A LOST IDEALISM

Waipa Post, Volume 32, Issue 1786, 24 July 1926, Page 3

A LOST IDEALISM

| When Rupert Brooke went to AnierI ica he reported that dressing children 1 was one of (the few things the Amer- | icans knew no more about than we did I but no wideawake young poet could 1 I make such an observation now, writes I Edith Shackleton, in the Evening 1 Standard. We have caught up to Am- | erica in the hygiene and gaiety of | 'small garments. 'Surveying the little I population in Hyde Park and KensingI ton Gardens, and the kindergarten “crocodiles” round about the politer I squares, in jerseys and shorts, plain I cloth overcoats, and stubby flat shoes, 1 we may be moved to praise our - moJ dern sagacity in devising costumes so | I healthy and comfortable, so unfettering and unobscuring to childish, grace. J Children, we can say proudly, were I never so well dressed before. And yet, and yet ? Is there not a certain forlorn timidity, almost a despair, expressed in jjhese garments j which are the childrens very own, made for little, animals rather than for potential men and women c potential heroes and princesses? ! l “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 tapes there t were connected with a sailor blouse, and all the rest of it. But they do not,' lon these occasions, remember quite } all. J For was there no thrill in being j I dressed as a sailor, correct, pnrposeful, 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 com-. I pliment of some phase of grown-up life rather than strictly according to I nursery needs? Too easily, perhaps, we take it for granted that children, with all their ' inborn cravings fo r make-believe, are really happiest when dressed strictly las small human animals. A flyaway I cloak and a Tam o’ Shanter was not so good a girl’s dress as the protective tube coat a,nd the well-pulled-on *felt pudding ; fbasin of to-day, but still there was always a chance of being some- . how mistaken for Flora MacDonald. And did not some of us secretly envey our mothers the alleged Breton fishwife dresses which they in their time • had worn in obedience to the contemporary grown-up fancy? I 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 makingdressing! themselves for their sitters, as a great portrait painter is said to ( have done the other day for a rich peer’s beautiful daughters who had nothing worth painting to wear.