Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/296

270 THE FIRST MORRIS and entering results, does like to be regarded too as a subtle discoverer of causes — and of causes, often, as she is pleasantly persuaded, that are cunningly hidden from the artist himself. An illusion, perhaps, but it serves to keep her to the duller task, makes amends for the drudgery : for probably nothing in all letters is more absorbing, more exciting, than the sight of the Spirit of Letters (as it seems) duping her prey, the poor writer, with old baits and ambitions, playing him softly, till at length she wrings out just the service she required and he lies neatly gutted on the bank, performer of a very different service to the scheme of things from that which he proposed when first he spread his little fins. She has Bedford gaol for one man and blindness for another; tricks a Fitzgerald with loneliness into whimsical hobbies ; turns an angry letter to the Times into a ten-year book called Modern Painters ; sets a Blake pursuing phantoms with cries that became happy carols in mid-air. These are random figures, but are they not typical? From Spenser (with his politics) to Pater (with his Winckelmann) they all work with enchanted ink that changes as it dries ; they believe themselves to be writing one message and quite another reaches us ; they leave the world gratefully in their debt for something which they had neither knowledge nor intention of bestowing. Or so at least Criticism — perhaps duped in her turn ? — is delighted to suppose. Yet certainly this case of Morris, whom we may know better than the Langlands, not only warms up the belief with new colour, but actually increases its attractiveness, screwing up the dramatic pitch some points further. Mostly, the Spirit of Letters (or, more strictly, of course, some obscure daemon in the man himself, the deep, dim essence of his genius) gets its way : not often meeting a man both strong enough to stand to his principles without