He couldn’t stand it. His face grew red, he bristled and glared, reached for his cocktail, downed it, and rose.
“That was a good story,” he said, indignantly, “but he can’t tell it. This is the way it should go.” And he told it in his inimitable way.
After that nothing could stop him. He was witty, clever, and the life of the lunch. The old Clemens girded on his armor and went out again arrayed for battle; but I often wonder if he went to his grave thinking I was as much of an ass as I appeared that day.
Chapter XV: Paint and Painters
An old college friend of mine once wrote to me and asked what he should do about his son, who was in Harvard, but wished to give up college and become a painter. I answered and said: “Discourage him; discourage him to the point of starvation, for if he be sincere in his love of the fine arts, he will pay no attention to you. No man is a real artist unless he finds the impetus toward it so great that he sticks to it in spite of every deprivation.” I do not know whether my friend took my advice or not, but at any rate his son, Barry Faulkner, has become, with or without discouragements, one of our foremost younger decorative painters.
Emerson understood, perhaps better than anyone, as he tells us in his
To An Artist
Forget the hut and seek the palace,
Reck not what the people say,
For where’er the trees grow biggest