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To Edwin, who was just beginning to touch the planes of worldliness and of dilettantism in art, to Edwin, with the mysterious and haughty creature at his elbow, they seemed to have no more in common with himself and her than animals had.
The party system has another consequence which will not stand scrutiny in the light of reality; it is dilettantism in the conduct of the nation's principal business. Some of the chief branches of the executive work of government are the provinces of special arts and sciences, each of which to master requires the work of a lifetime.
But now, were Dilettantism, Scepticism, Triviality, and all that sorrowful brood, cast out of us, as, by God's blessing, they shall one day be; were faith in the shows of things entirely swept out, replaced by clear faith in the things, so that a man acted on the impulse of that only, and counted the other non-extant; what a new livelier feeling towards this Burns were it!
No sooner had one speaker convinced his hearers that women would precipitate anarchy by their radicalism than the next proved equally conclusively that an era of dilettantism and millinery shop legislation would be the inevitable result of woman suffrage; no sooner were they filled with the horror of the degradation of politics by the class of women certain to participate in it, than another speaker assured them that politics was already so vile that any woman would be hopelessly contaminated who had anything to do with the gangrenous growth, and yet another showed that women wouldn't vote anyhow.
The very brush- work expresses the difference between the two; the crowding of nervous tentative lines, the subtler gradations of color, somehow convey a suggestion of dilettantism. You feel what a delicate instrument the man is, how every sense has been tuned to the finest responsiveness." Mrs. Mellish paused, blushing a little at the echo of her own eloquence.
The Government had for a long time held aloof, with the weak-kneed dilettantism with which it handled everything which did not concern the immediate interests of the politicians: and it never occurred to it that it might be less dangerous frankly to maintain the most dangerous doctrines than to leave them free to creep into the veins of the people and ruin their capacity for war, while armaments were being prepared.
Dilettantism is incompatible with a certain elevation of mind, and with a certain degree of "moral perfection," but not with technical proficiency. Some of the most accomplished critics merely make a trade of their skill, and have never reflected on the ends to which their art is a means. It would, however, be wrong to infer that science itself has nothing to fear from dilettantism.
It was an age of literary dilettantism, when nearly everybody wrote books who knew how to write; and in the drab monotony of Roman supremacy, the triumph over the Jews, which had placed the Flavian house on the throne, was a happy opportunity for ambitious authors.
He was no less terrified by the intensity of the sentiment of which he had become the object. Thoroughly superficial and thoroughly selfish, immersed in his London life of dilettantism and gossip, the weekly letters from France with their burden of a desperate affection appalled him and bored him by turns.
And one cannot help feeling, while reading the magnificent oration on Supra-sensual Love, which Castiglione, in his admirable book "The Courtier," puts into the mouth of the profligate Bembo, how near mysticism may lie not merely to dilettantism or to Pharisaism, but to sensuality itself.
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