“Confession de Minuit” is the story of a man than whom a more uninteresting person could hardly be found in life; and yet as told by the man himself, Duhamel sustains the interest of the reader in the recital of pitiful weakness from the first page to the last without one lapse into dryness or loss of sympathy for the character, with whom, in the flesh, it would have been hard to feel any sentiment besides pity. It opens with the incident which causes the man to lose his position as a small clerk in an office through an utterly senseless—although perfectly harmless—performance: yielding to a sudden impulse to touch the ear of his employer just to assure himself that the employer was really made of flesh and blood, as himself. As society, or in this case the employer, is more afraid of an insane person than of a criminal, the reader does not share the man's feeling of injustice because he is first confronted with a revolver and then thrown speedily and bodily out of the office where he had been a faithful worker for several years; although he is able to pity the victim. The story, as told by the man himself, traces his rapid deterioration through progressive stages of self-pity, self-absorption, and inability to get hold of himself, to make an effort to re-establish himself, or even to seek advice or sympathy, until the last night when he pours out his “confession” to a stranger, with the statement that, on account of his failure in every relation in life, he is never going home to his old mother who has supported him with her small income and her needlework—nor is he ever going anywhere else, so far as the reader can see. He does not commit suicide. In fact, the story leaves one with the impression that he is merely “going crazy.” Whether or not he is insane when the recital begins with the commission of the insane act is a matter for neither the novelist nor the critic to state.
The great art of the writer lies in his ability to sustain interest at a high level in a pure character study of what is frequently described as a “shut-in personality.”
This novel seems to have been written without reference to the author's happiness or “cult of the soul” theory. It might almost be construed as a contradiction of it. One might put a fatalistic construction upon it, if one did not take a material point of view of health and disease. I do not see how anyone could get away from the conviction that the man who makes the “Midnight Confession” of his own pitiful failure in life is a victim of either his own mental limitations, or else of his particular environment, or of both. The only other way in which anyone might account for his utter inability to get hold of life or to stand up against his first discouragement is the refuge of the Radical Socialist—that society gave him no chance, the concrete illustration being the cruel way in which constituted authority, or his employer, treated his first downward step. But if the author had intended to condemn the employer and to excuse the man he would hardly have selected for this step an act which would so readily arouse a question as to the man's sanity, nor would he have followed the incident with a story in which the only development was rapidly increasing loss of touch with the outside world. No philosophy, or religion, or cult could have helped this man, who was handicapped with a nature so weak that it could not resist an impulse which would have been suppressed instantly by any well-balanced person; nor could it have given him the strength to withstand the simple discouragements that are the inevitable lot of all men. He simply was not able to cope with something—define it as one may.
One moral the story teaches. And that is the nobility of sympathy with even the weakest, most despised, and least interesting of human beings.
M. Duhamel consecrates his life to the prevention of war. It is a noble gesture. He is gifted, sane, articulate, and temperamentally adapted and adjusted to the task. Were he a platonist and not a neo-platonist, I am sure greater success would crown his efforts. Twenty-five hundred years ago a man who penetrated the mysteries of life and death more deeply than anyone before or since said to his pupils who had gathered to speed him to the Great Beyond, the ship having returned from Delos and the Eleven having decided to release Socrates from his fetters:
“The body fills us with passions and desires, and fears, and all manner of phantoms and much foolishness; and so, as the saying goes, in very truth we can never think at all for it. It alone and its desires, cause war and factions and battles for the origin of all wars is the pursuit of wealth.”
Until that pursuit can be substituted, the labours of M. Duhamel and his co-founders of “Clarté” are likely to be in vain.
CHAPTER XI
EVEN YET IT CAN'T BE TOLD—THE WHOLE TRUTH ABOUT
D. H. LAWRENCE
About twenty years ago a brilliant, unbalanced, young Austrian Jew wrote a book, “Sex and Character,” whose purpose was to show that woman had played a greater rôle in the world than her possessions warranted, that she was inherently devoid of morality, and that men should cease to procreate. In the autumn of 1903 its author, Otto Weininger, then twenty-three years old, shot and killed himself in the house in Vienna in which Beethoven had died. The author's awful theme and his tragic end caused the book to be widely read and even more widely discussed. Amongst those impressed by it was a boy of humble but uncommon parents, bred in the coal-fields of mid-England where he had led a strenuous life struggling with the sex question, contending with the stream of consciousness as it became swollen with the tributaries of puberty—“Oh, stream of hell which undermined my adolescence.” While still a youth he felt the influence of another Austrian mystic of the same faith, Sigmund Freud, who maintains that the unconscious is the real man, that its energiser and director is the libido, and that the conscious is the artificed, the engendered man whose tenant and executive is the ego. By day and by night this exceptionally gifted and burdened boy took his grist to these two mystic millers. To comfort himself, to keep up his courage in the dark on his journeys to the mill and from it, he read the Bible, the poetry of Walt Whitman and Robert Browning, and the prose of Thomas Hardy. From the Old Testament he got an unsurpassed capacity for narrative and metaphor, while the “grey poet” whetted his appetite for worship and exaltation of the human body. Well might he say of Whitman, as Dante said of Virgil:
“Tu sè'lo mio maestro e il mio autore
Tu sè'solo colui, da cui io tòlsi
Lo bèllo stile che m'à fatto onore.”