Publisher's Synopsis
A great soul's adventures among the terrors of pessimism. By the author of "Civilization," to which was awarded the famous Goncourt fiction prize of 1918. Georges Duhamel, poet, philosopher and surgeon, served for four years with a French mobile hospital in the midst of the human wreckage left in the wake of the first world war.
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Georges Duhamel belongs to that comparatively small but very talented group of French writers, of which Henri Barbusse and Romaine Rolland are perhaps the best known exponents. Their common spirit is a sentimental materialism, which is more German than French in origin and character, but which they clothe in a beauty of diction and lucidity of style that is their own native birthright. In consequence, they have done, and are doing, much harm; for in their books the enemy is presented to us in the loved guise of a friend. Denying the immortality of the soul, they see present human happiness as the only good, and present suffering as the only evil. Their powerful pictures of the misery of war are unrelieved by any true perception of the nobility and heroism to which its courageous acceptance has given birth; and their thought emanates an insidious pacifism, like a poisonous gas, that enervates our spirit until we rise above it into the clear clean airs of eternal realities.
The Heart's Domain does not deal explicitly with the war, though it was written during it. It is a collection of essays upon what the author would have us consider "the inner life," "the sublime and familiar colloquy that every being pursues with the better part of himself." He turns to this inner domain of the heart, not for explanation of the outer life, or for strength and inspiration with which to meet its duties, but rather as a refuge from the reality of its pain. Set over, thus, against reality, every thought or vision of beauty that he gives us is made, itself, unreal. We move, as in a dream, through a world empty of all solid substance. The exquisite writing, terse and brilliant aphorisms, and wealth of imagery which mark the book, offer no nourishment to mind or heart, but only a cloying sweetness that soon becomes utterly repulsive. There is a tragic poverty in such a heart's domain as this-in such an anemic, psychic counterfeit of the robust and virile reality of the true inner life. But it would be more tragic if it were not so largely willful. On every page it is as though the author said, "On reality I will not feed. I choose to starve. But I shall starve gazing at the fancied flower of the root I will not eat. Come you, and gaze and starve with me."
-The Theosophical Quarterly, Volume 17
