For it is not upon undigested refuse
that people can be nourished, but solely upon the milk which secretes
from the very blood itself.
The wig is the appropriate symbol of the man of learning, pure and
simple. It adorns the head with a copious quantity of false hair, in
lack of one's own: just as erudition means endowing it with a great
mass of alien thought. This, to be sure, does not clothe the head so
well and naturally, nor is it so generally useful, nor so suited for
all purposes, nor so firmly rooted; nor when alien thought is used up,
can it be immediately replaced by more from the same source, as is
the case with that which springs from soil of one's own. So we find
Sterne, in his _Tristram Shandy_, boldly asserting that _an ounce of a
man's own wit is worth a ton of other people's_.
And in fact the most profound erudition is no more akin to genius than
a collection of dried plants in like Nature, with its constant flow
of new life, ever fresh, ever young, ever changing. There are no two
things more opposed than the childish naivete of an ancient author and
the learning of his commentator.
_Dilettanti, dilettanti!_ This is the slighting way in which those who
pursue any branch of art or learning for the love and enjoyment of the
thing,--_per il loro diletto_, are spoken of by those who have taken
it up for the sake of gain, attracted solely by the prospect of money.
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