436 THE ART OF

poem or tale. Once I heard him say anyone ought to beable to write a novel in six weeks, and that then it oughteither to be so good or so bad that no subsequent revisioncould alter it materially. He said much more to the samepurport, and it is mentioned here as an evidence that, inhis judgment, the value of a literary produdt depended onthe original inspiration, not on subsequent revision. Hisown activity in letters knew no abatement, and it waseasier for him to begin writing on a fresh theme than tolabour with patience at revising what he had writtenalready.” The absence, indeed, of what Cicero in one ofhis letters calls limes labor , a process that is apt to takethe life and soul out of a man’s work and leave it a merepiece of dead academicalism, is one of the most striking ofMorris’s characteristics. His touch has the quality ofbeing swift and firm and unfaltering; therefore, prodigiousas was the amount of the work accomplished by Morris’sbrain and hand, it never seems jaded, never conveys thepainful impression of having cost its author much anxiousor prolonged effort to produce. And this was the result notby any means of carelessness and indifference, but ratherof a faculty of mental absorption which, for the time being,enabled him to project his whole intelligence on onesingle objedt to the exclusion of all else. As Mr. Watts-Dunton has truly observed: “ Whatever chanced to beMorris’s goal of the moment was pursued by him withas much intensity as though the universe contained noother possible goal, and then, when the moment was passed,another goal received all his attention.” This versatilityof Morris’s, this capacity for passing, from having beencompletely engrossed in one thing, as readily and un-reservedly to another, is to be reckoned as one of the secretsof his success in his art. Indeed, as has been seen already,he laid down change of occupation as an essential con-dition. The worker “ must be allowed ” not only “ tothink of what he is doing,” but also “to vary his work asthe circumstances of it vary and his own moods.” Thereis no surer way to preserve his buoyancy and spontaneity,to insure him from sinking into the dull insensibility of