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 cardboard.

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 aesthete. 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 that 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