Health and Education - Charles Kingsley 7 стр.

That drama of Nausicaa is lost; and if I dare say so of any play of Sophocles, I scarce regret it.  It is well, perhaps, that we have no second conception of the scene, to interfere with the simplicity, so grand, and yet so tender, of Homers idyllic episode.

Nausicaa, it must be remembered, is the daughter of a king.  But not of a king in the exclusive modern European or old Eastern sense.  Her father, Alcinous, is simply primus inter pares among a community of merchants, who are called kings likewise; and Mayor for lifeso to speakof a new trading city, a nascent Genoa or Venice, on the shore of the Mediterranean.  But the girl Nausicaa, as she sleeps in her carved chamber, is like the immortals in form and face; and two handmaidens who sleep on each side of the polished door have beauty from the Graces.

To her there enters, in the shape of some maiden friend, none less than Pallas Athené herself, intent on saving worthily her favourite, the shipwrecked Ulysses; and bids her in a dream go forthand wash the clothes.2

Startled by her dream, Nausicaa awakes, and goes to find her parents

And calling him, as she might now, Pappa phile, Dear Papa, asks for the mule waggon: but it is her fathers and her five brothers clothes she fain would wash,

But he understood alland she goes forth in the mule waggon, with the clothes, after her mother has put in a chest of all kinds of delicate food, and meat, and wine in a goatskin; and last but not least, the indispensable cruse of oil for anointing after the bath, to which both Jews, Greeks, and Romans owed so much health and beauty.  And then we read in the simple verse of a poet too refined, like the rest of his race, to see anything mean or ridiculous in that which was not ugly and unnatural, how she and her maids got into the polished waggon, with good wheels, and she took the whip and the studded reins, and beat them till they started; and how the mules rattled away, and pulled against each other, till

The mere beauty of this scene all will feel, who have the sense of beauty in them.  Yet it is not on that aspect which I wish to dwell, but on its healthfulness.  Exercise is taken, in measured time, to the sound of song, as a duty almost, as well as an amusement.  For this game of ball, which is here mentioned for the first time in human literature, nearly three thousand years ago, was held by the Greeks and by the Romans after them, to be an almost necessary part of a liberal education; principally, doubtless, from the development which it produced in the upper half of the body, not merely to the arms, but to the chest, by raising and expanding the ribs, and to all the muscles of the torso, whether perpendicular or oblique.  The elasticity and grace which it was believed to give were so much prized, that a room for ball-play, and a teacher of the art, were integral parts of every gymnasium; and the Athenians went so far as to bestow on one famous ballplayer, Aristonicus of Carystia, a statue and the rights of citizenship.  The rough and hardy young Spartans, when passing from boyhood into manhood, received the title of ball-players, seemingly from the game which it was then their special duty to learn.  In the case of Nausicaa and her maidens, the game would just bring into their right places all that is liable to be contracted and weakened in women, so many of whose occupations must needs be sedentary and stooping; while the song which accompanied the game at once filled the lungs regularly and rhythmically, and prevented violent motion, or unseemly attitude.  We, the civilised, need physiologists to remind us of these simple facts, and even then do not act on them.  Those old half-barbarous Greeks had found them out for themselves, and, moreover, acted on them.

But fair Nausicaa must have beensome will saysurely a mere child of nature, and an uncultivated person?

So far from it, that her whole demeanour and speech show culture of the very highest sort, full of sweetness and light.Intelligent and fearless, quick to perceive the bearings of her strange and sudden adventure, quick to perceive the character of Ulysses, quick to answer his lofty and refined pleading by words as lofty and refined, and pious withal;for it is she who speaks to her handmaids the once so famous words:

Clear of intellect, prompt of action, modest of demeanour, shrinking from the slightest breath of scandal; while she is not ashamed, when Ulysses, bathed and dressed, looks himself again, to whisper to her maidens her wish that the Gods might send her such a spouse.This is Nausicaa as Homer draws her; and as many a scholar and poet since Homer has accepted her for the ideal of noble maidenhood.  I ask my readers to study for themselves her interview with Ulysses, in Mr. Worsleys translation, or rather in the grand simplicity of the original Greek,3 and judge whether Nausicaa is not as perfect a lady as the poet who imagined heror, it may be, drew her from lifemust have been a perfect gentleman; both complete in those manners which, says the old proverb, make the man: but which are the woman herself; because with herwho acts more by emotion than by calculationmanners are the outward and visible tokens of her inward and spiritual grace, or disgrace; and flow instinctively, whether good or bad, from the instincts of her inner nature.

