Abroad with Mark Twain and Eugene Field/Mark's Idea of High Art
MARK'S IDEA OF HIGH ART
"This here earth is governed like a military despoty," said Mark Twain when we were sitting outside a Ringstrasse restaurant in Vienna one afternoon. He was eyeing the procession of army officers, with pretty girls upon their arms, passing to and fro.
"And if you had the ordering of things, would your soul have meandered into one of these jackanapes in monkey jackets and corsets, and czackos and busbies and things?" inquired Susan, the wit's witty young daughter.
"No, darling, but I would have loved to live in the time of Shakespeare and Queen Elizabeth, the best dressed period of the world. You know I like color and flummery and all such things—I was born red-headed—maybe that accounts for my passion for the gorgeous and ornamental."
"Tell the company about the riot of colors you delight in," said Susan.
"I saw it only once," replied Mark, "and it was rather uncomfortable, even painful, to the other creature, namely, a tortoise-shell cat that accidentally had dropped into a tomato stew. As pussy tried to get out, pawing like the baby after the Ivory soap, there was a display of rainbows, spectrums, chromatics, prisms, pigments, and plain everyday paints and stains such as I have run across in a few Italian picture galleries only.
He picked up a copy of the "New York Herald," lying on the table. "There's our friend George in New York," he said, "having more trouble with that pesky French brother-in-law of his. The little Paris fortune hunter has already cost his wife's estate fifteen or twenty million francs and—no returns outside of a few babies. Yet French brother-in-law could make a tall income if he were put to 'work right,' as they say in the wild and woolly, for he has a most tremendous eye for color effects, that chap. If he were my brother-in-law, I would starve the cuss into becoming a man-milliner, the first of the world. That's what he could be, and ought to be with clever management.
"My word," continued Mark, "you ought to see him drive in state in the Bois de Boulogne. When I first clapped eyes on his flunkies and outriders, in their liveries, rich yet soft in color effects, I almost yearned to be one of them for the sake of their fine togs."
Indeed, sensational clothes were always Mark's hobby. Hence the white suits he wore in his reclining days, and the sealskin coat, with the fur outside, that adorned him in his days of youthful glory. I am quite sure he would have gone to bed in his Oxford mantle and cap if he had had more than one of each, and the passing of his red hair was a real grievance to him, he told Gyp, the French novelist whom he called, "warm, yet not torrid."