Well, my dearest, I am not yet come to the great thing I wanted to say. I have always found that there was so much truth in the suggestion that you must dig for hidden treasures in silence or you will not find it; and so I dug after my poor little plan in silence, even from you. It was to go to be a nurse at Salisbury Hospital for these few months to learn the “prax.”; and then to come home and make such wondrous intimacies at West Wellow, under the shelter of a rhubarb powder and a dressed leg; let alone that no one could ever say to me again, your health will not stand this or that. I saw a poor woman die before my eyes this summer because there was no one but fools to sit up with her, who poisoned her as much as if they had given her arsenic. And then I had such a fine plan for those dreaded latter days (which I have never dreaded), if I should outlive my immediate ties, of taking a small house in West Wellow.—Well, I do not like much talking about it, but I thought something like a Protestant Sisterhood, without vows, for women of educated feelings, might be established. But there have been difficulties about my very first step, which terrified Mama. I do not mean the physically revolting parts of a hospital, but things about the surgeons and nurses which you may guess. Even Mrs. Fowler[29] threw cold water upon it; and nothing will be done this year at all events, and I do not believe—ever; and no advantage that I see comes of my living on, excepting that one becomes less and less of a young lady every year, which is only a negative one. You will laugh, dear, at the whole plan, I daresay; but no one but the mother of it knows how precious[45] an infant idea becomes; nor how the soul dies between the destruction of one and the taking up of another. I shall never do anything, and am worse than dust and nothing. I wonder if our Saviour were to walk the earth again, and I were to go to Him and ask, whether He would send me back to live this life again, which crushes me into vanity and deceit. Oh for some strong thing to sweep this loathsome life into the past.
And so ended for the time the dash of the caged bird for liberty.
Though the outward man may perish, yet the inward man is renewed day by day. For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory; while we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen: for the things which are seen are temporal, but the things which are not seen are eternal.—St. Paul.
The failure of her plan left Florence in a state of great dejection. “The day of personal hopes and fears,” she wrote, “is over for me. Now I dread and desire no more.” This was but a passing mood; and very soon, as we shall hear in the next chapter, she resumed, with increased determination, her struggle for freedom and self-expression in a life of action. But for the moment, and at many recurring moments in later years, the dejection was intense. It was not merely the disappointment of an eager mind denied its appropriate energy; it was the exceeding bitter cry of an intensely religious soul, tempted in its perplexity to ask, “My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?”
In some autobiographical notes Miss Nightingale recorded under the year 1843 “an illness and an acquaintance I made with a woman to whom all unseen things seemed real, and eternal things near, awakened me” [from dreaming]. The woman to whom she referred was, it may safely be conjectured, Miss Hannah Nicholson. They met once or twice a year—when Miss Nicholson visited Embley or Miss Nightingale stayed with Miss Nicholson's brother at Waverley. At other times they exchanged a voluminous correspondence, and this was almost entirely devoted to religious experiences and speculations. “Aunt Hannah” had inexhaustible sympathy with her self-torturing young friend. She did not chide or discourage Florence; but the burden of her message was the claim of the spiritual life, the message of Paul to the Corinthians. “Your whole life,” wrote Florence in one of many bursts of affectionate gratitude to Miss Nicholson, “seems to be love, and you always find words in your heart which, without the pretension of enlightening, yet are like a clearing up to me. You always seem to rest on the heart of the divine Teacher, and to participate in His mysteries.” “Your letters,” she said on another occasion, “stay by me and warm me when the dreams of life come one after another, clouding and covering the realities of the unseen.” To this sympathetic and (in some limited respects) kindred soul, Florence poured out unreservedly the experiences of her spiritual life; as also, sometimes, though with more conscious art of literary expression, to Miss Clarke in Paris.
