warmed
me, moved me, stirred me, uplifted me, enraptured me, that at times
I could have cried, and at others split my throat with shouting.
The great crowd was another evidence that it was low-grade music,
for only the few are educated up to a point where high-class music
gives pleasure. I have never heard enough classic music to be able
to enjoy it, and the simple truth is I detest it. Not mildly, but
with all my heart.

What a poor lot we human beings are anyway! If base music gives me
wings, why should I want any other? But I do. I want to like the
higher music because the higher and better like it. But you see I
want to like it without taking the necessary trouble, and giving the
thing the necessary amount of time and attention. The natural
suggestion is, to get into that upper tier, that dress-circle, by a
lie--we will pretend we like it. This lie, this pretense, gives to
opera what support it has in America.

And then there is painting. What a red rag is to a bull Turner's
"Slave Ship" is to me. Mr. Ruskin is educated in art up to a point
where that picture throws him into as mad an ecstasy of pleasure as
it throws me into one of rage. His cultivation enables him to see
water in that yellow mud; his cultivation reconciles the floating of
unfloatable things to him--chains etc.; it reconciles him to fishes
swimming on top of the water. The most of the picture is a manifest
impossibility, that is to say, a lie; and only rigid cultivation can
enable a man to find truth in a lie. A Boston critic said the
"Slave Ship" reminded him of a cat having a fit in a platter of
tomatoes. That went home to my non-cultivation, and I thought, here
is a man with an unobstructed eye.

Mark Twain has dwelt somewhat upon these matters in 'A Tramp Abroad'. He
confesses in that book that later he became a great admirer of Turner,
though perhaps never of the "Slave Ship" picture. In fact, Mark Twain
was never artistic, in the common acceptance of that term; neither his
art nor his tastes were of an "artistic" kind.

CXVIII. TRAMPING WITH TWICHELL. Twichell arrived on time, August 1st.
Clemens met him at Baden-Baden, and they immediately set out on a tramp
through the Black Forest, excursioning as pleased them, and having an
idyllic good time. They did not always walk, but they often did. At
least they did sometimes, when t