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 aesthetic twilight in
which we now live is, in spite of all the pessimists, not of the
greyness of death, but the greyness of dawn.

OPTIMISM OF BYRON

Everything is against our appreciating the spirit and the age of
Byron. The age that has just passed from us is always like a dream when
we wake in the morning, a thing incredible and centuries away. And the
world of Byron seems a sad and faded world, a weird and inhuman world,
where men were romantic in whiskers, ladies lived, apparently, in
bowers, and the very word has the sound of a piece of stage scenery.
Roses and nightingales recur in their poetry with the monotonous
elegance of a wall-paper pattern. The whole is like a revel of dead men,
a revel with splendid vesture and half-witted faces.

But the more shrewdly and earnestly we study the histories of men, the
less ready shall w