stitions 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
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