Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/308

282 THE FIRST MORRIS VI What did Morris take from Rossetti, then, and where did he bury his booty? He took things of one special kind — and the contents of the cache, when we discover and open it, flash a keen light on the whole range of his pillagings. There are three poems in The Defence of Guenevere whose titles, themes, and accessories are all lifted bodily from Rossetti. They are The Blue Closet, The Tune of the Seven Towers, and King Arthurs Tomb. But it is not in any index to Rossetti's poems that you will find these names. They are the titles of three of his pictures — pictures which Morris purchased — studied — absorbed — and then — repeated in verse. It is absolutely typical. It may be said at once that Morris took, and could take, nothing from his poets but their pictures. As incapable as a child of "fundamental brainwork," he could only seize what he saw ; thought itself had to be made sensible before he could grasp it ; he was one of those (perhaps a more numerous race than we realize) who reason in pictures, who cannot absorb an idea until it is made into an ideogram — and all that was abstract in Rossetti's work, all that was intellectual, speculative, ethereal, psychological, flowed through his more primitive fingers like an empty wind. But, for this incapacity (which has in it perhaps the germ of a wise instinct, a refusal to see validity in anything that cannot take a vivid form — an involuntary recognition of the law of truth and beauty) he was compensated by the possession of an inordinate sensual avidity — and of an insatiable power, in especial, of sucking up sense-impressions through the eye and storing them with absolute security. This,^ ^ His biographer tells us, as "characteristic of his extraordinary eye and extraordinary memory," that he saw the Church of