Le Dilettantisme

Le Dilettantisme

Critique of contemporary French literature

Like a star-gazer who would tell us that astronomy is vanity, yet offers in exchange his own descriptions and fancies of the hour, so this contemporary literature of dilettantism thinks of life as a mere phantasmagoria, pleasant to observe but vain to understand. Moreover, amid true and false, good and ill, why limit our interest by any preference? Renan was founder of the school, Jules Lemaltre and Anatole France are its leaders, Maurice Barres its exaggerator. Their qualities and defects are manifest; charm of style and fancy, wide and varied interests, subtle perceptions, refined enjoyment: but corresponding lack of interpretation and of judgment, paralysis of will, incapacity even of conceiving action. Such literature is that of overgrown children; the great masters have always reached manhood, have expressed its qualities, and hence inspire them.

Essay by Abbe Felix Klein

Headpiece and tailpiece by Nellie Baxter, Marion A. Mason, and Annie Mackie

Patrick Geddes & Colleagues

Autumn 1895

Public Domain
Toronto Metropolitan University Library Archives and Special Collections

Evergreen Digital Edition, edited by Lorraine Janzen Kooistra, 2016-2018. Yellow Nineties 2.0, Toronto Metropolitan University Centre for Digital Humanities, 2019.

French

Image, text

Essay

EGV2o_decorp_p83
EGV2o_head_p83
EGV2o_decorp_p88
EGV2o_tail_p88

30 October 2017, ljk
3 January 2023, rb

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Dublin Core Metadata