Page:The Life of William Morris.djvu/694

ÆT. 58] of patience, diligence, and courage. These were the qualities that went to make great men; and great men might be trusted to do great work.

As regards the technique of painting, Morris had, from his own early practice of the art as well as from the insight of his immense genius, a knowledge that was not less great because he seldom showed it. But the art of painting always took its place in his mind as one of the arts subordinate to architecture, though it might be the first of these. The inflexible naturalism and minute finish of the early Pre-Raphaelites, he held, were necessary at the time to startle men out of the lethargy of a long convention, but they hardly represented the permanent method in which the painter's art should employ itself. His own artistic intelligence had been as a matter of fact first awakened by that militant and, one might almost say, aggressive type of picture. "I remember distinctly myself," he said in this address when speaking of the Pre-Raphaelite revolt against an outworn academic tradition, "as a boy, that when I had pictures offered to my notice I could not understand what they were about at all. I said 'Oh well, that is all right: it has got the sort of thing in it which there ought to be in a picture: there is nothing to be said against it, no doubt. I cannot say I would have had it other than that, because it is clearly the proper thing to do.' But really I took very little interest in it." For a short period he had been as profound an admirer of the earlier work of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood as any of the school, and had himself worked hard at being a painter in the Pre-Raphaelite manner. When this temporary enthusiasm passed over, pictures took a place in his mind among the various methods of decorating surfaces. Except for his unbroken and almost daily intimacy Rh