One of the merits of boating is that it suggests indirectly the attendant accomplishment of swimming, and this is some thing of such priceless importance that no trouble can be too great for its acquisition. Parents are uneasy until their children are vaccinated, and yet leave them to incur a risk as great and almost as easily averted. The barbarian mother, who, lowering her baby into the water by her girdle, teaches it to swim ere it can walk, is before us in this duty. Swimming, moreover, is not one of those arts in which a little learning is a dangerous thing; on the contrary, a little may be as useful in an emergency as a great deal, if it gives those few moments of self-possession amid danger which will commonly keep a person from drowning until assistance comes. Women are naturally as well fitted for swimming as men, since specific buoyancy is here more than a match for strength; but effort is often needed to secure for them those opportunities of instruction and practice which the unrestrained wanderings of boys secure for them so easily. For this purpose, swimming-schools for ladies are now established in many places, at home and abroad; and the newspapers have lately chronicled a swimming-match at a girls' school in Berlin, where thirty-three competitors were entered for the prize,—and another among titled ladies in Paris, where each fashionable swimmer was allowed the use of the left hand only, the right hand sustaining an open parasol. Our own waters have, it may be, exhibited spectacles as graceful, though less known to fame. Never may I forget the bevy of bright maidens who under my pilotage buffeted on many a summer's day the surges of Cape Ann, learning a wholly new delight in trusting the buoyancy of the kind old ocean and the vigor of their own fair arms. Ah, my pupils, some of you have since been a prince's partners in the ball-room; but in those days, among the dancing waves, it was King Neptune who placed on you his crown.
Other out-door habits depend upon the personal tastes of the individual, in certain directions, and are best cultivated by educating these. If a young girl is born and bred with a love of any branch of natural history or of horticulture, happy is she; for the mere unconscious interest of the pursuit is an added lease of life to her. It is the same with all branches of Art whose pursuit leads into the open air. Rosa Bonheur, with her wanderings among mountains and pastures, alternating with the vigorous work of the studio, needed no other appliances for health. The same advantages come to many, in spite of delinquent mothers, in the bracing habits of household labor, at least where mechanical improvements have not rendered it too easy. Improved cooking-stoves and Mrs. Cornelius have made the culinary art such a path of roses that it is hardly now included in early training, but deferred till after matrimony. Yet bread-making in well-ventilated kitchens and sweeping in open-windowed rooms are calisthenics so bracing that one grudges them to the Irish maidens, whose round and comely arms betray so much less need of their tonic influence than the shrunken muscles exhibited so freely by our short-sleeved belles.
Perhaps even well-developed arms are not so essential to female beauty as erectness of figure, a trait on which our low school-desks have made sad havoc. The only sure panacea for round shoulders in boys appears to be the military drill, and Miss Mitford records that in her youth it was the custom in girls' schools to apply the same remedy. Dr. Lewis relies greatly on the carrying of moderate weights upon a padded wooden cap which he has devised for this purpose; and certainly the straightest female figure with which I am acquainted—aged seventy-four—is said to have been formed by the youthful habit of pacing the floor for half an hour dally, with a book upon the head, under rigid maternal discipline. Another traditional method is to insist that the damsel shall sit erect, without leaning against the chair, for a certain number of hours daily; and Sir Walter Scott says that his mother, in her eightieth year, took as much care to avoid giving any support to her back as if she had been still under the stern eye of Mrs. Ogilvie, her early teacher. Such simple methods may not be enough to check diseased curvatures or inequalities when already formed: these are best met by Ling's system of medical gymnastics, or "movement-cure," as applied by Dr. Lewis, Dr. Taylor, and others.
