The Life of Florence Nightingale Volume I Part 5

(_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 G.o.d; 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 G.o.d who created the good, and man the evil, which was not the will of G.o.d, 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 G.o.d, or heed the directing guide-posts. But the judgments of nature (the law of G.o.d), as she goes her mighty, solemn, inflexible march, sweeps sometimes so fearfully over man that though it is the triumph, not the defeat of G.o.d'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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d'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 att.i.tude 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 s.p.a.ce 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 1/2 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 all have been on your knees during the service, without minding your fine gowns and the cold stones.

[31] Edward Vernon Harcourt.

[32] _Nee_ Brandreth (not Mrs. Gaskell, the auth.o.r.ess).

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 t.i.tles. 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 G.o.d, 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 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 G.o.d's Dealings with them, like the old Puritans, and then perhaps we should find out at last what are G.o.d'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]

[33] _Life of Lord Houghton_, by T. Wemyss Reid, vol. i. p. 524.

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 G.o.d. 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.

CHAPTER IV

DISAPPOINTMENT

(1846-1847)

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 n.o.body knows how I love) and been separated from here, if it would please G.o.d 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 "Maternite"

was very coa.r.s.e. In the _clinique obstetricale_ at the ecole de Medecin, "the eleves 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 pa.s.s muster exceedingly well among a set of young students, but I shall be quite sorry for her to sacrifice a ma.s.s 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.

[34] See Miss Nightingale's letter, printed below (p. 117). Similarly she wrote to her father in 1854 (Feb. 22), that the head nurse in a certain London hospital told her that "in the course of her large experience she had never known a nurse who was not drunken, and that there was immoral conduct practised in the very wards, of which she gave me some awful examples."

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 inst.i.tution, 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 Inst.i.tution 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 inst.i.tution 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 Inst.i.tutions 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 S[oe]urs do at Dublin and the Hotel 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 cla.s.s, 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 inst.i.tution 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.

[35] _Life of Lord Houghton_, vol. i. p. 524.

[36] In many accounts of Kaiserswerth and of Florence Nightingale, it is stated that her knowledge of the inst.i.tution came from Elizabeth Fry. It was a pleasant temptation to establish such a link between these two famous women, but Mrs. Fry was dead (1845) before Miss Nightingale had ever heard, so far as her papers show, of Kaiserswerth.

II

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_[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.

[37] See below, p. 94.

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 G.o.d 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'hote_ of people.... When I want _Erfrischung_ I read a little of the _Jahresberichte uber 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 pa.s.s 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.

III

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 a.s.sociation 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 pa.s.sage 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 m.u.f.fins at somebody's afterwards. The Fowlers, Hamilton Grays, Barlows and selves are the m.u.f.fins; 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 Athenaeum, 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:--

EMBLEY, _October_ 13 [1847]. DEAREST FRIEND--To think that you are now a two months' wife, and I have never written to tell you that your piece of news gave me more joy than I ever felt in all my life, except once, no, not even excepting that once, because _that_ was a game of Blind-man's-Buff,--and in _your_ case you knew even as you were known. I had the news on a Sunday from dear Ju, and it was indeed a Sunday joy and I kept it holy, though not like the city, which was to be in cotton to be looked at _only_ on Sundays.

As has often been said, we must all take Sappho's leap, one way or other, before we attain to her repose--though some take it to death, and some to marriage, and some again to a new life even in this world.