Occasionally Alfred refers to the poets. He enjoys Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Lowell is an especial favorite; while delighting in the "Biglow Papers," he quotes with appreciation from Lowell's more serious poetry. The companionship of Thackeray, Dickens, and Scott brightened and mellowed many dark, hard hours for Alfred. "Sir Walter Scott's novels broke my taste for trashy stuff," he writes. Naturally, Victor Hugo's "Les Miserables" absorbed and thrilled him. "Shall I ever forget Jean Valjean, the galley slave; or Cosette? While reading the story I thought such a character as the Bishop impossible. I was mistaken." Of Charles Reade he says: "One cannot help loving Reade. He has such a dashing, rollicking style. And then he hardly ever wrote except to denounce some wrong or sham." Even in fiction his preference follows the trend of his burning love and pity for the desolate and oppressed. How he would have worshipped Tolstoi!
Complaint or criticism of the hardships of convict life forms small part of the thirty letters written me by Alfred while in prison. He takes this stand: "I ought not to complain because I brought this punishment upon myself." "I am almost glad if anyone does wrong to me because I feel that it helps balance my account for the wrongs I have done others." Shall we never escape from that terrible idea of the moral necessity of expiation, even at the cost of another?
Nevertheless, Alfred feels the hardships he endures and knows how to present them. And he is not "speaking for the gallery" but to his one friend when he writes:
"Try to imagine yourself working all day on a stool, not allowed to stand even when your work can be better done that way. If you hear a noise you must not look up. You are within two feet of a companion but you must not speak. You sit on your stool all day long and work. Nothing but work. Outside my mind was a pleasure to me, in here it is a torture. It seems as if the minutes were hours, the hours days, the days centuries. A man in prison is supposed to be a machine. So long as he does ten hours' work a day—don't smile, don't talk, don't look up from his work, does work enough to suit the contractors and does it well and obeys the long number of unwritten rules he is all right. The trouble with the convicts is that they can't get it out of their heads that they are human beings and not machines. The present system may be good statesmanship. It is bad Christianity. But I doubt if it is good statesmanship to maintain a system that makes so many men kill themselves, go crazy, or if they do get out of the Shadow alive go out hating the State and their fellowmen. As a convict said to me, 'It's funny that in this age of enlightenment they have not found out that to brutalize a man will never reform him. I have not been led to reform by prison life. It has made me more bitter at times than I thought I ever could be. One cannot live in a prison without seeing and hearing things to make one's blood boil....'
"Times come to me here when it seems as if I could not stand the strain any longer. Then again, even in this horrid old shop I have some very happy times, thinking of your friendship and building castles in the air. My favorite air castle is built on the hope that when my time is out I can get into a printing office and in time work up to be an editor. And perhaps do a little something to help the poor and to aid the cause of progress. Shall I succeed in my dream? Do we ever realize our ideals?"
"I wonder if ever a sculptor wrought
Till the cold stone warmed to his ardent heart;
Or if ever a painter with light and shade
The dream of his inmost heart portrayed."
"I did have doubts as to whether Spring was really here till the violets came in your letter. Now I am no longer an unbeliever. I am afraid that I love all beautiful things too much for my own comfort. If a convict cares for beauty that sensitiveness can only give him pain while in prison. I love music and at times I have feelings that it seems to me can only be expressed through music; and I hope I shall be able to take piano lessons some time."