sons for the broadening and deepening of his
humour with the passage of time, Mr. Clemens once remarked to me: "I
succeeded in the long run, where Shillaber, Doesticks, and Billings
failed, because they never had an ideal higher than that of merely being
funny. The first great lesson of my life was the discovery that I had
to live down my past. When I first began to lecture, and in my earlier
writings, my sole idea was to make comic capital out of everything I saw
and heard. 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. Fairbanks' warning not to try their
endurance of the irreverent too far--that had a markedly salutary effect
upon Mark Twain's humorous writings. There can be no doubt that the
deep and lifelong friendship of Mr. Howells, expressing itself as
occasion demanded in the friendliest criticism, had a subduing influence
upon Mark Twain's tendency, as a humorist, to extravagance and headlong
exaggeration. In time he left the field of carpet-bag observation--the
humorous depicting of things seen from the rear of an observation car,
so to speak--and turned to fiction. Now at last the long pent-up flood
of observation upon human character and human characteristics found full
vent. 'Tom Sawyer' and 'Huckleberry Finn' are the romances of eternal
youth, the same yesterday, to-day, and forever. They are freighted,
however, with a wealth of pungent and humorous characterization that
have made of them contemporary