Dilettante

DILETTANTE, and it’s more common synonym, amateur both take root in words for passion & love – delect or delight in the former, amant (literally lover) in the latter. Unsurprisingly, each of these roots have grown within the romance languages – Italian and French, in turn – and were adopted during the Middle and Modern English periods.

Delight, which is our true concern here, is recorded as early as C13th and features a number of times in William Langland’s C14th poem Piers Plowman, perhaps most prominently in his account of the story of Lot:

Dilytede him in drinke · as þe deuel wolde, [He delighted in drink · as the Devil wished]

Clearly, ‘dilyte’ or delight captures a feeling of pleasure or enjoyment, perhaps also, as in the case of Lot, with a sense of moral caution. The Latin delicere– from which delight derives – is itself built from the devilish Latin laciō meaning lure or deceive. To delight is then no straightforwardly innocent activity, as is similarly evident in Chaucer’s early use of the term in his C14th poems Troilus & Criseyde and the lesser-known Anelida & Arcite – each, in their own ways, tragic stories of unrequited love. For poor Anelida we read:

The kynde of mannes herte is to delyte In thing that straunge is, also God me save! For what he may not gete, that wolde he have.

It would appear that the nature of ‘mannes’ – or at least Arcite’s – heart is then to delight in that which is held back, to desire what one may not have.

For the amateur or dilettante – the one who loves someone or something – that which is held back from their affections is professional status, particularly within the context of the arts. As both words enter the English language during the first half of the C18th they do so in a context of rapid economic growth and proto-professionalisation. A need emerges therefore to make stronger distinctions between those who are and aren’t paid for their labour, whether one is pursuing their art (writing, painting, acting, &c.) for enjoyment or remuneration. In a late C19th report in the Pall Mall Gazette, a day’s court proceedings makes this question explicit:

The judge: Was this an amateur company?—Yes; they took money out of it.—The judge: Oh, then, I don't call that amateur.

Again, dilettante is used in similar cases, however with less explicitly commercial connotations; in the same C19th period John Ruskin – the much famed writer, art-critic and protean socialist philosopher – wrote of the work of poet (and banker), Samuel Rogers:

Rogers was a mere dilettante, who felt no difference between landing where Tell leaped ashore, or standing where ‘St. Preux has stood’.

The story of these ‘mere’ dilettantes is, however, more complex than the originary ‘deceit’ concealed in the word’s etymology. Somewhat unusually, the history of the term begins definitively and intentionally, with the founding, in London, of the The Society of Dilettanti – as the group wrote in a 1769 preface to a book on Ionian Antiquities:

In the year 1734 some gentlemen who had travelled in Italy, desirous of encouraging at home a taste for those objects which had contributed to their entertainment abroad, formed themselves into a society under the name of the Dilettanti.

The purpose of this aristocratic society – and the rationale for its naming – was derived from the etymology described above: to delight in the antiquities their travels to Italy had exposed them to, their motto – 'seria ludo' – encouraging the members to treat serious matters in a playful spirit. It is clear how this spirit would irk those whose approach to such studies bent staid and consequently build a reputation of amateurism – as Horace Walpole wrote in 1743:

...a club, for which the nominal qualification is having been in Italy, and the real one being drunk…

Drunk or not, members of the group were nevertheless central in the creation of the Royal Academy of Arts and – while undoubtedly patrician – presented a mode of artistic intellectual development that differed (or would eventually help distinguish) from bourgeois ‘professional’ values. In his review of Tim Hilton’s 1985 biography of Ruskin, Raymond Williams writes:

Thus the gentleman amateur, the dilettante patron – and among these some very original writers and artists – were at a pivotal moment in English culture: launched and supported by bourgeois trade but not yet flattened into professional and business routines and conformities. There is irony in the fact that Ruskin – like Morris, the son of a wealthy bourgeois – should become a central figure in the rejection of mainline bourgeois values. But this was not, as it sometimes was later, a matter of revolt against parents: it was, by what is only an apparent paradox, what their bourgeois parents had in some ways prepared them for…

Perhaps, then we owe the dilettante a second chance – not only as marker of a sensibility which might serve to instruct us against the increasingly destructive professionalisation of the arts (and its surrounding discourse); but also as a more radical, paradoxical antecedent to the idea of a society (a whole society) free from alienated labour tout court.