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Updated: June 17, 2025
But it requires a mind entirely free to give one's self up to the charm of historical dilettanteism which cities built upon the past conjure up, and although Julien prided himself, not without reason, on being above emotion, he was not possessed of his usual independence of mind during the walk which took him to his "human mosaic," as he picturesquely expressed it, and he pondered and repondered the following questions: "Boleslas Gorka returned?
On the contrary it is a token of our virile independence, our scorn for the delicatessen of education, mere dilettanteism. And this has its practical side, for if we don't know how to pronounce the words "evanescent persiflage" we can call it "bunk" or "rot." We suspect all college graduates. We don't want them in our business. They slink through our lives like pickpockets fearful of detection.
There was nothing genuine or commanding in the metaphysical dilettanteism of Bulwer: the philosophical speculations of Georges Sand are the least permanently interesting feature of her writings; and the same might in some measure be affirmed of George Eliot, whose gloomy wisdom finally confesses its inability to do more than advise us rather to bear those ills we have than fly to others that we know not of.
In short, there was a kind of "Transcendentalist" dilettanteism, which betrayed itself by a phraseology as distinctive as that of the Della Cruscans of an earlier time. In reading the following description of the "intelligent and religious persons" who belonged to the "Transcendentalist" communion, the reader must remember that it is Emerson who draws the portrait, a friend and not a scoffer:
It must fashion the mind as an artist fashions the passive metals into a musical instrument, and then every event in time might touch it to exquisite harmony. But the more ravishing the beauty which seemed offered through perfect realization of this knowledge, the more blighting would be its effects, if entertained in the spirit of a selfish dilettanteism.
So far from mankind being thrown out of work according to your notion," concluded Trost, with a peculiar nasal note of scorn, "if it were not for your incurable dilettanteism in science as in all other things if you had once understood the action of any delicate machine you would perceive that the sequences it carries throughout the realm of phenomena would require many generations, perhaps aeons, of understandings considerably stronger than yours, to exhaust the store of work it lays open."
Agriculture had no more charms for him; he was too infirm for sport; he could not, like his father, pass his old age in the busy indolence of a country gentleman's life, nor could he, as some statesmen have done, soothe his declining years by harmless and amiable literary dilettanteism.
The chase, which in early stages of human life was a necessity, has become with advancing civilization not merely a passion but a dilettanteism, and the cruel records of this pastime are among the most discreditable pages in modern literature.
But that moral dilettanteism, which thinks first of its own hands, was not confined to non-voting abolitionists; for the "thorough goers" of the old Liberty Party, could not come down from their perch on platforms which embraced all the moralities, to work on one which only said to slavery "not another foot of territory." Both these parties attacked me.
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