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 aesthetic, 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 Athene herself, intent on saving worthily her favourite, the
shipwrecked Ulysses; and bids her in a dream go forth--and wash the
clothes. {72}
"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 Phoeacian 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."