I wish that every American journalist, every American book reviewer, every American drama critic, would spend a month in London and diligently read the morning newspapers, such as The Times, The Telegraph, The Morning Post. Every page seems to be written for intelligent readers. These London journalists review tennis, golf and cricket matches with more dignity than the average New Yorker reviews plays and books. One reason that militates steadily against intellectual progress in America is the fact that apparently we have no language suitable as a medium for the exchange of ideas. Our book reviews and our drama criticisms are too often written in a cheap kind of slang that is intended to be smart. If anyone imagines that the journalism of London loses in intensity by being written in suitable English, let him turn to a file of The London Times and read the story of Tilden playing tennis at Wimbledon.
A remarkable thing about literary society in London is that age has nothing to do with it. One meets in social gatherings men and women in the twenties and in the eighties—disparity in years seems to be forgotten.
One should remember that, owing to the small size of England, one can use London as a base of operations and take excursions into the country on the swift English trains, returning to London every evening; many happy, baggageless days have I spent in this manner.
When G. K. Chesterton was in America, I asked him what difference between the two countries impressed him most. Instantly he replied, “Your wooden houses.” I had never thought of them as curiosities, but one does not see them in England. The thing that to me is most noticeable on the London streets is the absence of straw hats. There are many more bare male heads than there are straw hats. It is almost impossible to attract attention in London, but a straw hat will come nearest to doing the trick. Some men are exquisitely and others strangely clad, and nobody cares. I saw a man riding a bicycle. He had on tan shoes, homespun trousers, a frock coat, and a tall silk hat.
XXVI
WHAT THE MAN WILL WEAR
Men, women, and children are all interested in clothes; there have been many scholarly works, displaying vast erudition, on the history of costume; and two literary masterpieces, dealing with the philosophy of clothes, belong permanently to literature—A Tale of a Tub, by Jonathan Swift, and Sartor Resartus, by Thomas Carlyle.
So much attention has recently been paid in the newspapers and by the public to the clothes of women, that we are forgetting what revolutionary changes have taken place in the garments of men. Women’s clothes have decreased in number, weight, and size. Men’s clothes have gone through a process of softening. Hard hats, hard collars, hard shirts, hard shoes, hard suits, have given way to soft; and, for the first time in centuries, the carcasses of males are comfortably clad.
One hundred years ago the average gentleman, not satisfied with covering his body with an accumulation of intolerably thick clothes, wound an enormous stock around his neck. How stifling they look in those old family portraits! Robert Louis Stevenson applied an unexpected but accurate adjective to those collections of oil paintings of deceased ancestors, with which their descendants adorned walls of their dining rooms. Stevenson called them “these constipated portraits.”
This is the way my father dressed on practically every morning of his life; that is, after he left the farm, and entered upon the practice of his profession. He wore long, heavy flannel underwear, reaching to his ankles and his wrists. He put on a “hard-boiled,” white, full-bosomed shirt, stiff as sheet-iron. At the neck he fastened a stiff, upright, white linen choker collar; at the ends of the sleeves he buttoned on thick, three-ply linen cuffs. He imprisoned his feet, ankles, and shins in black, stiff, leather boots, reaching to the knees, but concealed above the ankles by his trousers. He wore a long-tailed coat, a waistcoat, and trousers made out of thick, dark-blue or black broadcloth. The trousers were strapped over his shoulders by suspenders. For the top of his head there was a tall, heavy, beaver hat.
Thus, clad in impenetrable armour from head to foot, he set out for the day’s work.