protected without being strangled, and even his ostrich feathers, if any
Philistine should object to them, are not merely dandyism, but fan him
very pleasantly, I am sure, in summer, and when the weather is bad they
are no doubt left at home, and his cloak taken out. _The value of the
dress is simply that every separate article of it expresses a law_. My
young man is consequently apparelled with ideas, while Mr. Huyshe's young
man is stiffened with facts; the latter teaches one nothing; from the
former one learns everything. I need hardly say that this dress is good,
not because it is seventeenth century, but because it is constructed on
the true principles of costume, just as a square lintel or a pointed arch
is good, not because one may be Greek and the other Gothic, but because
each of them is the best method of spanning a certain-sized opening, or
resisting a certain weight. The fact, however, that this dress was
generally worn in England two centuries and a half ago shows at least
this, that the right laws of dress have been understood and realised in
our country, and so in our country may be realised and understood again.
As regards the absolute beauty of this dress and its meaning, I should
like to say a few words more. Mr. Wentworth Huyshe solemnly announces
that 'he and those who think with him' cannot permit this question of
beauty to be imported into the question of dress; that he and those who
think with him take 'practical views on the subject,' and so on. Well, I
will not enter here into a discussion as to how far any one who does not
take beauty and the value of beauty into account can claim to be
practical at all. The word practical is nearly always the last refuge of
the uncivilised. Of all misused words it is the most evilly treated. But
what I want to point out is that beauty is essentially organic; that is,
it comes, not from without, but from within, not from any added
prettiness, but from the perfection of its own being; and that
consequently, as the body is beautiful, so all apparel that rightly
clothes it must be beautiful also in its construction and in its lines.