14 October 1874 • Hartford, Conn. (MS: DLC, UCCL 01139)
I have just dropped a note of considerable length (upon unimportant subjects) to my publisher, & in the midst of it injected this apparaently caslual question:
“By the way—how would you like to have a volume of stories from Mrs. Louise Chandler Moulton? I Ⓐemendationhave heard that which inclines me to thinke she would maybe like to try the subscription way of publishing?”
One has to be diplomatic with these folks. It is much better that you seem to do Bliss a favor & than that he get the idea that he is doing you one. When he replies, you shall know the result. 2explanatory note
Mrs.
Mrs Your dainty volume came last night & Mrs. Clemens read “Brains” to me while I smoked—& I was glad she read instead of I, because I was so touched my voice would have done me treachery, & I find it necessary to be manly & ferocious in order to maintain a proper discipline in this family.3explanatory note We have so long read your book reviews in the Tribune that it was no surprise that we liked to the story so much.4explanatory note
Our eldest daughter is progressing finely, & I think you will like her when you come down to see us by & by as you promised to do. We have been in a portion of our house a month, & we expect the carpenters to give up the rest before Christmas—though “art is long”5explanatory note & so they may possibly remain with us a year or two more.
With many thanks for the pretty book I am
Mrs. Louise Chandler Moulton | Pomfret | Conn. on flap: slc/mt postmarked: hartford ct. oct 15 11am docketed by Moulton: S. L. Clemens—Mark Twain.
Clemens answered the following letter (CU-MARK):
Moulton, a Boston resident, was visiting in Pomfret, the small town in northeast Connecticut where she had grown up (Whiting 1910, 5, 71–72). The photograph she mentioned was the one of Susy that Clemens had sent her on 13 February. During the past two decades, Moulton had published numerous poems and prose pieces in the Atlantic Monthly and other leading magazines, as well as several volumes of poetry, stories, and children’s tales. Her most recent collection, Some Women’s Hearts, was issued in the summer of 1874 by Roberts Brothers of Boston. The first story in that collection, “Fleeing from Fate,” was 130 pages long (BAL, 6:14606–20).
Neither Clemens’s note to Bliss, nor his reply, is known to survive (but see 21 Oct 74 to Blissclick to open link).
“Brains,” the second story in Moulton’s collection, is about a young woman “accustomed to luxury” who, after her father’s death, is compelled to earn her living as a genteel dressmaker under an assumed identity. Success in business does not console her for her loss of social standing and marital prospects. She finds inspiration, however, in the sacrificial devotion to duty of her errand girl (nicknamed “Brains”), a twelve-year-old “little morsel, scarcely so tall as a well-grown child of seven, but with a grave, mature, preternaturally wise face,” who works for her briefly before succumbing to “inflamed” lungs. The sad death leads to the dressmaker’s reunion with the man she has always loved, a doctor (Moulton 1874 [bib13741], 131–56).
In “Literary Notes,” her semiregular column in the New York Tribune, Moulton reviewed many of the titles published by Roberts Brothers, as well as a wide variety of other works. For example, she commented favorably on the Atlantic installments of Aldrich’s Prudence Palfrey and of Howells’s A Foregone Conclusion (Moulton 1874 [bib13742], 1874 [bib13743], 1874 [bib13745], 1874 [bib13746]; see also 8 Jan 75 to Moulton, n. 1click to open link).
“Art is long, and Time is fleeting” (Longfellow, “A Psalm of Life” [1839], stanza 4, line 13). But the expression was thoroughly proverbial, traced back to antiquity: “Life is short, the art long, opportunity fleeting, experience treacherous, judgment difficult” (Hippocrates, Aphorisms, sec. 1:1).
MS, Papers of Ellen Louise Chandler Moulton, Library of Congress (DLC).
L6 , 256–58.
After Moulton’s death in 1908, her daughter gave the “bulk of her correspondence,” comprising autograph letters from a great many distinguished persons, to DLC (Whiting 1910, 292–93).
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.