A LOST IDEALISM.

Otago Witness, Issue 3773, 6 July 1926, Page 73

A LOST IDEALISM.

When Rupert Brooke went to America lie reported that dressing children was one of the few things the Americans knew more about than we did, but no wideawake young poet could make such an observation now, writes Edith Sliackleton, in the Evening Standard. We have caught up to America in the hygiene and gaiety of small garments. Surveying the little population in Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens, and the kindergarten “crocodiles” round about the politer squares, in jerseys and shorts, plain cloth overcoats, and stubby flat shoes, we may be moved to praise our modern sagacity in devising costumes so healthy and comfortable, so unfettering and unobscuring to childish grace. Children, we can say proudly, were never so well dressed before. And yet, and yet ? Is there not a certain forlorn timidity, almost a despair, expressed in these garments which are the children’s very own, made for little animals rather than for potential men and women, potential heroes and princesses? “So much better than the clothes we wore,” young parents tell one another complacently, and then fall to reminiscence of the way sailor hats used to blow off, and what a lot of tajta there were connected with a sailor blouse, and all the rest of it. But they do not,

on these occasions, remember quite all. For was there no thrHl in being dressed as a sailor, correct, purposeful, with a whistle on your lanyard, and perhaps a real man-o’-war*s ribbon round your hat? Was there not an enviable confidence and idealism in the way our elders dressed up in compliment of some phase of grown-up life rather than strictly according to nursery needs? Too easily, perhaps, we take it for granted that children, with all their inborn cravings for make-believe, are really happiest when dressed strictly as small human animals. A flyaway cloak and a Tam o’ Shanter was not so good a girl’s dress as the protective tube coat and the well-pulled-on felt pudding basin of to-day, but still there was always a chance of being somehow mistaken for Flora Macdonald. And did not some of us secretly envy our mothers the alleged Breton fishwife dresses which they in their time had worn in obedience to the contemporary grown-up fancy? But perhaps the banishing of tradition and idealism from the nursery wardrobe will have fine fruits in the end. Perhaps the boys and girls who have grown up expressing their obvious selves only, and never their inner dreams, in their clothes, will take to the art of dress with a new and delightful energy. Fantasy will come again, the terror of affectedness will pass, and maybe the great painters of that time will not be driven to making dresses themselves for their sitters, as a jreat portrait painter is said to have done the other day for a rich peer’s beautiful daughters who had nothing worth painting to wear.