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 the modern Nausicaa: but not of the
quality which they desire for their country's future good. Self-
consciousness, eagerness, volubility, petulance in countenance, in
gesture, and in voice--which last is too often most harsh and
artificial, the breath being sent forth through the closed teeth,
and almost entirely at the corners of the mouth--and, with all
this, a weariness often about the wrinkling forehead and the
drooping lids;--all these, which are growing too common, not among
the Demos only, nor only in the towns, are signs, they think, of
the unrest of unhealth, physical, intellectual, spiritual. At
least they are as different as two types of physiognomy in the
same race can be, from the expression both of face and gesture, in
those old Greek sculptures, and in the old Italian painters; and,
it must be said, in the portraits of Reynolds, and Gainsborough,
Copley, and Romney. Not such, one thinks, must have been the
mothers of Britain during the latter half of the last century and
the beginning of the present; when their sons, at times, were
holding half the world at bay.
And if Nausicaa has become such in town: what is she when she
goes to the seaside, not to wash the clothes in fresh-water, but
herself in salt--the very salt-water, laden with decaying
organisms, from which, though not polluted further by a dozen
sewers, Ulysses had to cleanse himself, anointing, too, with oil,
ere he was fit to appear in the company of Nausicaa of Greece?
She dirties herself with the dirty saltwater; and probably chills
and tires herself by walking thither and back, and staying in too
long; and then flaunts on the pier, bedizened in garments which,
for monstrosity of form and disharmony of colours, would have set
that Greek Nausicaa's teeth on edge, or those of any average
Hindoo woman now. Or, even sadder still, she sits on chairs and
benches all the weary afternoon, her head drooped on her chest,
over some novel from the "Library;" and then returns to tea and
shrimps, and lodgings of which the fragrance is not unsuggestive,
sometimes not unproductive, of typhoid fever. Ah, poor Nausicaa
of England! That is a sad sight to some who think about the
present, and have read about the past. It is not a sad sight to
see your old father--tradesman, or clerk, or what not--who has
done good work in his day, and hopes to do some more, sitting by
your old mother, who has done good work in her day--among the
rest, that heaviest work of all, the bringing you into the world
and keeping you in it till now--honest, kindly, cheerful folk
enough, and not inefficient in their own calling; though an
average Northumbrian, or Highlander, or Irish Easterling, beside
carrying a brain of five times the intellectual force, could drive
five such men over the cliff with his bare hands. It is not a sad
sight, I say, to see them sitting about upon those seaside
benches, looking out listlessly at the water, and the ships, and
the sunlight, and enjoying, like so many flies upon a wall, the
novel act of doing nothing. It is not the old for whom wise men
are sad: but for you. Where is your vitality? Where is your