Mark Twain Speaking

139. Speech on Art

MARK TWAIN SPEAKING· 139 · 443 At the St. Louis art students' luncheon for Mark Twain, Professor Halsey C. [ves, director of the Museum of Fine Arts, conferred upon the chiefguest the degree of "Master Doctor ofArts." Mark Twain enjoyed himself, although he was chagrined by a scheduling mixup that forced him to leave the luncheon party before the end. Speech on Art Art Students Association Luncheonfor Mark Twain, Museum of Fine Arts, St. Louis, June 7, 1902 Ladies and gentlemen, and the Art Students Association: I am sorry myself that that mistake was made, and I do not know how it was made. I was promising myselfa long sojourn here with you, and through that misfortune I am to lose that. I am to go straightway to some other place and do some other thing-I don't know what it is, something for the furthering ofthe public good or the advancement ofcivilization; but if I could only stay here a little longer, I should like to go into a disquisition ofsome sort concerning art, now that I feel reenforced for work like that by this degree which has just been conferred upon me. I have always had the impression that I was intended for an instructor in art, but I never have felt full confidence, because that sort of recognition which is the sort of thing that gives confidence, had not arrived. Just as soon as you become a master doctor of arts, you know all about it, for you have a better opportunity to know, and from that moment you are competent to teach in these high matters of art. I feel now entirely competent to teach. Before, I should have considered that what I might offer in the matter of instruction would properly be considered a matter ofopinion, but now I consider it is a matter oflaw. I consider that now I know how to talk to you on art. A long time ago, when I used to examine the old masters on the other side of the water, I did not consider myself competent to teach other people, but I did consider myselfcompetent to teach myself. But I found as I went along that I had overestimated my ability in that line, 444 MARK TWAIN SPEAKING too, for I was not able to appreciate. I was not able to find in the old masters the joys which other people found there. I could not find beauty or anything to enthuse me in a Saint Sebastian stuck full of arrows. Moreover, I objected to every Saint Sebastian that I ever saw, because they all seemed to be enjoying it. And I said, "That old master that considers that saint or sinner can be a pincushion of arrows, and smile, does not know human nature, and his art is all wrong." Many things in art I was not able to see. I did not know what I wanted to see. I went into the Pitti Palace, where they have those treasures of art, as they call them, and there was a Titian Venus five or six feet long on a bed sixteen or seventeen feet long, with a dog close by that you could put in a snuffbox. The drawing and perspective were all wrong. The drawing was atrocious-to me-and I finally said to a man who was away up in art, "What do you find in that picture?" He said, "It is not worth while for me to tell you. Because certain qualities are required in order that you shall see the marvels in that picture, and you are not qualified to see them. You are born with a lack that cannot be supplied by education. You cannot learn, and you may as well give it up." And he told me about a lady who said to Turner, once, "Why, Mr. Turner, I have spent many years in Venice, at one time and another, but I have never seen the colors in the Grand Canal that are in this picture ofyours." And he said, "Don't you wish you could?"-meaning that she had not an educated eye. There are two things concerned there: in the first place, natural ability that can be educated, a vision that can be educated, so that by and by you can see everything that is in a great picture; but without that original equipment, reenforced by education, you cannot expect to see those things in the great masters. That...