Among the Nudists
IT is never quite safe to mock the Victorians. They are sometimes right for the wrong reasons. They held, for instance, that the activities of people who had taken all their clothes off were not fit to be described. And—to judge from this innocuous but excessively dull book—there is a lot to be said for the idea.
Mr. and Mrs. Merrill's book consists largely of a record of their experiences among the Nudists in France and Germany. The authors—though they withhold such pertinent impondcr- ables as how old they are, and what shape—are revealed as sincere, simple-minded, and American. Their book is as clean as a whistle, but five times as monotonous. It is interesting to learn that there are in Europe large associations of charming and worthy people who spend their whole time (in the summer) without any clothes on, and attain, as a consequence, a remarkable degree of moral and physical well-being. Without doubt it is a very sensible way to live, if you have the time to spare, and a very salubrious one, if the weather keeps fine. Mr. and Mrs. Merrill found the experience enjoyable. But they lack the power to communicate their enjoyment to us ; the dramatic value of physical jerks and vegetarianism is small, and is only slightly increased by a flavour of propaganda. Their apologia passes from the naive to the well-meaning, from the well-meaning to the redundant, and from the redundant to the dreary.
It is a pity that a book about such an amusing movement should be so dull. Mr. John Langdon-Davies, whose Future of Nakedness supplied the authors with part of their incentive and the pick of their quotations, notes in a friendly introduction that : in my generation we could only approach the subject through wit, in theirs it is possible to be serious." But although Mr. and Mrs. Merrill, who thresh out the ethics and aesthetics of nudity very thoroughly, achieve at times a kind of solemn gaiety, one feels that their underlying seriousness was hardly the right medium. They write with one eye on the future, foreshadowing the ever wider spread of the practice ; but some of their omissions leave them very vulnerable to scepticism. What about the climate ? They seem to postulate a most-favoured nation clause in every country's treaty with the sun. And how will habits becoming in a rural community dovetail into those of an urban ? As the photographs in this book suggest, nudity is all very well for the comparatively lissom, who can afford to spend their time jumping up and down on sky-lines. Would it be as natural or as beneficial in a crowded bus ? Between Arcady and Oxford Street there is a great gulf fixed. However high our ideals, however low our rainfall, we can only go Back to Nature on a week-end ticket.
R. P. F.
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