n to hard
work and virtue as the only forms of amusement which did not spoil the
bloom of one's cheek. Even the supreme philosopher of clothes would
have kept us far too busy ever to think about them.

People unfortunately have got it into their heads, as the result of a
long process of civilisation, that, in order to be beautiful, clothes
must be a kind of finery to which one gives the thoughts of one's
nights and days. And the result is that most women would rather take
the advice of their dressmaker than of Epicurus. It is one of the most
ludicrous misdirections that the human race has ever followed. The
dressmaker's living depends on her keeping off Epicurus with one hand
and the Twelve Apostles with the other, and she has certainly done so
with the most brilliant efficiency. We who do not live by dressmaking,
however, should be coolly critical of the dressmaker's point of view.
It was not she, perhaps, who invented, but it is she who most brazenly
keeps alive, the great delusion of civilised society that woman's
foolish dresses are more beautiful than the reasonable clothes of men.
In fifteen thousand years or so, when the idea of beauty will have had
time to develop into a tiny bud, men and supermen will laugh at this
old absurdity. The idea that modern men's clothes are ugly is a
deception chiefly maintained by advertisement agents and shopkeepers.
There is, I admit, much to be said against the bowler hat. But the
jacket, the trousers, and the sock--so long as it does not match the
tie--come nearer what is excellent and appropriate in dress than any
other costume that has been invented since the strong silent
Englishman left his coat of paint behind him in the wood. It is
possible, no doubt, to spoil the effect of it all with too much
folding and pressing. Dandyism means the ruin of one's clothes from
the aesthetic point of view. One must be ready to expose them to all
weathers--to have them rained upon and rumpled--if one wants them to
be really beautiful, say, like an old church.

It is because woman's dress at its finest does not stand this test of
beauty that a marchioness is worse clad than the driver of a coal cart
or a chimney-sweep. Not luxury, but necessity, is the creator of
beauty. Beauty comes from our submission to Nature; it is not a matter
of thieving a few handfuls of coloured feathers from Nature's breast
and wings. It comes by accident, as you will see if you look down from
a hill at night on