Health and Education. Charles Kingsley

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 been—some will say—surely 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:

      “Strangers and poor men all are sent from Zeus;

         And alms, though small, are sweet”

      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. Worsley’s 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 her—or, it may be, drew her from life—must 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 her—who acts more by emotion than by calculation—manners 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 ridicule—and 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 mother’s 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 height—that is a little matter—but 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 hundreds—I pass hundreds every day—trying to hide their littleness by the nasty mass of false hair—or 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 called—why 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 hide—it must be presumed—deficiencies 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?  Well—it 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 lived—as she too often does, I hear—on 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 not—what every country fellow knows—that 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, well—there 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 СКАЧАТЬ