A few letters, selected from a great number, will serve to trace the course of her religious thoughts. They resumed, it will be seen, the spiritual experiences and convictions of the saints who have served mankind. The Reality of the Unseen World is the subject of a letter to Miss Clarke (August 1846), in which, after a page of family news, she continues:—
But I think you must be tired of all this, for I fancy that you live much more in the supernatural than the natural world. I always believe in Homer; and in St. Paul's “cloud of witnesses”; and in the old Italian pictures, which have a first story, where the Unseen live au premier, with a two-pair back, where the Père Eternel's shadow is half seen peeping out, and a ground floor where poor mortals live, but still have a connexion with the establishment above stairs. I like those books, where the Invisible communicates freely with the Visible Kingdom; not that they ever come up to one's idea, which is always so much brighter than the execution (for the word is only the shadow cast by the light of the thought); but they are suggestive. I always believe in a multitude of spirits inhabiting the same house with ourselves; we are only the entresol, quite the most insignificant of its lodgers, and too busy with our pursuit of daily[48] bread, too much confined with hard work, and too full of the struggle with the material world, to visit the glorious beings immediately about us—whom we shall see, when the present candle of our earthly reason is put out, which blinds us just as the candle end, left burning after one is in bed, long prevents us from seeing the world without, lit up by the full moon. It trembles and flickers and sinks into its socket, and then we catch a bright stripe of moonlight shining on the floor; but it flares up again, and the silvery stream is gone “as if it could not be, as if it had not been,” and we can see nothing but the candle, and hardly imagine any other light—till at last it goes quite out, and the flood of moonlight rushes into the room, and every pane of the casement window, and every ivy leaf without, are stamped, as it were, upon the floor, and a whole world revealed to us, which that flickering candle was the means of concealing from us. This is what Jesus Christ meant, I suppose, when He said that He must go away in order to be with His friends in His spirit, that He would be much nearer to them after death than in the flesh. In the flesh, we were separated from our friends by their going into the next room only—a door, a partition divided us; but what can separate two souls? Often I fancy that we can perceive the presence of a good spirit communicating thoughts to us: are they not all ministering spirits, sent forth to minister unto us? When Jesus Christ warns us not to despise any one, because that in Heaven their angels do always behold the face of His Father, perhaps He thought that our beloved ones, who are gone, might be these our “angels,” who must therefore have communion with men.
It is here, where a cold and false life of conventionalism and prejudices and frivolity is often all that reaches our outward senses, that we are sometimes baffled in seeing into the life which lies beneath; it is here, amidst the tempers and little vexations, which are the shadows that dim the brightest intercourse, it is here that we fail sometimes in having intimate communion with souls, and we stop short at the dead coverings; but between the soul which is free, and our soul, what barrier, what restraint can there be? Human sympathy is indeed necessary to our happiness of every moment, and the absence of it makes an awful void in our life. Every room becomes a grave, and every book we used to read together a monument to the one we love. But some one says, that we need an idée merveilleuse to preserve us from the busy devils, which imagination here is always conjuring up. This idée merveilleuse, I think, is the idea of the loving presence of spirits. Those dear ones are safe, and yet with us still, for truly do I believe that these senses of ours are what veil from us, not discover to us, the world around (which is[49] sometimes revealed to us in dreams, or in moments of excitement, as at the point of death, either our own or a friend's, or by mesmerism, or by faith). Faith is the real eye and ear of the soul, and as it would be impossible to describe the harmony and melody of Music to one who was born deaf, or to make a blind man perceive the beauty of the effects of colour, so without faith the spiritual world is as much a hidden one to the soul as the Art of Painting to the blind man. On a dark night the moon, when at last she rises, reveals to us, just at our feet, a world of objects, of the presence of which we were not aware before. We see the river sparkling in the moonbeams close beside us, and the tall shadows sleeping quietly on the grass, and the sharp relief of the architectural cornices, and the strong outline of the lights and shades, so well defined that we can scarcely believe that a moment ago, and we did not see them. What shall we say if, one day, the moon rises upon our spiritual world, and we see close at hand, ready to hold the most intimate communion with us, those spirits, whom we had loved and mourned as lost to us? We are like the blind men by the wayside, and ought to sit and cry, Lord that we may receive our sight! And, when we do receive it, we shall perhaps find that we require no transporting into another world, to become aware of the immediate presence of an Infinite Spirit, and of other lesser ones whom we thought gone. What we require is sight, not change of place, I believe.
The struggle which absorbed Florence's mind and heart was to establish some harmony between her dealings in the world of sense and her communion with the unseen world. She reproached herself for impatience, for selfishness, for lack of confidence in the good time of God. Happy are they who have no more occasion than she to deem themselves unprofitable servants! But the condition of attainment to comparative sinlessness is, I suppose, the Conviction of Sin; and this was intensely present to Florence Nightingale. “I have read over your letters many times again and again since I have been here,” she wrote from Tapton (her grandmother Shore's house) in 1845. “Ah, my dear Aunt Hannah, you are like the white swan on your cool, fresh, blue lake, rocked to peace and rest by the sweet winds of your faith and love, and you cannot be dragged down into our busy chicken-yard of struggling, scratting life.[30] You do not know what it is, when one has sinned with such aggravation as I have. No one has had such advantages, and I have sinned with all these, and after having been made to know what sin was, and what my obligations were. No one has so grieved the Holy Spirit. I have sinned against my conviction, and, as it were, standing before God's judgment-seat.” In many of Miss Nightingale's religious outpourings, both in letters and in private diaries, there is a note which borders on the morbid; but the danger-point is averted, sometimes by practical good sense, and sometimes by a saving sense of humour. The letter, just given, was soon followed by another (from Embley, Oct. 1845), containing this account of a scene at the bedside of her favourite little cousin:—“One night when I was reading to Shore the verse about the temptations of the world, the flesh, and the devil, and we were agreeing that the temptations of the flesh were liking a great deal of play and no work, and lying long bed, and the temptations of the world liking to be praised and admired, and be a general favourite, and so on, more than anything else, and we were both very much affected, he said before I left him, ‘Now I may lie in bed to-morrow, and you won't call me at six, will you?’ And I too went away to dream about a great many things which I had much better not think about. Oh, how I did laugh at the results of all our feelings! To think and to be are two such different things!”
