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.
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