London Films | Page 7

they overdo their pleasure. But at the worst the
effect is more interesting than our uniformity. The conventional
evening dress alone remains inviolate, but how long this will remain,
who can say? The simple-hearted American, arriving with his
scrupulous dress suit in London, may yet find himself going out to
dinner with a company of Englishmen in white linen jackets or tennis
flannels.
If, however, the men's dress in England is informal, impatient, I think
one will be well within the lines of safety in saying that above
everything the English women's dress expresses sentiment, though I
suppose it is no more expressive of personal sentiment than the chic of
our women's dress is expressive of personal chic; in either case the
dressmaker, male or female, has impersonally much to do with it.
Under correction of those countrywomen of ours who will not allow
that the Englishwomen know how to dress, I will venture to say that
their expression of sentiment in dress is charming, but how charming it
comparatively is I shall be far from saying. I will only make so bold as
to affirm that it seems more adapted to the slender fluency of youth
than some realizations of the American ideal; and that after the azaleas
and rhododendrons in the Park there is nothing in nature more
suggestive of girlish sweetness and loveliness than the costumes in
which the wearers flow by the flowery expanses in carriage or on foot.
The colors worn are often as courageous as the vegetable tints; the
vaporous air softens and subdues crimsons and yellows that I am told
would shriek aloud in our arid atmosphere; but mostly the shades worn
tend to soft pallors, lavender, and pink, and creamy white. A group of
girlish shapes in these colors, seen newly lighted at a doorway from a
passing carriage, gave as they pressed eagerly forward a supreme effect
of that sentiment in English dress which I hope I am not recreant in

liking. Occasionally, also, there was a scarf, lightly escaping, lightly
caught, which, with an endearing sash, renewed for a fleeting moment a
bygone age of Sensibility, as we find it recorded in many a graceful
page, on many a glowing canvas.
Pictorial, rather than picturesque, might be the word for the present
dress of Englishwomen. It forms in itself a lovely picture to the eye,
and is not merely the material or the inspiration of a picture. It is
therefore the more difficult of transference to the imagination of the
reader who has not also been a spectator, and before such a scene as
one may witness in a certain space of the Park on a fair Sunday after
church in the morning, or before dinner in the early evening, the
boldest kodak may well close its single eye in despair. As yet even the
mental photograph cannot impart the tints of nature, and the reader who
wishes to assist at this scene must do his best to fancy them for himself.
At the right moment of the ripening London season the foliage of the
trees is densely yet freshly green and flatteringly soft to the eye; the
grass below has that closeness of texture which only English grass has
the secret of. At fit distances the wide beds of rhododendrons and
azaleas are glowing; the sky is tenderly blue, and the drifted clouds in it
are washed clean of their London grime. If it is in the afternoon, these
beautiful women begin to appear about the time when you may have
bidden yourself abandon the hope of them for that day. Some drift from
the carriages that draw up on the drive beside the sacred close where
they are to sit on penny chairs, spreading far over the green; others
glide on foot from elect neighborhoods, or from vehicles left afar,
perhaps that they may give themselves the effect of coming informally.
They arrive in twos and threes, young girls commonly with their
mothers, but sometimes together, in varied raptures of millinery, and
with the rainbow range in their delicately floating, delicately clinging
draperies. But their hats, their gowns, always express sentiment, even
when they cannot always express simplicity; and the just observer is
obliged to own that their calm faces often express, if not simplicity,
sentiment. Their beauty is very, very great, not a beauty of coloring
alone, but a beauty of feature which is able to be patrician without
being unkind; and if, as some American women say, they do not carry
themselves well, it takes an American woman to see it. They move

naturally and lightly--that is, the young girls do; mothers in England, as
elsewhere, are apt to put on weight; but many of the mothers are as
handsome in their well-wearing English way as their daughters.