Twelve Types | Page 5

hopes of such a change, in the growing
orthodoxy of rough and athletic costumes. But if this cannot be, it will
be no substitute or satisfaction to turn life into an interminable
historical fancy-dress ball. But the limitation of Morris's work lay
deeper than this. We may best suggest it by a method after his own
heart. Of all the various works he performed, none, perhaps, was so
splendidly and solidly valuable as his great protest for the fables and
superstitions of mankind. He has the supreme credit of showing that the
fairy-tales contain the deepest truth of the earth, the real record of
men's feeling for things. Trifling details may be inaccurate, Jack may
not have climbed up so tall a beanstalk, or killed so tall a giant; but it is
not such things that make a story false; it is a far different class of
things that makes every modern book of history as false as the father of
lies; ingenuity, self-consciousness, hypocritical impartiality. It appears
to us that of all the fairy-tales none contains so vital a moral truth as the
old story, existing in many forms, of Beauty and the Beast. There is

written, with all the authority of a human scripture, the eternal and
essential truth that until we love a thing in all its ugliness we cannot
make it beautiful. This was the weak point in William Morris as a
reformer: that he sought to reform modern life, and that he hated
modern life instead of loving it. Modern London is indeed a beast, big
enough and black enough to be the beast in Apocalypse, blazing with a
million eyes, and roaring with a million voices. But unless the poet can
love this fabulous monster as he is, can feel with some generous
excitement his massive and mysterious 'joie-de-vivre,' the vast scale of
his iron anatomy and the beating of his thunderous heart, he cannot and
will not change the beast into the fairy prince. Morris's disadvantage
was that he was not honestly a child of the nineteenth century: he could
not understand its fascination, and consequently he could not really
develop it. An abiding testimony to his tremendous personal influence
in the æsthetic world is the vitality and recurrence of the Arts and
Crafts Exhibitions, which are steeped in his personality like a chapel in
that of a saint. If we look round at the exhibits in one of these æsthetic
shows, we shall be struck by the large mass of modern objects that the
decorative school leaves untouched. There is a noble instinct for giving
the right touch of beauty to common and necessary things, but the
things that are so touched are the ancient things, the things that always
to some extent commended themselves to the lover of beauty. There are
beautiful gates, beautiful fountains, beautiful cups, beautiful chairs,
beautiful reading-desks. But there are no modern things made beautiful.
There are no beautiful lamp-posts, beautiful letter-boxes, beautiful
engines, beautiful bicycles. The spirit of William Morris has not seized
hold of the century and made its humblest necessities beautiful. And
this was because, with all his healthiness and energy, he had not the
supreme courage to face the ugliness of things; Beauty shrank from the
Beast and the fairy-tale had a different ending.
But herein, indeed, lay Morris's deepest claim to the name of a great
reformer: that he left his work incomplete. There is, perhaps, no better
proof that a man is a mere meteor, merely barren and brilliant, than that
his work is done perfectly. A man like Morris draws attention to needs
he cannot supply. In after-years we may have perhaps a newer and
more daring Arts and Crafts Exhibition. In it we shall not decorate the

armour of the twelfth century but the machinery of the twentieth. A
lamp-post shall be wrought nobly in twisted iron, fit to hold the sanctity
of fire. A pillar-box shall be carved with figures emblematical of the
secrets of comradeship and the silence and honour of the State. Railway
signals, of all earthly things the most poetical, the coloured stars of life
and death, shall be lamps of green and crimson worthy of their terrible
and faithful service. But if ever this gradual and genuine movement of
our time towards beauty--not backwards, but forwards--does truly come
about, Morris will be the first prophet of it. Poet of the childhood of
nations, craftsman in the new honesties of art, prophet of a merrier and
wiser life, his full-blooded enthusiasm will be remembered when
human life has once more assumed flamboyant colours and proved that
this painful greenish grey of the æsthetic twilight in which we now live
is, in spite of all the pessimists, not of the greyness of death, but the
greyness of dawn.