To bring thought and action into harmony, to make the presence of the Unseen a guide through the path of this present world: that is the problem of the practically religious life. To Florence Nightingale, communion with the Unseen meant something deeper, richer, fuller, more positive than the fear of God. The fear of God is the beginning, but not the end, of wisdom, for perfect love casteth out fear. It was for the love of God as an active principle in her mind, constraining all her deeds, that she strove. When she was conscious of falling away from this grace, she knew the pains of hell, here and now, as the state of a soul in estrangement from the Eternal goodness:—
(To Miss Nicholson.) Embley, Christmas Eve [undated]. Think of me to-morrow at the Sacrament. I have not taken it since I last took it with you, except once, with a poor woman[51] on her death-bed. Time has sped wearily with me since then, Aunt Hannah. If, when the plough goes over the soul, there were always the hand of the Sower there to scatter the seed after it, who would regret? But how often the seed-time has passed, it is too late, the harrow has gone over, the time of harvest has come and the harvest is not.… Give me your thoughts to-morrow, my dear Aunt Hannah; I want them sadly; and take me with you to the Throne of Grace. Bless me too, as poor Esau said. I have so felt with him, and cried with a great and exceeding bitter cry, Bless me, even me also, O my Father; but He never has yet, and I have not deserved that He should.
(To Miss Nicholson, May 1846.) “The sorrows of hell compassed me about.” We learn to know what these are beforehand, when we cannot command our thoughts to pray, when all our omissions give themselves form and life, and shut us up within a wall over which there is no looking, no return: when they hold us down with a resistless power, and we are hemmed in with our remembrances, like a cell compassing us about. What can the future hell be other than this? The Unspeakable Presence may be joy and peace unspeakable, but it may be a Horror, a Dweller on our Threshold, a Spirit of Fear to the stricken conscience. Jesus Christ prayed on the Cross not for life or safety, but only for the light of His countenance: Why hast Thou forsaken me? And all sorrows disappear before that one. Let those who have felt it say if it is not so, and if there is any sorrow like unto that sorrow. How willingly would we exchange it for pain, which we almost welcome as a proof of His care and attention. Grief in itself is no evil; as making the Unseen, the Eternal, and the Infinite present to our consciousness, it is rather a good. But when all one's imaginations are wandering out of one's reach, then one realizes the future state of punishment even in this world. Pray that He will not leave my soul in hell. How little can be done under the spirit of fear; it is the very sentence pronounced upon the serpent, “Upon thy belly shalt thou go all the days of thy life.” Oh, if any one thinks that, in the repentance of fear, this is the time for the soul to open to the Infinite goodness, to the spirit of love and of power and of a sound mind, in the heart's death to live and love,—let him try how hard it is to collect oneself out of distraction—let him feel the woes of saying To-morrow, when God has said To-day; and then when he has found how weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable seem all the uses of the world, let him try with a dead heart to live unto God, to love with all his strength when all energy to love is gone.
The state of perfect love, expressing itself in perfect rightness of thought and deed, may be unattainable on earth, but nothing lower than the search for this ideal can satisfy the yearnings of a soul such as was Florence Nightingale's. She had the Hunger for Righteousness. “The crown of righteousness!” she wrote to Miss Nicholson (May 1846). “That word always strikes me more than anything in the Bible. Strange that not happiness, not rest, not forgiveness, not glory, should have been the thought of that glorious man's mind, when at the eve of the last and greatest of his labours; all desires so swallowed up in the one great craving after righteousness that, at the end of all his struggles, it was mightier within him than ever, mightier even than the desire of peace. How can people tell one to dwell within a good conscience, when the chief of all the apostles so panted after righteousness that he considered it the last best gift, unattainable on earth, to be bestowed in Heaven?”
