[45] _E.g._ in an article in _Good Words_, August 1879: "Whoever in the glorious light of an Egyptian sunset--where all glows with colour, not like that of birds and flowers, but like transparent emeralds and sapphires and rubies and amethysts, the gold and jewels and precious stones of the Revelations--has seen the herds wending their way home on the plain of Thebes by the colossal pair of sitting statues, followed by the stately woman in her one draped garment, plying her distaff, a naked, lovely little brown child riding on her shoulder, and another on a buffalo, can conjure up something of the ideal of the ryot's family life in India."
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.
