Varied Types | Page 4

public necessity and fulfilled it heroically. The difficulty with
which he grappled was one so immense that we shall have to be
separated from it by many centuries before we can really judge of it. It
was the problem of the elaborate and deliberate ugliness of the most
self-conscious of centuries. Morris at least saw the absurdity of the
thing. He felt it was monstrous that the modern man, who was
pre-eminently capable of realising the strangest and most contradictory
beauties, who could feel at once the fiery aureole of the ascetic and the
colossal calm of the Hellenic god, should himself, by a farcical bathos,
be buried in a black coat, and hidden under a chimney-pot hat. He
could not see why the harmless man who desired to be an artist in
raiment should be condemned to be, at best, a black and white artist. It
is indeed difficult to account for the clinging curse of ugliness which
blights everything brought forth by the most prosperous of centuries. In
all created nature there is not, perhaps, anything so completely ugly as
a pillar-box. Its shape is the most unmeaning of shapes, its height and
thickness just neutralising each other; its colour is the most repulsive of
colours--a fat and soulless red, a red without a touch of blood or fire,
like the scarlet of dead men's sins. Yet there is no reason whatever why
such hideousness should possess an object full of civic dignity, the
treasure-house of a thousand secrets, the fortress of a thousand souls. If
the old Greeks had had such an institution, we may be sure that it
would have been surmounted by the severe, but graceful, figure of the
god of letter-writing. If the mediæval Christians has possessed it, it
would have had a niche filled with the golden aureole of St. Rowland
of the Postage Stamps. As it is, there it stands at all our street-corners,
disguising one of the most beautiful of ideas under one of the most
preposterous of forms. It is useless to deny that the miracles of science
have not been such an incentive to art and imagination as were the
miracles of religion. If men in the twelfth century had been told that the
lightning had been driven for leagues underground, and had dragged at
its destroying tail loads of laughing human beings, and if they had then
been told that the people alluded to this pulverising portent chirpily as
"The Twopenny Tube," they would have called down the fire of
Heaven on us as a race of half-witted atheists. Probably they would
have been quite right.

This clear and fine perception of what may be called the anæsthetic
element in the Victorian era was, undoubtedly, the work of a great
reformer: it requires a fine effort of the imagination to see an evil that
surrounds us on every side. The manner in which Morris carried out his
crusade may, considering the circumstances, be called triumphant. Our
carpets began to bloom under our feet like the meadows in spring, and
our hitherto prosaic stools and sofas seemed growing legs and arms at
their own wild will. An element of freedom and rugged dignity came in
with plain and strong ornaments of copper and iron. So delicate and
universal has been the revolution in domestic art that almost every
family in England has had its taste cunningly and treacherously
improved, and if we look back at the early Victorian drawing-rooms it
is only to realise the strange but essential truth that art, or human
decoration, has, nine times out of ten in history, made things uglier than
they were before, from the "coiffure" of a Papuan savage to the
wall-paper of a British merchant in 1830.
But great and beneficent as was the æsthetic revolution of Morris, there
was a very definite limit to it. It did not lie only in the fact that his
revolution was in truth a reaction, though this was a partial explanation
of his partial failure. When he was denouncing the dresses of modern
ladies, "upholstered like arm-chairs instead of being draped like
women," as he forcibly expressed it, he would hold up for practical
imitation the costumes and handicrafts of the Middle Ages. Further
than this retrogressive and imitative movement he never seemed to go.
Now, the men of the time of Chaucer had many evil qualities, but there
was at least one exhibition of moral weakness they did not give. They
would have laughed at the idea of dressing themselves in the manner of
the bowmen at the battle of Senlac, or painting themselves an æsthetic
blue, after the custom of the ancient Britons. They would not have
called that a movement at all. Whatever was beautiful in their dress or
manners sprang honestly