To do All for the Love of God was the ideal which she sought to attain. “The foundation of all must be the love of God. That the sufferings of Christ's life were intense, who doubts? but the happiness must also have been intense. Only think of the happiness of working, and working successfully too, and with no doubts as to His path, and with no alloy of vanity or love of display or glory, but with the ecstasy of single-heartedness! All that I do is always poisoned by the fear that I am not doing it in simplicity and godly sincerity.” This was one of the constant dreads throughout her life. When she had become famous, and was praised and courted by the popular breath, she shrank, with an abhorrence which some may have considered almost morbid and which was certainly foreign to the fashion of the world, from any avoidable publicity. This was no pose or affectation; it was part of her religion. It was a counsel dictated by her earnest striving to dissociate her work for God from any taint of worldliness.
The world which came to owe much to the life and example of Florence Nightingale, owes something to Miss Nicholson, whose gentle sympathy brought to her young friend much strength and peace. But the world may also be glad, I think, that Miss Nightingale's religious thought worked itself out in the end on lines of her own. Florence Nightingale has been enrolled by the popular voice among the saints; but there are saints and saints—saints contemplative or mystic, and saints active and ministering. In all ages of the world there have been godly women whose passion of religious spirit has led them to lives of professional pieties, rather than of practical service; who have spent in ecstasies of pity, or in tortures of self-abasement at the foot of the Cross, powers which might have gone to redeem and save the world. Florence Nightingale had, as we have sufficiently seen, a profound sense of personal religion. She felt, as all the saints must feel, that a religious life means a state of the soul; but she attained also to the conviction, which became ever stronger within her, that a state of the soul can only be approved by its fruits, and that thus the Service of God is the Service of Man:—
(To Miss Nicholson.) Embley, Sept. 24, [1846]. I am almost heart-broken to leave Lea Hurst. There are so many duties there which lie near at hand, and I could be well content to do them there all the days of my life. I have left so many poor friends there whom I shall never see again, and so much might have been done for them.… I feel my sympathies are with Ignorance and Poverty. The things which interest me interest them; we are alike in expecting little from life, much from God; we are taken up with the same objects.… My imagination is so filled with the misery of this world that the only thing in which to labour brings any return, seems to me helping and sympathizing there; and all that poets sing of the glories of this world appears to me untrue: all the people I see are eaten up with care or poverty or disease. I know that it was God who created the good, and man the evil, which was not the will of God, but the necessary consequence of His leaving free-will to man. I know that misery is the alphabet of fire, in which history, with its warning hand, writes in flaming letters the consequences of Evil (the Kingdom of Man), and that without its glaring light, we should never see the path back into the Kingdom of God, or heed the directing guide-posts. But the judgments of nature (the law of God), as she goes her mighty, solemn, inflexible march, sweeps sometimes so fearfully over[54] man that though it is the triumph, not the defeat of God's truth and of His laws, that falsehood against them must work misery, and misery is perhaps here the strongest proof that His loving hand is present,—yet all our powers, hopes, and fears must, it seems to me, be engrossed by doing His work for its relief. Life is no holiday game, nor is it a clever book, nor is it a school of instruction, nor a valley of tears; but it is a hard fight, a struggle, a wrestling with the Principle of Evil, hand to hand, foot to foot. Every inch of the way must be disputed. The night is given us to take breath, to pray, to drink deep at the fountain of power. The day, to use the strength which has been given us, to go forth to work with it till the evening. The Kingdom of God is coming; and “Thy Kingdom come” does not mean only “My salvation come.”
“To find out what we can do,” she wrote as an annotation in Browning's Paracelsus, “one's individual place, as well as the General End, is man's task. To serve man for God's sake, not man's, will prevent failure from being disappointment.” Florence Nightingale sought then to save her soul by serving others.
