rmer that they may
conceive a fictitious execution of the latter. Stimulants
may refresh, and may even temporarily comfort, the body
after labor of brain; they do not help it--not even in the
lighter kinds of labor. They unseat the judgment, pervert
vision. Productions, cast off by the aid of the use of them,
are but flashy, trashy stuff--or exhibitions of the
prodigious in wildness or grotesque conceit, of the kind
which Hoffman's tales give, for example; he was one of the
few at all eminent, who wrote after drinking.

To reinforce the opinion of the great Englishman I cannot forbear
giving that of an equally great American:

Never [wrote Emerson] can any advantage be taken of nature
by a trick. The spirit of the world, the great calm presence
of the Creator, comes not forth to the sorceries of opium or
of wine. The sublime vision comes to the pure and simple
soul in a clean and chaste body.... The poet's habit of
living should be set on so low a key that the common
influences should delight him. His cheerfulness should be
the gift of the sunlight; the air should suffice for his
inspiration, and he should be tipsy with water.

In other words, the artist should keep himself in a condition so fit
as to need no other stimulant than his own exuberance. But this should
always flow as freely as beer at a college reunion. And there should
always be plenty in reserve. It were well to consider whether there is
not some connection between decadent art and decadent bodies. A friend
of mine recently attended a meeting of decadent painters and reported
that he could not find a chin or a forehead in the room.

One reason why so many of the world's great since Greece have
neglected to store up an overplus of vitality is that exercise is
well-nigh indispensable thereto; and exercise has not seemed to them
sufficiently dignified. We are indebted to the dark ages for this dull
superstition. It was then that the monasteries built gloomy granite
greenhouses for the flower of the world's intellect, that it might
deteriorate in the darkness and perish without reproducing its kind.
The monastic system held the body a vile thing, and believed that to
develop and train it was beneath the dignity of the spiritually elect.
So flagellation was substituted for perspiration, much as, in the
Orient, scent is substituted for soap--and with no more satisfact