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 beautiful. This was the weak point in William
Morris as a reformer: that he sought to reform modern life, and that he
hated modern life instead of loving it. Modern London is indeed a beast,
big enough and black enough to be the beast in Apocalypse, blazing with
a million eyes, and roaring with a million voices. But unless the poet
can love this fabulous monster as he is, can feel with some generous
excitement his massive and mysterious 'joie-de-vivre,' the vast scale of
his iron anatomy and the beating of his thunderous heart, he cannot and