Page:The Life of William Morris.djvu/331

310 He also worked a good deal at drawing from the model, "for my soul's sake chiefly," he quaintly said, "for little hope can I have ever to do anything serious in the thing." "I never," he says on the same occasion, "had the painter's memory which makes it easy to put down on paper what you think you see, nor indeed can I see any scene with a frame, as it were, round it, though in my own way I can realize things visibly enough to myself. But it seems I must needs try to make myself unhappy with doing what I find difficult, or impossible."

This unhappiness is not strange to the artistic temperament. But his practice in drawing now was not useless to him: and its effects may be seen, not indeed in any marked proficiency in drawing the human figure, but in a greater breadth and decisiveness of design in his decoration: a matter of no small importance when the designing of patterns for chintzes and woven tapestries became, as it did soon afterwards, one of his chief occupations. "I can't say that I get on with my drawing," he writes nearly a year afterwards; "but then I never expected I should: so I keep it up, dreading the model day like I used to dread Sunday when I was a little chap." At present, however, what he called the mood of idleness (his idleness was more productive than most men's work) was rather strong on him. "It is wet and wild weather," he writes one day during that winter, "but somehow I don't dislike it, and there is something touching about the real world bursting into London with these gales: it makes me feel lazy in the mornings though, and I feel as if I should like to sit in my pretty room at Turnham Green reading some hitherto unprinted Dumas, say about as good as the Three Musketeers." Another letter of a few months later shows very clearly all the strange thoughts that