Amiel coddled his sensibilities for fear of rebuff; he hid his intellectuality in the diary lest he should suffer from the clear light of publicity; he denied life out of apprehension that life might bruise his ego. He told himself that he was protecting his idealism. In reality he was protecting his egoism. If he had been the victim of a psychosis he would not have recognised his limitations nor stated them so clearly. It was sanity that enabled him to see the impossibility of attaining the perfection of which he dreamed and wrote. It was cowardice, not a psychosis, which made him refuse to act in the face of this knowledge. Had he been a Roman Catholic, he might have rested upon the conception of absolute perfection offered in the authority of the Church and the life of the cloister. But being a Protestant, both by inheritance and by conscience, he had to think things out for himself; and the more he thought the wider became the breach between his conception of perfection and his hope of realising it. He was tortured by a conscience goading him to action and a temperament paralysing him with the fear that the end would fall short of anticipation. He lacked the moral courage to put his power to the test and be disappointed. He was without the stamina of the man who fights and runs away. He was too much of an egoist to risk a losing game, and in consequence he never tasted the sweet flavour of work well done—even though the end was apparent failure.
The growing sense of inadequacy between the conscience to act and the temperament to deny action is written plainly in these random quotations from the “Journal” during the record of many years. At thirty he wrote,
“He who is silent is forgotten; he who abstains is taken at his word; he who does not advance, falls back; he who stops is overwhelmed, distanced, crushed; he who ceases to grow greater becomes smaller; he who leaves off gives up; the stationary condition is the beginning of the end—it is the terrible symptom which precedes death. To live, is to achieve a perpetual triumph; it is to assert oneself against destruction, against sickness, against the annulling and dispersion of one's physical and moral being. It is to will without ceasing, or rather to refresh one's will day by day.”
Ten years later when the conflict was closing in upon him he wrote,
“In me an intellect which would fain forget itself in things, is contradicted by a heart which yearns to live in human beings. The uniting link of the two contradictions is the tendency towards self-abandonment, towards ceasing to will and exist for oneself, towards laying down one's own personality, and losing—dissolving—oneself in love and anticipation. What I lack above all things is character, will, individuality. But, as always happens, the appearance is exactly the contrary of the reality, and my outward life the reverse of my true and deepest aspiration. I whose whole being—heart and intellect—thirsts to absorb itself in reality, in its neighbour man, in Nature and in God—I, whom solitude devours and destroys—I shut myself up in solitude and seem to delight only in myself and to be sufficient for myself.”
At forty-seven, when most men's work is at the high tide of realisation, he said,
“I have no more strength left, I wish for nothing; but that is not what is wanted. I must wish what God wishes; I must pass from indifference to sacrifice, and from sacrifice to self-devotion. The cup I would fain put away from me is the misery of living, the shame of existing and suffering as a common creature who has missed his vocation; it is the bitter and increasing humiliation of declining power, of growing old under the weight of one's own disapproval, and the disappointment of one's friends.”
At fifty-four,
“What use have I made of my gifts, of my special circumstances, of my half century of existence? What have I paid back to my country?... Are all the documents I have produced ... anything better than withered leaves?... When all is added up—nothing! And worst of all, it has not been a life used up in the service of some adored object, or sacrificed to any future hope.”
Psychology teaches that too much emphasis cannot be laid in education upon the reconciliation of ideals and performance, nor too much effort devoted to the formation of habits of facing concrete situations squarely, reaching definite decisions, and thereby making efforts, however ineffective and crude, to link ideals to action. It has been proved that if natural dispositions are ignored or denied by the repression of normal primary instincts, disassociation of personality is likely to be the result. Amiel's ineffectiveness, his lack of dynamic quality, while in no sense a psychosis, may be considered as a personality defect. How far this defect may have been conditioned by his denial of the basic springs of human action cannot be stated. Neither can it, in any impartial estimate of his life and personality, be ignored. Next to the instinct of self-preservation, the instinct for the preservation of the race to which one belongs is the dominant impulse of the individual. No system of thought, no plan of life can ignore it and not pay the penalty. Amiel's diary is full of such denials, and they frequently carry with them the consciousness that he realised the death sentence to aspiration and realisation which he was reading to himself between the lines.