Page:The Life of William Morris.djvu/696

ÆT. 58] those rooms in it which contained the works which were after his own heart, he was intimately familiar. Angelico, Van Eyck, and Holbein, his three greatest admirations among the painters of past ages, he admired as profoundly as he did any artist whatever. In one of the later numbers of the Commonweal, while discussing in a fragmentary and parenthetic way what the art of the future under realized Socialism might be like, he makes some remarks on the pictures in the National Gallery which incidentally open up his whole mind on the subject of pictorial art. "Perhaps," he says, "mankind will regain their eyesight, which they have lost to a great extent; people have largely ceased to take in mental impressions through the eyes, whereas in times past the eyes were the great feeders of the fancy and imagination. I am in the habit when I go to an exhibition or a picture gallery of noticing their behaviour there; and as a rule I note that they seem very much bored, and their eyes wander vacantly over the various objects exhibited to them. If ordinary people go to our National Gallery, the thing which they want to see is the Blenheim Raphael, which, though well done, is a very dull picture to any one not an artist. While, when Holbein shows them the Danish princess of the sixteenth century yet living on the canvas, the demure half-smile not yet faded from her eyes; when Van Eyck opens a window for them into Bruges of the fourteenth century; when Botticelli shows them Heaven as it lived in the hearts of men before theology was dead, these things produce no impression on them, not so much even as to stimulate their curiosity and make them ask what 'tis all about; because these things were done to be looked at, and to make the eyes tell the mind tales of the past, the present, and0 the future." Yet deeply as Morris admired these pictures, he scarcely loved them with