tiful. 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 it we shall not decorate the
armour of the twelfth century but the machinery of the twentieth. A
lamp-post shall be wroug