There is a type of individual whose failure to bring his performance up to the standard which his intelligence would seem to warrant takes the form of inability to face concrete situations. Unable to adjust himself to his environment when realities present difficulties that call for solution, such an individual becomes burdened with a sense of his own inadequacy; and from this he is inclined to seek escape in impersonal abstractions, usually described by him as ideals. Mystic philosophy in some form is the frequent refuge of such tender souls from their own sense of inability to cope with life and its concrete problems.
Throughout the record divergence between ideals and acts stands out. Idealism is everywhere pled as the basis of the hesitation to act. The conscious and foredoomed disparity between conception and realisation is made the excuse for the absence of effort.
“Practical life makes me afraid. And yet, at the same time, it attracts me; I have need of it. Family life, especially, in all its delightfulness, in all its moral depth, appeals to me like a duty. Sometimes I cannot escape from the ideal of it. A companion of my life, of my work, of my thoughts, of my hopes; within, a common worship, towards the world outside, kindness and beneficence; educations to undertake, the thousand and one moral relations which develop round the first—all these ideas intoxicate me sometimes. But I put them aside, because every hope is, as it were, an egg whence a serpent may issue instead of a dove, because every joy missed is a stab, because every seed confided to destiny contains an ear of grief which the future may develop.”
“I have never felt any inward assurance of genius, or any presentiment of glory or happiness. I have never seen myself in imagination great or famous, or even a husband, a father, an influential citizen. This indifference to the future, this absolute self-distrust, are, no doubt, to be taken as signs. What dreams I have are vague and indefinite; I ought not to live, for I am now scarcely capable of living.—Recognise your place; let the living live; and you, gather together your thoughts, leave behind you a legacy of feeling and ideas; you will be more useful so. Renounce yourself, accept the cup given you, with its honey and its gall, as it comes. Bring God down into your heart. Embalm your soul in him now, make within you a temple for the Holy Spirit; be diligent in good works, make others happier and better. Put personal ambition away from you, and then you will find consolation in living or in dying, whatever may happen to you.”
Complaining of a restless feeling which was not the need for change, he said,
“It is rather the fear of what I love, the mistrust of what charms me, the unrest of happiness.... And is there not another reason for all this restlessness, in a certain sense of void—of incessant pursuit of something wanting?—of longing for a truer peace and a more entire satisfaction? Neighbours, friends, relations—I love them all; and so long as these affections are active, they leave in me no room for a sense of want. But yet they do not fill my heart; and that is why they have no power to fix it. I am always waiting for the woman and the work which shall be capable of taking entire possession of my soul, and of becoming my end and aim.”
Amiel's life was a constant negation. His ideals were all concerned with concepts of perfection, with the absolute, and being sane enough to realise the impossibility of attaining such perfection, he refused compromises. He would not play the game for its own sake, nor for the fine points. If he could not win all the points—and being sane he knew beforehand that he could not—he preferred not to play at all. But he made a virtue of his weakness and called it idealism. Had he possessed the courage to hitch his wagon to a star—and let the star carry him where it would; had he heeded the warning,
“And the sin I impute to each frustrate ghost
Is—the unlit lamp and the ungird loin”;
or gone the way of thousands of practical idealists who have made their idealism an incentive to action and thereby left the world richer for having passed through it, he would have needed no excuse for his failure to attain perfection. On the contrary, he would have learned with the sureness of a hard-learned lesson that idealism is worth our loyalty only when it becomes an inspiration to living, and that it is worse than futile when it serves merely as a standard for thought or an excuse for failure.