The ordinary gymnastic apparatus has also been employed extensively by women, and that very successfully, wherever the exercises have been systematically organized, with agreeable classes and competent teachers. If the gymnasium often fails to interest girls as much as boys, it is probably from deficiency in these respects,—and also because the female pupils, beginning on a lower plane of strength, do not command so great a variety of exercises, and so tire of the affair more readily. But hundreds, if not thousands, of American women have practised in these institutions during the last ten years,—single establishments in large cities having sometimes several hundred pupils,—and many have attained a high degree of skill in climbing, vaulting, swinging, and the like; nor can I find that any undue proportion of accidents has occurred. Wherever Dr. Lewis's methods have been introduced, important advantages have followed. He has invented an astonishing variety of games and well-studied movements,—with the lightest and cheapest apparatus, balls, bags, rings, wands, wooden dumb-bells, small clubs, and other instrumentalities,—which are all gracefully and effectually used by his classes, to the sound of music, and in a way to spare the weakest when lightly administered, or to fatigue the strongest when applied in force. Being adapted for united use by both sexes, they make more thorough appeal to the social element than the ordinary gymnastics; and evening classes, to meet several evenings in a week, have proved exceedingly popular in some of our towns. These exercises do not require fixed apparatus or a special hall. For this and other reasons they are peculiarly adapted for use in schools, and it would be well if they could be regularly taught in our normal institutions. Dr. Lewis himself is now training regular teachers to carry on the same good work, and his movement is undoubtedly the most important single step yet taken for the physical education of American women.
There is withal a variety of agreeable minor exercises, dating back farther than gymnastic professors, which must not be omitted. Archery, still in fashion in England, has never fairly taken root among us, and seems almost hopeless: the clubs formed for its promotion die out almost as speedily as cricket-clubs, and leave no trace behind; though this may not always be. Bowling and billiards are, however, practised by lady amateurs, just so far as they find opportunity, which is not very far; desirable public or private facilities being obtainable by few only, except at the summer watering-places. Battledoor-and-shuttlecock seems likely to come again into favor, and that under eminent auspices: Dr. Windship holding it in high esteem, as occupying the mind while employing every part of the body, harmonizing the muscular system, giving quickness to eye and hand, and improving the balancing power. The English, who systematize all amusements so much more than we, have developed this simple entertainment into several different games, arduous and complicated as their games of ball. The mere multiplication of the missiles also lends an additional stimulus, and the statistics of success in this way appear almost fabulous. A zealous English battledoorean informs me that the highest scores yet recorded in the game are as follows: five thousand strokes for a single shuttlecock, five hundred when employing two, one hundred and fifty with three, and fifty-two when four airy messengers are kept flying simultaneously.
It may seem trivial to urge upon rational beings the use of a shuttlecock as a duty; but this is surely better than that one's health should become a thing as perishable, and fly away as easily. There is no danger that our educational systems will soon grow too careless of intellect and too careful of health. Reforms, whether in physiology or in smaller things, move slowly, when prejudice or habit bars the way. Paris is the head-quarters of medical science; yet in Paris, to this day, the poor babies in the great hospital of La Maternité are so tortured in tight swathings that not a limb can move. Progress is not in proportion to the amount of scientific knowledge on deposit in any country, but to the extent of its diffusion. No nation in the world grapples with its own evils so promptly as ours. It is but a few years since there was a general croaking about the physical deterioration of young men in our cities,—and now already the cities and the colleges are beginning to lead the rural districts in this respect. The guaranty of reform in American female health is to be found in the growing popular conviction that reform is needed. The community is tired of the reproaches of foreigners, and of the more serious evils of homes desolated by disease, and lives turned to tragedies. Morbid anatomy has long enough served as a type of feminine loveliness; our polite society has long enough been a series of soirées of incurables. Health is coming into fashion. A mercantile parent lately told me that already in his town, if a girl could vault a five-barred gate, her prospects for a husband were considered to be improved ten per cent.; and every one knows that there is no metre of public sentiment so infallible as the stock-market. Now that the country is becoming safe, we must again turn our attention to the health of our girls. Unless they are healthy, the country is not safe. No where can their physical condition be so important as in a republic. The utmost attention was paid to the bodily training of Victoria, because she was to be a queen and the mother of kings. By the theory of our government, however imperfectly applied as yet, this is the precise position of every American girl. Voltaire said that the fate of nations had often depended on the gout of a prime-minister; and the fate of our institutions may hang on the precise temperament which our next President shall have inherited from his mother.
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SONNET.
The starry flower, the flower-like stars that fade
And brighten with the daylight and the dark,
The bluet in the green I faintly mark,
And glimmering crags with laurel overlaid,
Even to the Lord of light, the Lamp of shade,
Shine one to me,—the least still glorious made
As crownèd moon or heaven's great hierarch.
And, so, dim grassy flower and night-lit spark
Still move me on and upward for the True;
Seeking, through change, growth, death, in new and old,
The full in few, the statelier in the less,
With patient pain; always remembering this,—
His hand, who touched the sod with showers of gold,
Stippled Orion on the midnight blue.