All Dilettanti are Plagiarists. They enervate and pull to pieces all that is original in manner or matter, and at the same time imitate, copy, and piece out their own emptiness with it. Thus the language gets filled with phrases and formulae stolen from all sides, which have no longer any meaning, and you may read whole books written in a fine _style_ and containing nothing. In a word, all that is really beautiful and good in true poetry is profaned, rendered common, and degraded. _In Pragmatical Poetry_ All the disadvantages of Dilettantism in Lyrical Poetry apply here in a far higher degree. Not the art alone, but the subject also, suffers more. Mixing up of different kinds. _In Histrionic Art_ Caricature of one’s own faulty individuality. Incapacitates the mind for all occupation, through the illusion of a fantastic mode of viewing objects. Expense of interest and passion, without fruit. Eternal circle of monotonous, ever repeated, ineffectual activity. (There is nothing so attractive to Dilettanti as rehearsals. Professional actors hate them.) Special forbearance and pampering of theatrical Dilettanti with applause. Eternal stimulation towards a passionate condition and behavior, without balance. Feeding all hateful passions, with the worst results for civic and domestic existence. Blunting the feeling for poetry. Use of exalted language for commonplace sentiments. A rag-fair of thoughts, commonplaces, and descriptions in the memory. Pervading affectation and mannerism, reaching also into life. Most injurious indulgence towards the indifferent and faulty, in a public and quite personal case. The general tolerance for the home-made becomes in this case more pronounced. Most pernicious use of amateur comedies for the education of children, where it turns into caricature. In the same manner, the most dangerous of all amusements for universities, &c. Destruction of the ideality of art, because the Dilettante, not being able to raise himself through the appropriation of artistic ideas and traditions, must do all through a pathological reality. THE THEORY OF LITERATURE THE PRODUCTION OF A NATIONAL CLASSIC[5] (_Literarischer Sansculottismus_) (1795) Those who consider it an absolute duty to connect definite concepts with the words which they employ in speaking and writing will very rarely use the expressions, “classical author” and “classical work.”