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To her firm spirit the idea of working in gloves savoured of dilettantism. "You see a lady and all red Deepings are gentlefolk of course a lady must have good hands," said the Honourable John Ruffin in a deprecating tone. "Yes, sir," said Pollyooly solemnly.
Bay Lodge and Joe Stickney had given birth to the wholly new and original party of Conservative Christian Anarchists, to restore true poetry under the inspiration of the "Gotterdammerung." Such a party saw no inspiration in Baireuth, where landscape, history, and audience were relatively stodgy, and where the only emotion was a musical dilettantism that the master had abhorred.
And I take refuge in dilettantism, in what a pedant would call demi-mondaine philosophy, as a shelter against the pedantry of specialists, against the philosophy of the professional philosophers. And who knows?... Progress usually comes from the barbarian, and there is nothing more stagnant than the philosophy of the philosophers and the theology of the theologians. Let them talk to us of Europe!
Yet we are already looking forward to the time in the near future when our intercourse, however circumscribed, with this nation will be essentially pacific, and when we can revert to our cherished narrow interests and our easy-going dilettantism.
As I write these words, I am conscious that this will strike many readers as the expression of a superfine and selfish dilettantism, arising no doubt from morbid lack of sympathy with the world into which Heaven has put us. What! become absentees from the poor, much troubled Present; turn your backs to Realities, become idle strollers in the Past?
My woodchuck invented that sort of thing all over again on Hubbard squash vines. After some weeks I had a new and strange race of decorative plants that, like Katisha's left elbow, people came miles to see. But they did not produce squashes. Dilettantism doesn't.
It is only when this homage becomes mere eye-service, when a book radically unworthy of such dignity is too delicately cultivated, too richly bound, that a poor dilettantism comes in between the reader and what he reads. Indeed, the best of volumes may, in my estimation, be destroyed as a possession by a binding so sumptuous that no fingers dare to open it for perusal.
Yet what interested him was not the outworn tale but the pathological fact that the reminiscences of the aged are symptomatic of hardening of the arteries. Mentally he weighed his father, gave him a year, eighteen months, and that, not because he was anxious for his shoes, but out of sheer dilettantism.
What can ever happen henceforth, save infinite railroads and crystal palaces, peace and plenty, cockaigne and dilettantism, to the end of time? Is it not full sixty whole years since the first French revolution, and six whole years since the revolution of all Europe?
In manners and speech something of the brutalism which was at the root of the English character at the time began to colour the refinement of the preceding age. Dilettantism gave way to learning and speculation; in the place of Bolingbroke came Adam Smith; in the place of Addison, Johnson. In a way it is the solidest and sanest time in English letters.
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