In April 1850 Miss Nightingale went with her friends to Athens. Their house was in Eucharis Street, and Florence “slept in the library, which opens on to a terrace looking upon the back of the Acropolis.” She had little taste for the topographical research and nice distinctions between different masters of sculpture which absorb the interest of many modern travellers and students. She was interested in broader speculations. The soul of a people, as expressed in their art, was the object to which she directed her observation, and around which she loved to let her imagination play. In her note-books and letters she discusses the spiritual conceptions embodied in the worship of the several Greek gods; she traces the symbols of Greek mythology to their sources in Greek scenery; she pictures the genius of Aeschylus (her favourite tragedian, preferred by her even to Shakespeare) or of Sophocles developing in relation to local conditions and surroundings. Of the statues, the pensive beauty of the sepulchral bas-reliefs most arrested her attention; and in architecture, she loved most the Doric, for its severity, its simplicity, its perfection of proportion, its image of the ideal republic:—
Only a republican could have conceived it, and it is sin for any other government to imitate it. Look at each column—man, I mean—rearing its noble head; yet none has a separate base. Each man stands upon the common base of his country. Look at the simplicity of the fluting of the capital. No man thinks of his own adornment, but only of the glory of the whole. The fluting does not look like its ornament, but its drapery. I do love the old Doric as if it was a person. Then comes the Ionic, light and elegant and airy, it is true, like the Attic wit, but somewhat luscious to the taste; it soon palls; the fluting is too laboured, too semicircular, like the people sitting in a semi-circle to hear the wit of Aristophanes; it does not look as if it belonged to the column; and that ridge between the flutes, what is it doing there? It looks like the interval while the next interlocutor is thinking of a repartee. Then that rich beading round the base, like one of Euripides' choruses which have nothing to do with the piece. Give me the Ionic to amuse me, but the Doric to interest me. The Corinthian is like the worship of Dionysus, like the illustration of Nature by Art—a bad conjunction, I think, which in any other hands would become Art run mad, but modified by the exquisite artistic perceptions of the Greeks is exquisitely beautiful, but it is not architecture. The Doric, the Ionic, and the Corinthian are the ethical, the poetical, and the aesthetic views of life. But look at the workmanship of these things. How mathematically exact it is—the very poetry of number.
It was characteristic of the philosophical bent of her mind that she sought to refer the charm of the scenery to some general law:—
Athens, June 8. I have been taking some lovely rides with Mr. Hill on Hymettus, along the Daphne road, and to Karà. How lovely the scenery is, would be difficult to describe, and why it is so lovely. I begin to think that it is the proportion, and that there must be proportion in the things of Nature as of Art. I am talking nonsense, I believe, but nobody minds me, you know. In the valleys of Switzerland the height is too great for the width, and it looks like a bottle. In the valleys of Egypt the width is too great for the height, and it looks like a tray. For this reason clouds are provided in Switzerland and Scotland; the height would become intolerably out of proportion unless it were covered in at the top. For this reason clear sky is in Egypt, or you would feel in a shelf. But here, where the clear sky is meant, they say, to be perpetual (tho' I cannot say I have seen much of it since I came), the proportion observed has been perfect, the exact curve is always there, the exact slope which you want; and if a line were to change its place, you feel the effect would be spoilt. You feel towards it as to an architectural building. I believe that in this lies the great peculiarity of the Athenian views. Otherwise, for colouring, I must declare I have seen nothing like the evenings of the Campagna.
Of the Parthenon by moonlight she wrote that it was “impossible that earth or heaven could produce anything more beautiful.” In other letters she dwells on the beauty of the view from Lycabettus, and the glory of the sunset from Hymettus. One day upon the Acropolis she found some boys with a baby owl that had just fallen from its nest in the Parthenon. She bought it from them and kept it. It used to travel in her pocket, and lived at Embley.
III
Public affairs in Greece interested her also. She had arrived in Greek waters at the height of the “Pacifico crisis.” There had been a rupture between England and Greece, which threatened also the relations between England and France, and which convulsed political parties at Westminster, over the claims of Mr. Finlay, the historian of modern Greece, and Don Pacifico, a native of Gibraltar. Lord Palmerston had ordered the Mediterranean Fleet to the Peiraeus to enforce the British claims, and Miss Nightingale was sitting beside Mr. Wyse, the British Minister at Athens, at dinner on board H.M.S. Howe, when the submission of the Greek Government was brought to him. Her home letters throw much light on the ins and outs of this affair, which, however, is now only remembered as the occasion of Lord Palmerston's vindication in the House of Commons with its famous peroration about Civis Romanus sum. Miss Nightingale now, as earlier, was a strong Palmerstonian. “The friends of Broadlands,” she wrote to her parents, “need never have been less uneasy for his reputation”; and if parliamentary success be a sufficient test, she was entirely right. She found herself again in the thick of political discussion on leaving Greek waters. Her party sailed from Athens on June 17, and went to Trieste by Corfu—“that fairy island,” she wrote, “where every flower grows twice as big as it does anywhere else, and where no frost can touch the olive and the pomegranate.” She and her parents were acquainted with Sir Henry Ward, then Lord High Commissioner of the Ionian Islands. Sir Henry, who had been an active Liberal at home, had felt himself obliged to adopt sternly repressive measures in the islands. Miss Nightingale was opposed to his policy, as also to the British occupation. He invited her and her friends to the Palace. She went to proffer excuses. “He came out, said that I had often called him ‘Tyrant,’ and took me in his arms like a father, and stood over me in the character of Tyrant (he said) till I had written a letter compelling them all to come, which he then sealed and I sent. So the whole posse comitatus of us spent the day there, they sending the carriage for us, and I am really glad to have seen what is my idea of Eastern luxury.” The tyrant placed his accuser next to him at dinner, deplored his “false position,” and so forth, and they made some sort of peace; though not perhaps till Miss Nightingale had sought to bring him to a conviction of sin for his executions and arbitrary arrests, for she was armed, as her letters show, now as ever, with all the facts and figures marshalled in Blue-book precision.