Page:The Life of William Morris.djvu/695

286 with Burne-Jones, he did not see much of painters as such, nor was he a frequenter of studios or picture galleries. When he did see a picture he saw what there was in it at a single glance; his eye for both design and colour was here, as elsewhere, infallible, and his memory portentous. But easel-pictures seem, as a rule, to have given him the uneasy feeling of decoration disproportionate in labour and finish to its decorative object. With a painted book he had not this feeling; nor with the gem-like masterpieces of the Flemish and early Italian schools which approximate in method and finish to the pictures in a painted book. But for pictures on a larger scale and in a broader manner he would have preferred frescoes or even tapestries. Sir Edward Burne-Jones told me that Morris would have liked the faces in his pictures less highly finished, and less charged with the concentrated meaning or emotion of the painting. As with the artists of Greece and of the Middle Ages, the human face was to him merely a part, though no doubt a very important part, of the human body. In speaking of the qualifications required from tapestry-weavers, it was on their skill in rendering the feet and hands, not the faces, of the figures, that he laid special stress. He was quite satisfied with the simple and almost abstract types of expression that can be produced in tapestry; and he thought that the dramatic and emotional interest of a picture ought to be diffused throughout it as equally as possible. Such too was his own practice in the cognate art of poetry: and this is one reason why his poetry affords so few memorable single lines, and lends itself so little to quotation. Either quality would have been a merely incidental merit, and perhaps even a defect, in the view of his art which he himself held.

With the National Gallery indeed, or at least with