WILLIAM MORRIS AND HIS SCHOOL


It is proper enough that the unveiling of the bust of William Morris
should approximate to a public festival, for while there have been many
men of genius in the Victorian era more despotic than he, there have
been none so representative. He represents not only that rapacious
hunger for beauty which has now for the first time become a serious
problem in the healthy life of humanity, but he represents also that
honourable instinct for finding beauty in common necessities of
workmanship which gives it a stronger and more bony structure. The time
has passed when William Morris was conceived to be irrelevant to be
described as a designer of wall-papers. If Morris had been a hatter
instead of a decorator, we should have become gradually and painfully
conscious of an improvement in our hats. If he had been a tailor, we
should have suddenly found our frock-coats trailing on the ground with
the grandeur of mediæval raiment. If he had been a shoemaker, we should
have found, with no little consternation, our shoes gradually
approximating to the antique sandal. As a hairdresser, he would have
invented some massing of the hair worthy to be the crown of Venus; as an
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