It is proper enough that the unveiling of the bust of William Morris
should approximate to a public festival, for while there have been many
men of genius in the Victorian era more despotic than he, there have
been none so representative. He represents not only that rapacious
hunger for beauty which has now for the first time become a serious
problem in the healthy life of humanity, but he represents also that
honourable instinct for finding beauty in common necessities of
workmanship which gives it a stronger and more bony structure. The time
has passed when William Morris was conceived to be irrelevant to be
described as a designer of wall-papers. If Morris had been a hatter
instead of a decorator, we should have become gradually and painfully
conscious of an improvement in our hats. If he had been a tailor, we
should have suddenly found our frock-coats trailing on the ground with
the grandeur of mediæval raiment. If he had been a shoemaker, we should
have found, with no little consternation, our shoes gradually
approximating to the antique sandal. As a hairdresser, he would have
invented some massing of the hair worthy to be the crown of Venus; as an
ironmonger, his nails would have had some noble pattern, fit to be the
nails of the Cross.
The limitations of William Morris, whatever they were, were not the
limitations of common decoration. It is true that all his work, even his
literary work, was in some sense decorative, had in some degree the
qualities of a splendid wall-paper. His characters, his stories, his
religious and political views, had, in the most emphatic sense, length
and breadth without thickness. He seemed really to believe that men
could enjoy a perfectly flat felicity. He made no account of the
unexplored and explosive possibilities of human nature, of the
unnameable terrors, and the yet more unnameable hopes. So long as a man
was graceful in every circumstance, so long as he had the inspiring
consciousness that the chestnut colour of his hair was relieved against
the blue forest a mile behind, he would be serenely happy. So he would
be, no doubt, if he were really fitted for a decorative existence; if he
were a piece of exquisitely coloured card-board.
But although Morris took little account of the terrible solidity of
human nature--took little account, so to speak, of human figures in the
round, it is altogether unfair to represent him as a mere æsthete. He
perceived a great 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 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 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.