True, Nausicaa could neither read nor write.  No more, most probably, could the author of the Odyssey.  No more, for that matter, could Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, though they were plainly, both in mind and manners, most highly-cultivated men.  Reading and writing, of course, have now become necessaries of humanity; and are to be given to every human being, that he may start fair in the race of life.  But I am not aware that Greek women improved much, either in manners, morals, or happiness, by acquiring them in after centuries.  A wise man would sooner see his daughter a Nausicaa than a Sappho, an Aspasia, a Cleopatra, or even an Hypatia.

Full of such thoughts, I went through London streets, among the Nausicaas of the present day; the girls of the period; the daughters and hereafter mothers of our future rulers, the great Demos or commercial middle class of the greatest mercantile city in the world: and noted what I had noted with fear and sorrow, many a day, for many a year; a type, and an increasing type, of young women who certainly had not had the advantages, educational and other, of that Greek Nausicaa of old.

Of course, in such a city as London, to which the best of everything, physical and other, gravitates, I could not but pass, now and then, beautiful persons, who made me proud of those grandes Anglaises aux joues rouges, whom the Parisiennes ridiculeand envy.  But I could not help suspecting that their looks showed them to be either country-bred, or born of country parents; and this suspicion was strengthened by the fact, that when compared with their mothers, the mothers physique was, in the majority of cases, superior to the daughters.  Painful it was, to one accustomed to the ruddy well-grown peasant girl, stalwart, even when, as often, squat and plain, to remark the exceedingly small size of the average young woman; by which I do not mean mere want of heightthat is a little matterbut want of breadth likewise; a general want of those large frames, which indicate usually a power of keeping strong and healthy not merely the muscles, but the brain itself.

Poor little things.  I passed hundredsI pass hundreds every daytrying to hide their littleness by the nasty mass of false hairor what does duty for it; and by the ugly and useless hat which is stuck upon it, making the head thereby look ridiculously large and heavy; and by the high heels on which they totter onward, having forgotten, or never learnt, the simple art of walking; their bodies tilted forward in that ungraceful attitude which is calledwhy that name of all others?a Grecian bend; seemingly kept on their feet, and kept together at all, in that strange attitude, by tight stays which prevented all graceful and healthy motion of the hips or sides; their raiment, meanwhile, being purposely misshapen in this direction and in that, to hideit must be presumeddeficiencies of form.  If that chignon and those heels had been taken off, the figure which would have remained would have been that too often of a puny girl of sixteen.  And yet there was no doubt that these women were not only full grown, but some of them, alas! wives and mothers.

Poor little things.And this they have gained by so-called civilisation: the power of aping the fashions by which the worn-out Parisienne hides her own personal defects; and of making themselves, by innate want of that taste which the Parisienne possesses, only the cause of something like a sneer from many a cultivated man; and of something like a sneer, too, from yonder gipsy woman who passes by, with bold bright face, and swinging hip, and footstep stately and elastic; far better dressed, according to all true canons of taste, than most town-girls; and thanking her fate that she and her Rom are no house-dwellers and gaslight-sightseers, but fatten on free air upon the open moor.

But the face which is beneath that chignon and that hat?  Wellit is sometimes pretty: but how seldom handsome, which is a higher quality by far.  It is not, strange to say, a well-fed face.  Plenty of money, and perhaps too much, is spent on those fine clothes.  It had been better, to judge from the complexion, if some of that money had been spent in solid wholesome food.  She looks as if she livedas she too often does, I hearon tea and bread-and-butter, or rather on bread with the minimum of butter.  For as the want of bone indicates a deficiency of phosphatic food, so does the want of flesh about the cheeks indicate a deficiency of hydrocarbon.  Poor little Nausicaa:that is not her fault.  Our boasted civilisation has not even taught her what to eat, as it certainly has not increased her appetite; and she knows notwhat every country fellow knowsthat without plenty of butter and other fatty matters, she is not likely to keep even warm.  Better to eat nasty fat bacon now, than to supply the want of it some few years hence by nastier cod-liver oil.  But there is no one yet to tell her that, and a dozen other equally simple facts, for her own sake, and for the sake of that coming Demos which she is to bring into the world; a Demos which, if we can only keep it healthy in body and brain, has before it so splendid a future: but which, if body and brain degrade beneath the influence of modern barbarism, is but too likely to follow the Demos of ancient Byzantium, or of modern Paris.

