I don't suppose you really realise what your two last letters to me have been like. Well, I must say I've never had any letters to beat them, and when you are in Paradise I hope the Lord will present you with two brushes of comet's hair in token of appreciation for same. Paint brushes, of course, I mean. In the meantime je vous serre la main bien fort, as they say, for them… I'll take 'em in order.

The first, I must say was what the French newspapers call un espèce de bowl-over! Your interview with Fate (not forgetting his Secretary) written on that beautiful leming coloured paper was simply a proof of what you could do at this imaginative short story writing if you really got going. Richard Murry enters the ring and shows Kid Mansfield How to Do it. I leave the drawing of the scene to you—me—in black velvet shorts with a crochet lace collar and you in a kind of zebra tights costume… Well, dear old boy, you wiped the ring with me. Not only that I do really think that things page 91 have taken a Turn and that J. and I have seen our worst days. Hope so, at any rate. I think your Easter plan is a first rate one. It's down in my diary as a certainty. Do let's bring it off! Don't worry about the fare. When the time comes just put your toospeg brush, pyjamas and a collar (for Sundays and fête days) into a handkerchief and I'll send along the ticket and a dotted line for you to follow. Seriously a ruck-sack is all you'll need. My grandpa said a man could travel all over the world with a clean pair of socks and a rook rifle. At the age of 70 odd he started for England thus equipped but Mother took fright and added a handkerchief or two. When he returned he was shorn of everything but a large watering can which he'd bought in London for his young marrows. I don't suggest him as a Man to be Followed, however. Already, just with the idea of you coming I've seen you on the terrace—the three of us, talking. I've packed the picnic basket and we've gone off for the day. Lunch under the olive trees … and so on … it will be awful if it doesn't come true! We must make it. J. has a scheme to meet you in Paris and convey you to and from the Louvre on your way.

Well, I now come to your Letter II. containing your photograph. I love having it. You have, as Koteliansky used to say, an “extremely nice face,” Richard. Being fond of you as I am I read into it all sorts of signs of the future painter … I believe they are all there.

My honest opinion is that if there is a person going on the right lines—you are he. I can't tell you how right I feel you are. It seems to me like this. Here is painting and here is life—we can't separate them. Both of them have suffered an upheaval extraordinary in the last few years. There is a kind of tremendous agitation going on still, but so far anything that has come to the surface seems to have been experimental, or a fluke—a lucky accident. I believe the only way to live as artists under these new conditions in art and life is to put everything to the test for ourselves. We've got, in the long run, to be our own teachers. There's no getting away from that. page 92 We've got to win through by ourselves. Well, as I see it, the only way to do that honestly, dead truthfully, shirking nothing and leaving nothing out, is to put everything to the test; not only to face things, but really to find out of what they are composed. How can we know where we are, otherwise? How can we prevent ourselves being weak in certain places? To be thorough—to be honest. I think if artists were really thorough and honest they would save the world. It's the lack of those things and the reverse of them that are putting a deadly blight on life. Good work takes upon itself a Life—bad work has death in it.

Well, (forgive me if I'm dull, old boy) your longing for technical knowledge seems to me profoundly what an artist ought to feel to-day. It's a kind of deep sign of the times—rather the Zeitgeist—that's the better word. Your generation, and mine too, has been ‘put off’ with imitations of the real thing and we're bound to react violently if we're sincere. This takes so long to write and it sounds so heavy. Have I conveyed what I mean to even? You see I too have a passion for technique. I have a passion for making the thing into a whole if you know what I mean. Out of technique is born real style, I believe. There are no short cuts.

But I wish you were not so far away. I wish the garden gate flew open for you often and that you came in and out and we talked—not as in London—more easily and more happily. I shall pin the sun into the sky for every day of your holiday and at night I shall arrange for a constant supply of the best moonlight.