London Films | Page 6

the
immensity he shares, and he is able to reflect that New York would not
look so relatively little, so comparatively thin, if New York were a
capital on the same lines as London. If New York were, like London, a
political as well as a commercial capital, she would have the national
edifices of Washington added to the sky-scrapers in which she is now
unrivalled, and her competition would be architecturally much more
formidable than it is. She would be the legislative centre of the
different States of the Union, as London is of the different counties of
the United Kingdom; she would have collected in her borders all their
capitols and public buildings; and their variety, if not dignity, would
valiantly abet her in the rivalry from which one must now recoil on her
behalf. She could not, of course, except on such rare days of fog as
seem to greet Englishmen in New York on purpose to vex us, have the
adventitious aid which the London atmosphere renders; her air is of
such a helpless sincerity that nothing in it shows larger than it is; no
mist clothes the sky-scraper in gigantic vagueness, the hideous tops
soar into the clear heaven distinct in their naked ugliness; and the low
buildings cower unrelieved about their bases. Nothing could be done in
palliation of the comparative want of antiquity in New York, for the
present, at least; but it is altogether probable that in the fulfilment of
her destiny she will be one day as old as London now is.

If one thinks, however, how old London now is, it is rather crazing;
much more crazing than the same sort of thought in the cities of lands
more exclusively associated with antiquity. In Italy you forget the
present; there seems nothing above the past, or only so thin a layer of
actuality that you have scarcely the sense of it. In England you
remember with an effort Briton, and Roman, and Saxon, and Norman,
and the long centuries of the mediaeval and modern English; the living
interests, ambitions, motives, are so dense that you cannot penetrate
them and consort quietly with the dead alone. Men whose names are in
the directory as well as men whose names are in history, keep you
company, and push the shades of heroes, martyrs, saints, poets, and
princes to the wall. They do not shoulder them willingly out of the way,
but helplessly; there is no place in the world where the material present
is so reverently, so tenderly mindful of the material past. Perhaps,
therefore, I felt safe in so largely leaving the English past to the English
present, and, having in London long ago satisfied that hunger for the
old which the new American brings with him to Europe, I now went
about enjoying the modern in its manifold aspects and possibly
fancying characteristic traits where I did not find them. I did not care
how trivial some of these were, but I hesitate to confide to the more
serious reader that I was at one moment much interested in what
seemed the growing informality of Englishmen in dress, as I noted it in
the streets and parks, or thought I noted it.
To my vision, or any illusion, they wore every sort of careless cap,
slouch felt hat, and straw hat; any sort of tunic, jacket, and cutaway.
The top-hat and frock-coat still appear, but their combination is
evidently no longer imperative, as it formerly was at all daytime
functions. I do not mean to say that you do not often see that stately
garment on persons of authority, but only that it is apparently not of the
supremacy expressed in the drawings of Du Maurier in the eighties and
nineties of the last century. Certainly, when it comes to the artist at
Truefitt's wearing a frock-coat while cutting your hair, you cannot help
asking yourself whether its hour has not struck. Yet, when one has said
this, one must hedge from a conjecture so extreme. The king wears a
frock-coat, a long, gray one, with a white top-hat and lavender gloves,
and those who like to be like a king conform to his taste. No one, upon

his life, may yet wear a frock and a derby, but many people now wear
top-hats, though black ones, with sack-coats, with any sort of coats; and,
above all, the Londoner affects in summer a straw hat either of a flat
top and a pasteboard stiffness, or of the operatically picturesque Alpine
pattern, or of a slouching Panama shapelessness. What was often the
derision, the abhorrence of the English in the dress of other nations has
now become their pleasure, and, with the English genius of doing what
they like, it may be that