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.
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