Varied Types | Page 5

and naturally out of the life they led and
preferred to lead. And it may surely be maintained that any real
advance in the beauty of modern dress must spring honestly and
naturally out of the life we lead and prefer to lead. We are not
altogether without hints and 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