It was by this same test of practical service that she came to try and to weigh the various forms of religious doctrine. Her father was, as I have said, a Unitarian, and several other members of her family circle were of the same persuasion. But she and some others of that circle conformed in practice to the services of the English Church. And so, in some degree, Miss Nightingale continued to conform to the end of her life; though, as we shall find later on, she departed widely from the doctrines of the Church as ordinarily received, did not care about “going to church,” and framed a creed of her own. But she always had a tolerant mind for any faith that issued in good works, and an impatience with any that did not. It is for this reason that she seemed to be all things to all men in religious matters. Her mission to the Crimea involved, as we shall learn, some religious bickerings. Protestants thought her too indulgent to Roman Catholics, and Catholics were sore that she did not go further with them. But her real attitude is perfectly clear, and was entirely consistent. If she looked with a favouring eye on Roman Catholics, it was on account, not of their dogmas, but of their deeds. Two letters to Madame Mohl, ten years apart in date, suggest what was always Miss Nightingale's point of view:—
Lea Hurst, Sept. [1841]. We are very anxious to hear, dearest Miss Clarke, how you are going on, and how Mrs. Clarke is, some day when you are able to write. We are just returned from the Leeds Consecration, and a more curious or interesting sight I never saw. Imagine a procession of 400 clergymen, all in their white robes, with scarfs of blue and black and fur and even scarlet, so that I thought some of them were cardinals, headed by the Archbishop of York,[31] the Bishop of Ripon, &c., and most curious of all the Bishop of New Jersey to whom Dr. Hook (who is,—you know, perhaps,—the Puseyite vicar of Leeds) had written to ask him to come over from America, expressly to preach the consecration sermon. Imagine all this procession, entering the church, repeating the 24th Ps.—and then filling the space before the altar and the Transept—and all responding aloud through the service, so that the roll and echo of their responses through the Transept, without being able to see them, was the most striking thing I ever heard. It was quite a gathering-place for Puseyites from all parts of England. Papa heard them debating, whether they should have lighted candles before the Altar, but they decided no, because the Bishop of Ripon would not like it—however they had them in the evening and the next morning when he was gone—and Dr. Hook has the regular Catholic jerk in making the genuflexion every time he approaches the altar. The church is a most magnificent one, and every one has contributed their best to it, with a true Catholic spirit; one gave the beautiful painted window, another the Correggio for the Altar piece, the Queen Dowager the Altar-cloth, another the bells, &c., &c. Dr. Hook gives a service every morning and evening at ½ p. 7, and the Sacrament every Sunday; and the aisle is all occupied by open seats. During the consecration I wished to have been a clergyman, but when Mrs. Gaskell[32] (whom I was with, she is a good Tory and half a Puseyite and withal the most general favourite and generally lenient person in England)—when she and I came down afterwards for the Sacrament, I could not help looking in the faces of the clergymen, for the impression I expected to see, as they walked down the aisle, and wandered about, (this immense crowd) after the Sacrament—and oh! I was woefully disappointed—they looked so stupid; and I could not help thinking, If you had been Catholics, you would[56] all have been on your knees during the service, without minding your fine gowns and the cold stones.
Embley, Feb. 7 [1851].… I suppose you know how the two churches have been convulsing themselves in England in a manner discreditable to themselves and ridiculous to others. The Anglican Ch. screamed and struggled as if they were taking away something of hers, the Catholic Ch. sang and shouted as if she had conquered England—neither the one nor the other has happened. Only a good many people (in our Church) found out they were Catholics and went to Rome, and a good many other people found out they were Protestants, which they never knew before, and left the Puseyite pen, which has now lost half its sheep. At Oxford the Puseyite volcano is extinct.… You know what a row there will be this Session in Parliament about it. The most moderate wish for a Concordat, but even these say that we must strip the R.C. Bishops of their new titles. Many think the present Gov. will go out upon it, because they won't do enough to satisfy the awakened prejudices of dear John Bull. I used to think it was a mere selfish quarrel between red stockings and lawn sleeves; but not a bit of it; it's a real popular feeling. One would think that all our religion was political by the way we talk, and so I believe it is. From the rising of the sun until the going down of the same, you hear our clergy talking of nothing but Bishops versus Vicars General—never a word of different plans of education, prisons, penitentiaries, and so on. One would think we were born ready made as to education, but that Art made a Church.
I feel little zeal in pulling down one Church or building up another, in making Bishops or unmaking them. If they would make us, our Faith would spring up of itself, and then we shouldn't want either Anglican Ch. or R.C. Church to make it for us. But, bless my soul, people are just as ignorant now of any law in the human mind as they were in Socrates' time. We have learnt the physical laws since then; but mental laws—why, people don't even acknowledge their existence. They talk of grace and divine influence,—why, if it's an arbitrary gift from God, how unkind of Him not to give it before! And if it comes by certain laws, why don't we find them out? But people in England think it quite profane to talk of finding them out, and they pray “That it may please Thee to have mercy upon all men,” when I should knock you down if you were to say to me “That it should please you to have mercy upon your boy.” I never had any training; and training to be called “training,” (as we train the fingers to play[57] scales and shakes)—I doubt whether anybody ever gets from other people, because they don't know how to give it according to any certain laws. I wish everybody would write as far as they can A Short Account of God's Dealings with them, like the old Puritans, and then perhaps we should find out at last what are God's ways in His goings on and what are not.
