The manner in which this intellectual idiosyncrasy we have been describing gradually affected Amiel’s life supplies abundant proof of its actuality and sincerity. It is a pitiful story. Amiel might have been saved from despair by love and marriage, by paternity, by strenuous and successful literary production; and this mental habit of his--this tyranny of ideal conceptions, helped by the natural accompaniment of such a tyranny, a critical sense of abnormal acuteness--stood between him and everything healing and restoring. “I am afraid of an imperfect, a faulty synthesis, and I linger in the provisional, from timidity and from loyalty.” “As soon as a thing attracts me I turn away from it; or rather, I cannot either be content with the second-best, or discover anything which satisfies my aspiration. The real disgusts me, and I cannot find the ideal.” And so one thing after another is put away. Family life attracted him perpetually. “I cannot escape,” he writes, “from the ideal of it. A companion, of my life, of my work, of my thoughts, of my hopes; within a common worship--toward the world outside kindness and beneficence; education to undertake; the thousand and one moral relations which develop round the first--all these ideas intoxicate me sometimes.” But in vain. “Reality, the present, the irreparable, the necessary, repel and even terrify me. I have too much imagination, conscience, and penetration and not enough character. _The life of thought alone seems to me to have enough elasticity and immensity, to be free enough from the irreparable; practical life makes me afraid._ I am distrustful of myself and of happiness because I know myself. The ideal poisons for me all imperfect possession. And I abhor useless regrets and repentance.”
It is the same, at bottom, with his professional work. He protects the intellectual freedom, as it were, of his students with the same jealousy as he protects his own. There shall be no oratorical device, no persuading, no cajoling of the mind this way or that. “A professor is the priest of his subject, and should do the honors of it gravely and with dignity.” And so the man who in his private Journal is master of an eloquence and a poetry, capable of illuminating the most difficult and abstract of subjects, becomes in the lecture-room a dry compendium of universal knowledge. “Led by his passion for the whole,” says M. Scherer, “Amiel offered his hearers, not so much a series of positive teachings, as an index of subjects, a framework--what the Germans call a _Schematismus_. The skeleton was admirably put together, and excellent of its kind, and lent itself admirably to a certain kind of analysis and demonstration; but it was a skeleton--flesh, body, and life were wanting.”