ht 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.

THE 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 we be to make use of the word "artificial." Nothing in
the world has ever been artificial. Many customs, many dresses, many
works of art are branded with artificiality because they exhibit vanity
and self-consciousness: as if vanity were not a deep and elemental
thing, like love and hate and the fear of death. Vanity may be found in
darkling deserts, in the hermit and in the wild beasts that crawl around
him. It may be good or evil, but assuredly it is not artificial: vanity
is a voice out of the abyss.

The remarkable fact is, however, and it bears strongly on the present
position of Byron, that when a thing is unfamiliar to us, when it is
remote and the product of some other age or spirit, we think it not
savage or terrible, but merely artificial. There are many instances of
this: a fair one is