Twelve Types | Page 3

and
the springtide terror. Every one of us as a boy or girl has had some
midnight dream of nameless obstacle and unutterable menace, in which
there was, under whatever imbecile forms, all the deadly stress and
panic of 'Wuthering Heights.' Every one of us has had a day-dream of
our own potential destiny not one atom more reasonable than 'Jane
Eyre.' And the truth which the Brontës came to tell us is the truth that
many waters cannot quench love, and that suburban respectability
cannot touch or damp a secret enthusiasm. Clapham, like every other

earthly city, is built upon a volcano. Thousands of people go to and fro
in the wilderness of bricks and mortar, earning mean wages, professing
a mean religion, wearing a mean attire, thousands of women who have
never found any expression for their exaltation or their tragedy but to
go on working harder and yet harder at dull and automatic
employments, at scolding children or stitching shirts. But out of all
these silent ones one suddenly became articulate, and spoke a resonant
testimony, and her name was Charlotte Brontë. Spreading around us
upon every side to-day like a huge and radiating geometrical figure are
the endless branches of the great city. There are times when we are
almost stricken crazy, as well we may be, by the multiplicity of those
appalling perspectives, the frantic arithmetic of that unthinkable
population. But this thought of ours is in truth nothing but a fancy.
There are no chains of houses; there are no crowds of men. The
colossal diagram of streets and houses is an illusion, the opium dream
of a speculative builder. Each of these men is supremely solitary and
supremely important to himself. Each of these houses stands in the
centre of the world. There is no single house of all those millions which
has not seemed to some one at some time the heart of all things and the
end of travel.

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 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 æsthete. 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