The country I am entering is the strangest on earth. From a distance, glimpsed through mists, it seems warm and pale. Yet draw closer and you will discover it lies under the fiercest sun—though that sun sheds no light. From afar, you would swear it was the realm of rest and indifference but look more carefully and you will see a hub of terrible activity—though what drives this activity defies comprehension. People rush about, urgent and eager, their smiles worn like masks. They visit the fields but return with neither fruit nor flower. They brush against everything, grasp nothing. They worship by turns at Jupiter-Ammon’s temple and Christ’s church. Faithless, they immerse themselves in studies that only Faith can justify or make fruitful. One moment you would swear they were ascetics and Church Fathers, knowing as much theology as Origen or Aquinas, but wait, and you will hear them ‘explain’ ecstasy as hypnotism, miracles as hallucination! They are charming company, and from the most distant realms—Pure Thought, Science, Poetry, Action. Kings and captains journey here for the pleasure of meeting these nobodies without titles or achievements who are nothing yet possess an uncanny gift for drawing out the best in everyone. Still, beneath their eternally placid smiles, they are not happy. Perhaps they secretly long to create something themselves, but their hearts harbour such a tangle of contradictory affirmations and negations, all frozen in place, that they are doomed to eternal paralysis—Buridan’s ass incarnate! Perhaps they secretly long to engage with life, to become fully human, but Dilettantism holds them captive. They are the Dilettanti.
Let me correct that: they do create. But what they create is contradiction itself. They cannot address the same subject twice without reversing themselves—yes becomes no, black becomes white. Should they write a book, it proves such a parade of blatant contradictions that readers wonder: is this mockery or madness? Yet the dilettante appears utterly sincere, and each particular judgement, taken alone, seems perfectly sound. No, the Dilettante is deeply sincere and deeply wise—too wise, in fact, not to see both sides of every question with equal clarity, and too sincere not to articulate everything he sees. If he swings back to affirming what he has just denied, it’s because he has stumbled upon some fresh argument for affirmation along the way. He won’t dream, however, of erasing his negation, suspecting that round the next corner lurks irrefutable proof that denial was the wiser course all along.
Dilettantism is—to borrow their jargon!—the anaesthesia of creative power through hypertrophy of receptive understanding. In religion and philosophy, it means death and void; in art, it’s both supreme danger and vital safeguard. Faithless, the dilettante remains sterile, and that superior smile playing on the lips of someone whose every look, gesture and word radiates extraordinary intelligence has a chilling effect on others’ creativity. Yet without prejudice, he achieves justice. Where the man of aesthetic action, swept along by passion and the natural bent of his genius, rushes to praise or damn, the dilettante weighs intention against accident, enters caveats of taste, and suspends judgement. For genius, dilettantism represents an alluring form of death. It’s the abyss that beckons those who sense the gulf between their vision and their power to realise it, and who drift towards it half-willingly. Though dilettanti appear to savour every pleasure equally, they suffer more than most, paralysed by choice. Their affliction is, quintessentially, Ennui in evening dress.
Dilettantism dissolves overripe societies more effectively than any critical spirit with which it’s sometimes confused. The confusion likely arises because they share nothing at all, and because we have invented that splendid nonsense: the Dilettante Critic—the critic who judges works through the prism of shifting, rootless preferences. True Criticism, which demands a mind anchored in unchanging principles92, stands at the polar opposite of dilettantism.
This is, I tell you, the disease that marks the twilight of civilisation, and I can think of almost no one today who has escaped infection. In some it declares itself openly, violently. Nearly everyone in that generation I accused of idleness could retort by pointing to their footprints across this strange, melancholy territory. M. Mendès passed through it some time ago. But one monarch rules this land: M. Ernest Renan
I’m not here to assess M. Renan’s philosophical and religious oeuvre. Yet since I cannot divorce substance from style, I marvel endlessly at how this language—woven from air, crystalline and weightless, the most transparent imaginable—can clothe such murky, duplicitous thoughts, so ponderous and evasive, this conviction forever slipping through one’s fingers, this faith riddled with doubt, this doubt shot through with faith—or rather, this doubting faith and this believing doubt. The chasm between form and content strikes me as unnatural, troubling, allowing thought such unexpected reversals, such latitude for manoeuvre. With M. Renan, the style—rich but never ostentatious—hovers around ideas that are simultaneously lucid and perverse. It has the comfortable ease of a worldly prelate wearing his sombre vestments without undue solemnity, and with wit so refined, so devilishly refined!, he casts the charms of his prose like sand in our eyes, smuggling in under cover of this dazzling display notions we don’t immediately detect in our enchantment. Or else, having established some unassailable truth in straightforward terms, showing it from an angle that delights with its novelty, he veers off on a tangent through some parenthetical remark, leading us down uncertain paths we would never have followed without the trust he has cultivated. But at the end of the journey, at the precipice where logic and our own impatience should have driven him, he wheels round serenely—his smile phosphorescent with irony—and retraces his steps to our starting point. There he pauses to let us catch our breath, then recaptures our flagging confidence, dazzling and soothing it at once. He works deeper into our trust through displays of bottomless erudition matched by apparently bottomless sincerity, until suddenly, through what I can only call sleight-of-hand wedded to genius, he spirits us down that second path. This one is darker and more treacherous than the first, yet he smooths it, illuminates it, teaches us to love it—only to strand us there, as before, in supreme doubt where he appears to triumph. Yet he styles himself, and we are prepared to accept him as, a believer.
M. Anatole France too calls himself a believer, if we credit his poetry, but his prose breathes scepticism. Such are the contradictions of Dilettantism! And here the case grows particularly intriguing. The subjects that seduce M. France the poet—Les Noces Corinthiennes, for instance, or that Leuconoë, so magnificent in certain passages that it bears comparison only with itself—are mystical, and he handles them with what seems wonderfully authentic mystical feeling. But let him turn to Saint Anthony in prose, and he will show us in that near-divine visionary—that genius of early Christianity who established countless monastic orders and gave them a Rule we still admire for its wisdom and rigour—nothing but a clinical case. For him, Mysticism becomes merely a nervous complaint. What are we to make of this? Was the beautiful poem just a parlour game? Clearly M. France withholds himself from his work. Art remains for him merely a splendid diversion. He is, in a word, a dilettante.
Dilettantism possesses a faint afterglow of certain virtues. It lacks pride. It cherishes the past, leaves the present unmolested, doesn’t tyrannise the future. Sometimes we need its help to achieve perfect justice—to appreciate with equal sympathy minds opposed to each other or resistant to our own convictions. Consider M. Vacquerie, whose Formosa I mentioned among those dramatic works that pierce the darkness of contemporary theatre with welcome shafts of light. Or Madame Ackermann, an atheist who, though otherwise talentless, touched genius for one brief instant. Or M. Hello, that Christian philosopher one often admires but who sometimes exasperates through “excesses of sincerity” that cloud his vision, exhaust the reader, and force one to close the book. We need this borrowed dilettantism to appreciate M. Octave Feuillet for one fine book (M. de Camors), M. Droz for similar reasons (Babolain), M. Hector Malot for his early novels, M. Fabre for his penetrating studies of clerical life, and M. Theuriet not only for his charming feeling for nature but perhaps also for the soothing worldview in his works—those epic dialogues between Town and Country, with rustic lovers and city-dwelling beloveds, yielding piercing dramas of love thwarted by conflicting allegiances.
Léon Hennique Novel 