Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/329

303 THE FIRST MORRIS 303 to make versification a sunny aid to his enjoyment of the visible world and the untroubled play of his senses (which was the secret sum of his desires) was estab- lished as his honest duty. And so he sent Jason and his Wanderers gathering loot for him, founding Kelm- scotts even fairer than his own —tasting through their lips the royal wines and fruits that lay beyond his physical reach ; and he invented a way of making verses that should interfere not at all with the directer joys of the day — a smiling mixture of tapestry-work and low music. Surely no poet ever wrote so much with such a small outlay of fatigue. " All that talk about inspiration is nonsense, I tell you flat," he used to say. " If a man can't turn out an epic while work- ing at a loom he had better give up the job." He never re-wrote, never filed or hammered or compressed. He simply sat down in a roomful of friends and drove ahead, reams at a time — breaking off, as often as not, as his manuscripts show, in the middle of a line — filling in those odd hours of the day that might otherwise have lacked their meed of fun. The act of creation for him was simply a jolly recreation : he would not allow it to become anything more. He composed in order to compose himself. He resolutely refused to enter those dark inner chambers of the mind where the last efforts of the imagination take place in torment, and the supreme revelations are received. He never wrought himself into a fever or indulged in any spiritual wrestlings ; rather, he used his art as a source of relief, to relax the pressure of real life. He dug, he dyed, he fished — he cooked and carved and printed ; he built a working-model of his mediaeval Utopia, copying the contents of his cave in actual stone and timber, and lived therein, with due uproari- ousness, the life assigned to one of his own ruddy and broad-browed heroes ; and then, when the day was done, or his arms grew tired, he simply sat down with