Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/307

THE FIRST MORRIS 281 lies along the memory like a vapour, mixing and melting like a cloud. ^ ^ Another and yet deeper difference may be noted here : Rossetti's poem is written by a master of narrative ; Bapunzel is the work of a man who suffered all his life from an utter inability to tell a tale. This is contrary to current opinion of course : it was primarily as a teller of tales that Morris insisted upon being regarded ; he believed himself to be the story-teller born ; and all his books, from The Earthly Paradise to The Sundering Flood, could be catalogued in a way that would make them seem credible stout witnesses to that faith. But his gifts were really as unlike Chaucer's (whom he loved to regard as his archetype) as Browning's : and from either of the two main ways of telling a story he was constitutionally barred. There are nine-and-ninety ways of spinning yarns indeed ; but though the species are so many, the types are strictly two. On the one hand the art of narrative may concern itself with recount- ing the progress and evolution of that invisible element, a blend of hints and hopes and possibilities and surprises, which is roughly called the plot : the abstract and impalpable core round which the characters and tangible situations successively cluster. On the other hand it may betray this evolution by presenting, in turn, the only part of its physical envelope which is capable of sympathizing with its changes — by holding up, that is to say, the little mirrors of men's minds in which the invisible fluctua- tions are legibly reflected. But Morris was spoiled for the first (and elder) of these methods by that curious incapacity of his for dealing with anything abstract or intangible of which we have already seen the signs in these Rossetti comparisons, and which will be more fully demonstrated in a moment. And for the second (which was Browning's and most novelists') he was even more completely disqualified by his queer lack of any psychological gift whatever — the defect which made him seem, all his life, notwithstanding his determined hilarity, so oddly unhuman and isolated, which made one of his dearest friends say sadly that "Morris never seemed really to need us," which was the source of his naive theories of society, and which turned his one attempt at a novel into what an honest critic (himself) admitted was merely " landscape and sentiment." What he could do, better than any one — what the great gift was that gave his soi-disant stories their vivid profusion, persuasiveness, and splendid facility — the page overleaf, at this very moment, is manfully endeavouring to define.