My object was not to tell the truth, but to make people
laugh. I treated my readers as unfairly as I treated everybody else
--eager to betray them at the end with some monstrous absurdity or some
extravagant anti-climax. One night, after a lecture in the early days,
Tom Fitch, the 'silver-tongued orator of Nevada,' said to me: 'Clemens,
your lecture was magnificent. It was eloquent, moving, sincere. Never
in my entire life have I listened to such a magnificent piece of
descriptive narration. But you committed one unpardonable sin--the
unpardonable sin. It is a sin you must never commit again. You closed
a most eloquent description, by which you had keyed your audience up to
a pitch of the intensest interest, with a piece of atrocious anti-climax
which nullified all the really fine effect you had produced. My dear
Clemens, whatever you do, never sell your audience.' And that,"
continued Mr. Clemens, "was my first really profitable lesson."
It was the toning down of his youthful extravagance--Fitch's precept not
to "sell" his audience, Mrs.
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