a very definite limit to it. It did not lie only in the fact that
his revolution was in truth a reaction, though this was a partial
explanation of his partial failure. When he was denouncing the dresses
of modern ladies, 'upholstered like arm-chairs instead of being draped
like women,' as he forcibly expressed it, he would hold up for practical
imitation the costumes and handicrafts of the Middle Ages. Further than
this retrogressive and imitative movement he never seemed to go. Now,
the men of the time of Chaucer had many evil qualities, but there was at
least one exhibition of moral weakness they did not give. They would
have laughed at the idea of dressing themselves in the manner of the
bowmen at the battle of Senlac, or painting themselves an aesthetic blue,
after the custom of the ancient Britons. They would not have called that
a movement at all. Whatever was beautiful in their dress or manners
sprang honestly and naturally out of the life they led and preferred to
lead. And it may surely be maintained that any real advance in the
beauty of modern dress must spring honestly and naturally out of the
life we lead and prefer to lead. We are not altogether without hints and
hopes of such a change, in the growing orthodoxy of rough and athletic
costumes. But if this cannot be, it will be no substitute or
satisfaction to turn life into an interminable historical fancy-dress
ball. But the limitation of Morris's work lay deeper than this. We may
best suggest it by a method after his own heart. Of all the various
works he performed, none, perhaps, was so splendidly and solidly
valuable as his great protest for the fables and superstitions of
mankind. He has the supreme credit of showing that the fairy-tales
contain the deepest truth of the earth, the real record of men's feeling
for things. Trifling details may be inaccurate, Jack may not have
climbed up so tall a beanstalk, or killed so tall a giant; but it is not
such things that make a story false; it is a far different class of
things that makes every modern book of history as false as the father of
lies; ingenuity, self-consciousness, hypocritical impartiality. It
appears to us that of all the fairy-tales none contains so vital a
moral truth as the old story, existing in many forms, of Beauty and the
Beast. There is written, with all the authority of a human scripture,
the eternal and essential truth that until we love a thing in all its
ugliness we cannot make it beau