As regards the mode of copying:  of course it is too long for any amanuensis to attempt:  and your own handwriting, dear Robbie, in your last letter seems specially designed to remind me that the task is not to be yours.  I think that the only thing to do is to be thoroughly modern and to have it typewritten.  Of course the MS. should not pass out of your control, but could you not get Mrs. Marshall to send down one of her type-writing girls—­women are the most reliable as they have no memory for the important—­to Hornton Street or Phillimore Gardens, to do it under your supervision?  I assure you that the typewriting machine, when played with expression, is not more annoying than the piano when played by a sister or near relation.  Indeed many among those most devoted to domesticity prefer it.  I wish the copy to be done not on tissue paper but on good paper such as is used for plays, and a wide rubricated margin should be left for corrections . . .  If the copy is done at Hornton Street the lady typewriter might be fed through a lattice in the door, like the Cardinals when they elect a Pope; till she comes out on the balcony and can say to the world:  “Habet Mundus Epistolam”; for indeed it is an Encyclical letter, and as the Bulls of the Holy Father are named from their opening words, it may be spoken of as the “Epistola:  in Carcere et Vinculis.” . . .  In point of fact, Robbie, prison life makes one see people and things as they really are.  That is why it turns one to stone.  It is the people outside who are deceived by the illusions of a life in constant motion.  They revolve with life and contribute to its unreality.  We who are immobile both see and know.  Whether or not the letter does good to narrow natures and hectic brains, to me it has done good.  I have “cleansed my bosom of much perilous stuff”; to borrow a phrase from the poet whom you and I once thought of rescuing from the Philistines.  I need not remind you that mere expression is to an artist the supreme and only mode of life.  It is by utterance that we live.  Of the many, many things for which I have to thank the Governor there is none for which I am more grateful than for his permission to write fully and at as great a length as I desire.  For nearly two years I had within a growing burden of bitterness, of much of which I have now got rid.  On the other side of the prison wall there are some poor black soot-besmirched trees that are just breaking out into buds of an almost shrill green.  I know quite well what they are going through.  They are finding expression.

Ever yours,

OSCAR.

—­Letter from Reading Prison to Robert Ross.

CAREY STREET