Arthur Stanley (afterwards the Dean) once asked her to use her influence in preventing a friend of his and of hers from taking the step, supposed to be imminent, of joining the Roman Communion. In a long reply which Miss Nightingale wrote with great care (Nov. 26, 1852), she promised to do what she could, but explained that this might not be much. She herself remained in the Anglican Communion “because she was born there,” and because the Roman Church offered some things which she personally did not want. She feared their friend might consider that such arguments as she could urge against the Roman Church applied equally against the Anglican. And, on the other hand, she had never concealed her opinion that the Roman Communion offered advantages to women which the Church of England (at that time) did not. “The Catholic orders,” she wrote, “offered me work, training for that work, sympathy and help in it, such as I had in vain sought in the Church of England. The Church of England has for men bishoprics, archbishoprics, and a little work (good men make a great deal for themselves). For women she has—what? I had no taste for theological discoveries. I would have given her my head, my heart, my hand. She would not have them. She did not know what to do with them. She told me to go back and do crochet in my mother's drawing-room; or, if I were tired of that, to marry and look well at the head of my husband's table. You may go to the Sunday School, if you like it, she said. But she gave me no training even for that. She gave me neither work to do for her, nor education for it.”
The latter part of the second letter to Miss Clarke shows Miss Nightingale's interest in speculations about the basis of moral law; but so far as the rivalry of Churches was concerned, it was by works that she tried them. “In all the dens of disgrace and disease,” she wrote in one of her note-books (1849), “the only clergy who deserve the name of pastors are the Roman Catholic. The rest, of all denominations—Church of England, Church of Scotland, Dissenters—are only theology or tea mongers.” “It will never do,” she once said to a friend, “unless we have a Church of which the terms of membership shall be works, not doctrines.”[33]
She was interested, however, in doctrines also. If she was resolved to dedicate her life to the Service of Man, she was no less convinced that such service could only be rendered, at the best and highest, in the light, and with the sanction, of Service to God. Herein may be found an underlying unity and harmony through the many and diverse interests of her life. We shall see that she who opened new careers and standards of practical benevolence in the modern world, spent also years of thought upon the less manageable task, if not of providing the world with a new religion, at any rate of giving to old doctrines a new application, and, as she hoped, a more acceptable sanction.
There are Private Martyrs as well as burnt or drowned ones. Society of course does not know them; and Family cannot, because our position to one another in our families is, and must be, like that of the Moon to the Earth. The Moon revolves round her, moves with her, never leaves her. Yet the Earth never sees but one side of her; the other side remains for ever unknown.—Florence Nightingale (in a Note-book of 1847–49).
A poet of our time has counted “Disappointment's dry and bitter root” among the ingredients of “the right mother-milk to the tough hearts that pioneer their kind.” If it indeed be so, Florence Nightingale was well nurtured. The spiritual experiences and speculations, recorded in the last chapter, worked round to a justification, as we have seen, of her chosen plan of life. Religion thus brought no consolation for the failure of her scheme to escape in December 1845. “My misery and vacuity afterwards,” she wrote in an autobiographical retrospect, “were indescribable.” “All my plans have been wrecked,” she wrote at the time, “and my hopes destroyed, and yet without any visible, any material change.” She faced the new year and its life on the old lines in a mood of depression which, with some happier intervals, was to grow deeper and more intense during the next few years.
She did not, however, abandon her ideal. We shall see in subsequent chapters that neither foreign travel distracted her from it, nor did opportunities for another kind of life allure her from the chosen path. The way was dark before her; the goal might never be reached, she often thought, in this present sphere; but she felt increasingly that only in a life of nursing or other service to the afflicted could her being find its end and scope. “The longer I live,” she wrote in her diary (June 22, 1846), “the more I feel as if all my being was gradually drawing to one point, and if I could be permitted to return and accomplish that in another being, if I may not in this, I should need no other heaven. I could give up the hope of meeting and living with those I have loved (and nobody knows how I love) and been separated from here, if it would please God to give me, with a nearer consciousness of His Presence, the task of doing this in the real life.”
