proof that it was not a beautiful picture, nor in any sense worthy of
commendation! He pours out the torrents of his ridicule, not
indiscriminately upon the works of the old masters themselves--though he
regarded Nature as the grandest of all the old masters--but upon those
half-baked sycophants who bend the knee to an art they do not
understand, an art of which they feign comprehension by mouthings full
of cheap and meaningless tags. As potent and effective as ever, in its
fine comic irony, is that passage in which he expresses his "envy" of
those people who pay lavish lip-service to scenes and works of art which
their expressionless language shows they neither realize nor understand.
He reserves his most biting condemnation for those second-hand critics
who accept other people's opinions for their criteria, and rave over
"beauty," "soul," "character," "expression" and "tone" in wretched,
dingy, moth-eaten pictures. He hated with the heartiest detestation
such people--whose sole ambition seemed to be to make a fine show of
knowledge of art by means of an easily acquired vocabulary of
inexpressive technical terms of art criticism.

There is much, I fear, of misguided honesty in Mark Twain's records of
foreign travel. To the things which he personally reverenced, he was
always reverential; and his expression of likes and dislikes, of
prejudices and predilections, was honest and fearless. Grant as we may
the humorist's right to exaggerate and even to distort, for the purposes
of his fun-making, it does not therefore follow that his judgments,
however forthright or sincere, are valid, reputable criticisms. One's
enjoyment of his fresh and hilarious humour, his persistent fun-making
is no whit impaired by the recognition that he was lacking in the
faculty of historic imagination and in the finer artistic sense. It is,
in a measure, because of his lack of culture and, more broadly, lack of
real knowledge, that he was enabled to evoke the laughter of the