Ay, but her intellect.  She is so clever, and she reads so much, and she is going to be taught to read so much more.

Ah, wellthere was once a science called physiognomy.  The Greeks, from what I can learn, knew more of it than any people since: though the Italian painters and sculptors must have known much; far more than we.  In a more scientific civilisation there will be such a science once more: but its laws, though still in the empiric stage, are not altogether forgotten by some.  Little children have often a fine and clear instinct of them.  Many cultivated and experienced women have a fine and clear instinct of them likewise.  And some such would tell us that there is intellect in plenty in the modern Nausicaa: but not of the quality which they desire for their countrys future good.  Self-consciousness, eagerness, volubility, petulance, in countenance, in gesture, and in voicewhich last is too often most harsh and artificial, the breath being sent forth through the closed teeth, and almost entirely at the corners of the mouthand, with all this, a weariness often about the wrinkling forehead and the drooping lids;all these, which are growing too common, not among the Demos only, nor only in the towns, are signs, they think, of the unrest of unhealth, physical, intellectual, spiritual.  At least they are as different as two types of physiognomy in the same race can be, from the expression both of face and gesture, in those old Greek sculptures, and in the old Italian painters; and, it must be said, in the portraits of Reynolds, and Gainsborough, Copley, and Romney.  Not such, one thinks, must have been the mothers of Britain during the latter half of the last century and the beginning of the present; when their sons, at times, were holding half the world at bay.

And if Nausicaa has become such in town: what is she when she goes to the seaside, not to wash the clothes in fresh-water, but herself in saltthe very salt-water, laden with decaying organisms, from which, though not polluted further by a dozen sewers, Ulysses had to cleanse himself, anointing, too, with oil, ere he was fit to appear in the company of Nausicaa of Greece?  She dirties herself with the dirty salt-water; and probably chills and tires herself by walking thither and back, and staying in too long; and then flaunts on the pier, bedizened in garments which, for monstrosity of form and disharmony of colours, would have set that Greek Nausicaas teeth on edge, or those of any average Hindoo woman now.  Or, even sadder still, she sits on chairs and benches all the weary afternoon, her head drooped on her chest, over some novel from the Library; and then returns to tea and shrimps, and lodgings of which the fragrance is not unsuggestive, sometimes not unproductive, of typhoid fever.  Ah, poor Nausicaa of England!  That is a sad sight to some who think about the present, and have read about the past.  It is not a sad sight to see your old fathertradesman, or clerk, or what notwho has done good work in his day, and hopes to do some more, sitting by your old mother, who has done good work in her dayamong the rest, that heaviest work of all, the bringing you into the world and keeping you in it till nowhonest, kindly, cheerful folk enough, and not inefficient in their own calling; though an average Northumbrian, or Highlander, or Irish Easterling, beside carrying a brain of five times the intellectual force, could drive five such men over the cliff with his bare hands.  It is not a sad sight, I say, to see them sitting about upon those seaside benches, looking out listlessly at the water, and the ships, and the sunlight, and enjoying, like so many flies upon a wall, the novel act of doing nothing.  It is not the old for whom wise men are sad: but for you.  Where is your vitality?  Where is your Lebensglückseligkeit, your enjoyment of superfluous life and power?  Why can you not even dance and sing, till now and then, at night, perhaps, when you ought to be safe in bed, but when the weak brain, after receiving the days nourishment, has roused itself a second time into a false excitement of gaslight pleasure?  What there is left of it is all going into that foolish book, which the womanly element in you, still healthy and alive, delights in; because it places you in fancy in situations in which you will never stand, and inspires you with emotions, some of which, it may be, you had better never feel.  Poor Nausicaaold, some men think, before you have been ever young.