Nausicaa in London: Or, the Lower Education of…

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.