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Updated: May 16, 2025
In spite of personal wishes, intentions, and prejudices; in spite of civil wars and diplomatic education; in spite of determination to be actual, daily, and practical, Henry Adams found himself, at twenty-eight, still in English society, dragged on one side into English dilettantism, which of all dilettantism he held the most futile; and, on the other, into American antiquarianism, which of all antiquarianism he held the most foolish.
I began to think after he had gone that my study of Shakespeare was mere dilettantism but I afterwards came to the conclusion that if a man wishes to spoil himself for Shakespeare, the best thing he can do is to turn Shakespearian critic. My worst enemy at this time was ill health, and it was more distressing than it otherwise would have been, because I had such responsibilities upon me.
On the other hand a foundation probably was laid in Etruria, even in early times, for that insipid accumulation of learned lumber, particularly of a theological and astrological nature, by virtue of which afterwards, when amidst the general decay antiquarian dilettantism began to flourish, the Tuscans divided with the Jews, Chaldeans, and Egyptians the honour of being admired as primitive sources of divine wisdom.
To convince ourselves of it, we are not obliged to take as our standard the idealized society which Castiglione depicts as discussing the loftiest sentiments and aims of human life at the court of Guidobaldo of Urbino, and Pietro Bembo at the castle of Asolo The society described by Bandello, with all the frivolities which may be laid to its charge, enables us to form the best notion of the easy and polished dignity, of the urbane kindliness, of the intellectual freedom, of the wit and the graceful dilettantism, which distinguished these circles.
A susceptible person does not like to indulge his tastes in this kind without the apology of some trivial necessity: he goes to see a wood-lot, or to look at the crops, or to fetch a plant or a mineral from a remote locality, or he carries a fowling-piece or a fishing-rod. I suppose this shame must have a good reason. A dilettantism in nature is barren and unworthy.
With Tasso and Spenser comes to a close the school of Boiardo, the small number of real artists who finally gave an enduring and beautiful shape to that strangely mixed and altered material of romantic epic left behind by the Middle Ages; comes to an end at least till our own day of appreciative and deliberate imitation and selection and rearrangement of the artistic forms of the past. Until the revival (after much study and criticism) by our own poets of Arthur and Gudrun and the Fortunate Isles, the world had had enough of mediæval romance. Chivalry had avowedly ended in chamberlainry; the devotion to women in the official routine of the cicisbeo; the last romance to which the late Renaissance had clung, which made it sympathize with Huon, Ogier, Orlando, and Rinaldo, which had made it take delight still in the fairyland of Oberon, of Fallerina, of Alcina, of Armida, of Acrasia, the romance of the new world, had also turned into prose, prose of blood-stained filth. The humanistic and rationalistic men of the Renaissance had doubtless early begun to turn up their noses in dainty dilettantism or scientific contempt, at what were later to be called by Montaigne, "Ces Lancelots du Lac, ces Amadis, ces Huons et tels fatras di livres
His religious faith did not disturb his mind, for he did not measure men and their works by its rules; and he would have been incapable of putting together a history of art according to the Bible. This great Catholic had at times a very pagan soul; and he could enjoy without a qualm the musical dilettantism of Renan and the sonorous nihilism of Leconte de Lisle.
The amiability and polite affectionateness, perceptible even yet through the dilettantism, may have been pleasant to him; and he may have noted the subtle and delicate expression of sympathy with his domestic unhappiness which seems to be conveyed in the passages quoted, as if by accident, from Petrarch, Horace, Chiabrera, and Tibullus.
And the average man, as to whom the artist's ignorance is often astounding, must for ever constitute the main part of the material in which he works. Above all, let not the creative artist suppose that the antidote to the circle of dilettantism is the circle of social reform. It is not.
Hence the situation is the same as in the field of vocational guidance. In both cases a vague longing for psychological analysis and psychological measurement, but in both cases so far everything has remained on the level of helpless psychological dilettantism.
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