Meanwhile she pursued her inquiries. Now that the fruits of Florence Nightingale's pioneer work have been gathered, and that nursing is one of the recognized occupations for gentlewomen, it is not altogether easy to realize the difficulties which stood in her way. The objections were moral and social, rooted to large measure in conventional ideas. Gentlewomen, it was felt, would be exposed, if not to danger and temptations, at least to undesirable and unfitting conditions. “It was as if I had wanted to be a kitchen-maid,” she said in later years. Nothing is more tenacious than a social prejudice. But the prejudice was in part founded on very intelligible reasons, and in part was justified by the level of the nursing profession at the time. These are considerations to which full weight must be allowed, both in justice to those who opposed Miss Nightingale's plans, and in order to understand her own courage and persistence. The idea was widely prevalent at the time that for certain cases in hospital practice a modest woman was, from the nature of things, unsuited to act as a nurse. Mr. Nightingale, who desired to do what was right by his daughter, made many inquiries, and consulted many friends. There is a letter to him from a Brighton doctor arguing against the prevalent belief, and maintaining stoutly that “women of a proper age and character are not unfit for such cases. Age, habit, and office give the mind a different turn.” But the whole of this letter shows a degree of broad-mindedness with regard to the education and sphere of women which was in advance of the average opinion at the time. And in any case, whether women were fit or unfit by nature, it was certain that many, perhaps most, of the women actually engaged in nursing were unfit by character, and that a refined gentlewoman, who joined the profession, might thus find herself in unpleasant surroundings. We shall have to consider this matter more fully in a subsequent chapter. Here it will suffice to say that though there were better-managed hospitals and worse-managed, yet there was a strong body of evidence to show that hospital nurses had opportunities, which they freely used, for putting the bottle to their lips “when so disposed,” and that other evils were more or less prevalent also.[34] Reports from Paris and its famous schools of medicine and surgery were no better. One who had been through it said that life at the “Maternité” was very coarse. In the clinique obstétricale at the École de Médecin, “the élèves have the reputation of being pretty generally the students' mistresses.” The difficulties in the way of a refined woman, who sought to obtain access to the best training, were very great. Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell, a pioneer among woman-doctors in America, told Miss Nightingale of a young girl who had planned, as the only feasible way of studying surgery in Paris, to don male attire. “Pantaloons will be accepted as a token she is in earnest, while a petticoat is always a flag for intrigue. She has a deep voice, and I think will pass muster exceedingly well among a set of young students, but I shall be quite sorry for her to sacrifice a mass of beautiful dark auburn hair! What a strange age we live in! What singular sacrifices and extraordinary actions are required of us in the service of truth! An age of reform is a stirring, exciting one, but it is not the most beautiful.” The more she heard of the worst, the more was Florence Nightingale resolved to make things better; but the more her parents heard, the greater and the more natural was their repugnance. Somebody must do the rough pioneer work of the world; but one can understand how the parents of an attractive daughter, for whom their own life at home seemed to them to open many possibilities of comfortable happiness, came to desire that in this case the somebody should be somebody else.
Miss Nightingale herself was so much impressed by the difficulties and dangers in the way of women nurses, that she was inclined at first to the idea that the admission of gentlewomen into the calling could best be secured, either in special hospitals connected with some religious institution, or in general hospitals under cover of some religious bond. “I think,” wrote Monckton Milnes to his wife, “that Florence always much distrusted the Sisterhood matter,”[35] and such was the case. Her inner thought was that no vow was needed other than the nurse's own fitness for the calling and devotion to it. But she was engaged in the crusade of a pioneer, and had to consider what was practically expedient and immediately feasible, as well as what was theoretically reasonable. Dr. Blackwell was of the same opinion. She did not like religious orders in themselves; they only “become beautiful,” she said, “as an expedient, a temporary condition, an antidote to present evils.” Miss Nightingale was therefore intensely interested in the Institution for Deaconesses, with its hospital, school, and penitentiary, which a Protestant minister, Pastor Theodor Fliedner, had established some years before at Kaiserswerth. Her family were great friends with the Bunsens, and the Baron had sent Florence one of Pastor Fliedner's Annual Reports.[36] Her interest in it was twofold. It was the kind of institution to which Protestant mothers might not object to send their daughters. It was also in some sort a school of nursing where, whatever wider scope might afterwards be attainable, gentlewomen could serve an apprenticeship to the calling. “Flo,” wrote her sister to a friend in 1848, “is exceedingly full of the Hospital Institutions of Germany, which she thinks so much better than ours. Do you know anything of the great establishment at Kaiserswerth, where the schools, the reform place for the wicked, and a great hospital are all under the guidance of the Deaconesses?” Two years before (June 1846) Florence herself had written to Miss Hilary Bonham Carter, begging her to ask Mrs. Jameson about “the German lady she knew, who, not being a Catholic, could not take upon herself the vows of a Sister of Charity, but who obtained permission from the physician of the hospital of her town to attend the sick there, and perform all the duties which the Sœurs do at Dublin and the Hôtel Dieu, and who had been there fifteen years when Mrs. Jameson knew her. I do not want to know her name, if it is a secret; but only if she has extended it further into anything like a Protestant Sisterhood, if she had any plans of that sort which should embrace women of an educated class, and not, as in England, merely women who would be servants if they were not nurses. How she disposed of the difficulties of surgeons making love to her, and of living with the women of indifferent character who generally make the nurses of hospitals, as it appears she was quite a young woman when she began, and these are the difficulties which vows remove which one sees nothing else can.” Perhaps it was as a result of these inquiries that Florence Nightingale became acquainted, through Baron von Bunsen, with the institution at Kaiserswerth; though, as appears from a letter given below, Madame Mohl had also sent her some information about it. It is certain that by the autumn of 1846 she was in possession of its Reports, and that the place had become the home of her heart. During these years she was also quietly pursuing studies on medical and sanitary subjects.
