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 aesthetic 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 aesthetic
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