NAUSICAA 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 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