With such thoughts in her mind, the routine of home life became more than ever empty and distasteful. Here are two typical extracts from her diary of 1846:—
Lea Hurst, July 7. What is my business in this world and what have I done this last fortnight? I have read the Daughter at Home[64] [37] to Father and two chapters of Mackintosh; a volume of Sybil to Mama. Learnt seven tunes by heart. Written various letters. Ridden with Papa. Paid eight visits. Done company. And that is all.
Embley, Oct. 7. What have I done the last three months? O happy, happy six weeks at the Hurst, where (from July 15 to Sept. 1) I had found my business in this world. My heart was filled. My soul was at home. I wanted no other heaven. May God be thanked as He never yet has been thanked for that glimpse of what it is to live. Now for the last five weeks my business has been much harder. They don't know how weary this way of life is to me—this table d'hôte of people.… When I want Erfrischung I read a little of the Jahresberichte über die Diakonissen-Anstalt in Kaiserswerth. There is my home; there are my brothers and sisters all at work. There my heart is, and there I trust one day will be my body; whether in this state or in the next, in Germany or in England, I do not care.
The “happy six weeks at Lea Hurst” were a time, as appears from the letter to Miss Nicholson already given (p. 53), when she found opportunity to do much sick-visiting. “One's days pass away,” she added in the same letter, “like a shadow, and leave not a trace behind. How we spend hours that are sacred in things that are profane, which we choose to call necessities, and then say ‘We cannot’ to our Father's business.” At Embley the opportunities for work among the poor were less favourable. The distances were greater. Florence interested herself, so far as she was able, in the school at Wellow; and amongst her papers of 1846 there is an able discussion of the defects of elementary education as she had there observed them. But the distractions were many. There was a constant round of company at home; and, as has been said before, the migrations of the family between London, Lea Hurst, and Embley were fatal to concentration of effort.
The year 1847 was one of much social movement in Miss Nightingale's life. In the spring she was in London “doing the exhibitions and hearing Jenny Lind; but it really requires a new language to define her.” Then she went with her parents to the meeting of the British Association at Oxford, where Adams and Leverrier, the twin discoverers of Neptune, were the lions of the day. She wrote many lively accounts of the meeting to her friends, from which a passage or two may be given:—
Here we are in the midst of loveliness and learning; for never anything so beautiful as this place is looking now, my dearest, have I seen abroad or at home, with its flowering acacias in the midst of its streets of palaces. I saunter about the churchyards and gardens by myself before breakfast, and wish I were a College man. I wish you could see the Astronomical Section—Leverrier and Adams sitting on either side of the President, like a pair of turtle-doves cooing at their joint star and holding it between them.… We work hard. Chapel at 8, to that glorious service at New College; such an anthem yesterday morning! and that quiet cloister where no one goes. I brought home a white rose to-day to dry in remembrance. Sections from 11 to 3. Then Colleges or Blenheim till dinner time. Then lecture at 8 in the Radcliffe Library. And philosophical tea and muffins at somebody's afterwards. The Fowlers, Hamilton Grays, Barlows and selves are the muffins; Wheatstone, Hallam, Chevalier, Monckton Milnes and some of the great guns occasionally are the philosophy.…
and so forth, and so forth; with particulars of “church every two hours” on Sunday, and of a luncheon with Buckland and his famous menagerie at Christ Church, when Florence petted a little bear, and her father drew her away, but Mr. Milnes mesmerised it. “And one thing more,” she adds; “Mr. Hallam's discovery that Gladstone is the Beast 666 (in the Revelations) came to him one day by inspiration in the Athenæum, after he had tried Pusey and Newman, and found that they wouldn't do.”
Miss Nightingale paid many visits during the same year with her father. They went, for instance, to Lord Sherborne, whose daughter, Mrs. Plunkett, became a great friend of hers; and they spent a couple of days with Lord Lovelace. Lady Lovelace, Byron's daughter, conceived a great admiration for Florence Nightingale, which found expression in the verses already quoted. It was in this year that Miss Clarke married her old admirer, M. Mohl. Florence's letter of congratulation was not without significance upon the state of her own feelings, as will be seen in a later chapter:—