Health and Education. Charles Kingsley

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СКАЧАТЬ IN LONDON: OR, THE LOWER EDUCATION OF WOMAN

      Fresh from the Marbles of the British Museum, I went my way through London streets.  My brain was still full of fair and grand forms; the forms of men and women whose every limb and attitude betokened perfect health, and grace, and power, and a self-possession and self-restraint so habitual and complete that it had become unconscious, and undistinguishable from the native freedom of the savage.  For I had been up and down the corridors of those Greek sculptures, which remain as a perpetual sermon to rich and poor, amid our artificial, unwholesome, and it may be decaying pseudo-civilisation; saying with looks more expressive than all words—Such men and women can be; for such they have been; and such you may be yet, if you will use that science of which you too often only boast.  Above all, I had been pondering over the awful and yet tender beauty of the maiden figures from the Parthenon and its kindred temples.  And these, or such as these, I thought to myself, were the sisters of the men who fought at Marathon and Salamis; the mothers of many a man among the ten thousand whom Xenophon led back from Babylon to the Black Sea shore; the ancestresses of many a man who conquered the East in Alexander’s host, and fought with Porus in the far Punjab.  And were these women mere dolls?  These men mere gladiators?  Were they not the parents of philosophy, science, poetry, the plastic arts?  We talk of education now.  Are we more educated than were the ancient Greeks?  Do we know anything about education, physical, intellectual, or æsthetic, and I may say moral likewise—religious education, of course, in our sense of the word, they had none—but do we know anything about education of which they have not taught us at least the rudiments?  Are there not some branches of education which they perfected, once and for ever; leaving us northern barbarians to follow, or else not to follow, their example?  To produce health, that is, harmony and sympathy, proportion and grace, in every faculty of mind and body—that was their notion of education.  To produce that, the text-book of their childhood was the poetry of Homer, and not of—But I am treading on dangerous ground.  It was for this that the seafaring Greek lad was taught to find his ideal in Ulysses; while his sister at home found hers, it may be, in Nausicaa.  It was for this, that when perhaps the most complete and exquisite of all the Greeks, Sophocles the good, beloved by gods and men, represented on the Athenian stage his drama of Nausicaa, and, as usual, could not—for he had no voice—himself take a speaking part, he was content to do one thing in which he specially excelled; and dressed and masked as a girl, to play at ball amid the chorus of Nausicaa’s maidens.

      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 Homer’s 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 life—so to speak—of 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 forth—and wash the clothes.2

      “Nausicaa, wherefore doth thy mother bear

      Child so forgetful?  This long time doth rest,

      Like lumber in the house, much raiment fair.

      Soon must thou wed, and be thyself well-drest,

      And find thy bridegroom raiment of the best.

      These are the things whence good repute is born,

      And praises that make glad a parent’s breast.

      Come, let us both go washing with the morn;

      So shalt thou have clothes becoming to be worn.

      “Know that thy maidenhood is not for long,

      Whom the Phœacian chiefs already woo,

      Lords of the land whence thou thyself art sprung.

      Soon as the shining dawn comes forth anew,

      For wain and mules thy noble father sue,

      Which to the place of washing shall convey

      Girdles and shawls and rugs of splendid hue.

      This for thyself were better than essay

      Thither to walk: the place is distant a long way.”

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

      “One by the hearth sat, with the maids around,

      And on the skeins of yarn, sea-purpled, spent

      Her morning toil.  Him to the council bound,

      Called by the honoured kings, just going forth she found.”

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

      “Ashamed to name her marriage to her father dear.”

      But he understood all—and 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

      “When they came to the fair flowing river

      Which feeds good lavatories all the year,

      Fitted to cleanse all sullied robes soever,

      They from the wain the mules unharnessed there,

      And chased them free, to crop their juicy fare

      By the swift river, on the margin green;

      Then to the waters dashed the clothes they bare

      And in the stream-filled trenches stamped them clean.

      “Which, having washed and cleansed, they spread before

      The sunbeams, on the beach, where most did lie

      Thick pebbles, by the sea-wave washed ashore.

      So, having left them in the heat to dry,

      They to the bath went down, and by-and-by,

      Rubbed with rich oil, their midday meal essay,

      Couched in green turf, the river rolling nigh.

      Then, throwing off their veils, at ball they play,

      While the white-armed Nausicaa leads the choral lay.”

      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 СКАЧАТЬ