank of water with nothing but a few grains of dust and sunlight are happy because they subsist and work out their humble joy. Has any sentient soul told him he was happy under parallel circumstances? That is the question. He reads his own philosophy into the algæ. To him to be living as nature intended one to live is to be happy. But who can say? Just here I am reminded of a quotation from Anatole France of which Duhamel makes use in this book: “Men have cut each others' throats over the meaning of a word.” People might argue forever over the meaning of the word “happiness” and never get anywhere.
Duhamel says that happiness is the ultimate end of life and that religion is the search for happiness in a life to come after this. Everybody wants to be happy in this life and some people expect to be happy in a life after this—of these two assertions there can be no doubt. But Duhamel says there is no life after this, and that the sole object of life is to be happy in this world. He does, however, speak of “saving the soul,” and he implies his belief in God. He says substantially that the plants are happy because they are fulfilling their destiny, or doing what God meant them to do; and implies that man will be happy if he does the same. Very likely. But shall he strive to fulfill his destiny—to do what God meant him to do—merely in order to be happy? Or shall he strive to fulfill his destiny—and happiness will follow incidentally? Which should be his conscious end, happiness or the fulfilment of his destiny? Most religious people would say the latter. Duhamel says the former. But, for working purposes they are about the same, except that, for people who are at all temperamental or who meet with many discouragements, it is frequently difficult to strive for a happiness which seems elusive. Whereas, such people, if they are spiritually minded, can always find a stimulus in trying to do what they were intended to do. And if they believe in God the stimulus becomes greater. And if they can believe that the soul grows through every honest effort—that nothing is ever lost, whether the result appears to be success or failure—and that the limits of its growth are not bounded by what their senses can tell them in this life, their capacity for striving becomes sometimes amazing. How else account for the man who expends ten times the effort in playing a losing game that he would have spent in one that promised an easy success?
That the soul will find its greatest happiness in the contemplation of itself, is Duhamel's belief. “He is the happiest man who best understands his happiness; for he is of all men most fully aware that it is only the lofty idea, the untiring courageous human idea, that separates gladness from sorrow,” he quotes from Maeterlinck. A man should think about his soul at least once every day. But it would be safe to say that for one man who finds happiness in a life of contemplation ten find it in a life of action. The wholesome, sane, average, happy men—of whom Duhamel is an excellent example—are mostly men of action. The very existence of this book is a contradiction of his happiness of contemplation theory as applied to himself. It may well be questioned whether Duhamel would have written “Possession du Monde” if he had not been the kind of man who finds happiness in giving expression to every emotion. Besides self-study is safe only for strong natures. Self-analysis was the undoing of the man in one of Duhamel's best books, “Confession de Minuit.”
Finally, what is “happiness”? Is it merely a feeling? Gladness? If that were all, and the ultimate end of life, would not the logical conclusion be that the happiest—and therefore the most successful—man would be the joyful maniac?
The publication of M. Duhamel which has the greatest popularity is the one that his admirers would wish he had not written: “Possession du Monde.” It is a protest against the evaluation of life commercially, and a plea for a moral or spiritual standard. This is a topic for an epoch maker, and one who has not a vision or a plan should not essay it. M. Duhamel may have both, but he does not reveal them. He displays only the wish that the world should be better. In the jargon of the Freudian, it is a wish-fulfilment that does not realise. It is neither well done nor convincing, and it has been well and convincingly done by many writers, and still we have not profited by it. Amiel did it; Maeterlinck did it; Karr did it; and “others too numerous to mention.” They may have had some effect upon individuals, but the history of the past eight years shows that they had no effect upon the world at large, its evolution, or devolution. Moreover, there is a note of unction and self-satisfaction running through the book that is displeasing, if not offensive. It is quite true, or likely to be true, that “to think about the soul, to think about it at least once in the confusion of every crowded day, is indeed the beginning of salvation,” but there is a book in which this is said in a more convincing way than M. Duhamel can ever hope to say it.
Viewed from a literary standpoint alone, the book is in keeping with, if not quite up to, the standard of his other works. His prose is always musical, and he often creates an atmosphere rather than an edifice. He is never emphatic, mandatory, severe, superlative. He is soft, gentle, often ironical, but always human.
Two remarkable pieces of fiction constitute Duhamel's output since the four war books: “Les Hommes Abandonnés” (Abandoned Men) and “Confession de Minuit” (Midnight Confession). The first contains eight histories which try to prove that when men are gathered together in a crowd they are abandoned by the individual soul. It is an illustration on the reverse side in favour of individualism.
“Confession de Minuit” is particularly significant as being named by the author in the interview as his favourite work. “As a human research I believe that it is the one with the most meaning,” he said of this novel; and it is, therefore, a matter of self-congratulation on the part of the writer that he found this book to be the one which interpreted to him the author's particular genius in the most convincing and interesting light The story has its bearing upon the author's theories because it illustrates more clearly than any of his other works a statement made by him in the interview:
“People often reproach me with being interested only in my stories with sick people or with children. Healthy men do not register the motives which govern them. When one studies a sick person one is able to see the relations between moral characteristics which in the healthy man exist, but are hidden.” However, I hold that the average man, healthy, typical, scarcely exists in literature, and that the most interesting creations from the human point of view had for their subjects men who were unbalanced—from Hamlet to Leopold Bloom; from Raskolnikov to Dorian Gray.
“Confession de Minuit” is the self-revelation of a man who was decidedly unbalanced. As a bit of art work the book is unique and remarkable. Almost the unity of a short-story is preserved without recourse to any of the usual machinery of the ordinary novel, such as plot, action, or conversation, except a very little of the most casual nature. To a person who reads fiction for character delineation this absence of trappings is a distinct gain.