Æsthetic appreciation gives a man the illusion that he is being spiritually made over and enlarged; and yet that appreciation is capable of an absolute divorcement from the intellect. It is--to take the extreme case--very strong in sleep. Dr. Holmes has recorded, in his own felicitous way, the experience, common to sensitive people, of writing down a dream-poem at midnight and discovering in its place at dawn a few lines of incomprehensible rubbish. The æsthetic sense is easily intensified by stimulants, by tea, coffee and tobacco. Anything that excites the heart or stimulates the emotions--praise, happiness, success, change of scene, any relief from mental tension--is apt to give a man new, and sudden entry into unexplored worlds of art. He thinks himself a new man. And yet this man stands, perhaps, in as great danger of loss as he does in hope of gain. It is not through receptivity, but through activity, that men are really changed. How trivial men become who live solely in the appreciation of the fine arts all of us know. The American who lives abroad is an intensely receptive being; but he has divorced himself from the struggles of a normal social existence, from communal life and duty. His love of the fine arts does not save him, but seems rather to enfeeble him the more. No European can effect a similar divorce in his own life; for the European is living at home: his social and political obligations make a man of him. Besides this, the fine arts are an old story to the European; and he does not go mad about them, as the American Indian goes mad about whiskey. The European is immune to the æsthetic; and neither a fine wainscot nor a beautiful doorknob can have the same power over him that it may have over that zealous, high-strung, new discoverer of the old world, the American who begins to realize what good decoration really means. Let anyone who thinks that this impoverishment is a purely American disease read the description of the Stanhope family in Trollope’s “Barchester Towers.” Here is the beefiest kind of a British county family, reduced to anemia by residence in Italy. Prolonged exile, and mere receptivity have withdrawn the energy from the organs of these people.