The Life of Florence Nightingale Volume II Part 16

That Religion is not devotion, but work and suffering for the love of G.o.d; this is the true doctrine of Mystics--as is more particularly set forth in a definition of the 16th century: "True religion is to have no other will but G.o.d's." Compare this with the definition of Religion in Johnson's _Dictionary_: "Virtue founded upon reverence of G.o.d and expectation of future rewards and punishments"; in other words on respect and self-interest, not love. Imagine the religion which inspired the life of Christ "founded" on the motives given by Dr. Johnson!

Christ Himself was the first true Mystic. "My meat is to do the will of Him that sent me and to finish His work." What is this but putting in fervent and the most striking words the foundation of all real Mystical Religion?--which is that for all our actions, all our words, all our thoughts, the food upon which they are to live and have their being is to be the indwelling Presence of G.o.d, the union with G.o.d; that is, with the Spirit of Goodness and Wisdom.

Where shall I find G.o.d? In myself. That is the true Mystical Doctrine. But then I myself must be in a state for Him to come and dwell in me. This is the whole aim of the Mystical Life; and all Mystical Rules in all times and countries have been laid down for putting the soul into such a state. That the soul herself should be heaven, that our Father which is in heaven should dwell in her, that there is something within us infinitely more estimable than often comes out, that G.o.d enlarges this "palace of our soul" by degrees so as to enable her to receive Himself, that thus he gives her liberty but that the soul must give herself up absolutely to Him for Him to do this, the incalculable benefit of this occasional but frequent intercourse with the Perfect: this is the conclusion and sum of the whole matter, put into beautiful language by the Mystics. And of this process they describe the steps, and a.s.sign periods of months and years during which the steps, they say, are commonly made by those who make them at all.

These old Mystics whom we call superst.i.tious were far before us in their ideas of G.o.d and of prayer (that is of our communion with G.o.d). "Prayer," says a mystic of the 16th century, "is to ask not what we wish of G.o.d, but what G.o.d wishes of us." "Master who hast made and formed the vessel of the body of Thy creature, and hast put within so great a treasure, the Soul, which bears the image of Thee": so begins a dying prayer of the 14th century. In it and in the other prayers of the Mystics there is scarcely a pet.i.tion.

There is never a word of the theory that G.o.d's dealings with us are to show His "power"; still less of the theory that "of His own good pleasure" He has "predestined" any souls to eternal d.a.m.nation.

There is little mention of heaven for self; of desire of happiness for self, none. It is singular how little mention there is either of "intercession" or of "Atonement by Another's merits." True it is that we can only _create_ a heaven for _ourselves and others_ "by the merits of Another," since it is only by working in accordance with G.o.d's Laws that we can do anything. But there is nothing at all in these prayers as if G.o.d's anger had to be bought off, as if He had to be bribed into giving us heaven by sufferings merely "to satisfy G.o.d's justice." In the dying prayers, there is nothing of the "egotism of death." It is the reformation of G.o.d's church--that is, G.o.d's children, for whom the self would give itself, that occupies the dying thoughts. There is not often a desire to be released from trouble and suffering. On the contrary, there is often a desire to suffer the greatest suffering, and to offer the greatest offering, with even greater pain, if so any work can be done. And still, this, and all, is ascribed to G.o.d's _goodness_.

The offering is not to buy anything by suffering, but--If only the suppliant can do anything for G.o.d's children!

These suppliants did not live to see the "reformation" of G.o.d's children. No more will any who now offer these prayers. But at least we can all work towards such practical "reformation." The way to live with G.o.d is to live with Ideas--not merely to think about ideals, but to do and suffer for them. Those who have to work on men and women must above all things have their Spiritual Ideal, their purpose, ever present. The "mystical" state is the essence of common sense.

The authors whom Miss Nightingale read for the purpose of her selection included St. Angela of Foligno, Madame de Chatel, St. Francis of a.s.sisi, St. Francis Xavier, St. John of the Cross, Peter of Alcantara, Father Rigoleuc, St. Teresa, and Father Surin. She arranged her extracts from these and other writers under headings, and supplied marginal summaries.

She prepared also a t.i.tle-page:--_Notes from Devotional Authors of the Middle Ages, Collected, Chosen, and Freely Translated by Florence Nightingale_.

III

This and all other literary work was interrupted, however, at the beginning of 1874 by the death of her father. She was in London; her sister and Sir Harry Verney were with him and Mrs. Nightingale at Embley. He was 80; but, though his strength of body and mind had failed a little, he had been out for his usual ride a few days before. Lady Verney had wished him good-night. "Say not good-night," he said in reply, quoting Mrs. Barbauld, "but in some brighter clime Bid me good-morning." A day or two later, he came down to breakfast as usual, but found that he had forgotten his watch. He went to fetch it, slipped upon the stairs, and died on the spot. Miss Nightingale felt the loss of her father deeply. "His reverent love for you," wrote Lord Houghton in a letter of condolence (Jan. 13, 1874), "was inexpressibly touching," and her love for him, though of a different kind, was very tender. Unlike in many respects, father and daughter were yet kindred spirits in intellectual curiosity, in a taste for speculative inquiry. M. Mohl noted among Mr. Nightingale's engaging characteristics "a modest curiosity about everything, a surprised, innocent, incredulous smile as he listened intently." Miss Irby spoke of his "exceeding sweetness and childlikeness of wisdom." These qualities were conspicuous in much of his intercourse with his daughter Florence, and she was now deprived of the father who had, in things of the mind, sat at her feet and sympathized in her searches after truth. The death of her father was quickly followed, on January 31, 1874, by that of her dearly loved friend, Mrs. Bracebridge. "She was more than mother to me," wrote Florence to M. and Madame Mohl (Feb. 3); "and oh that I could not be a daughter to her in her last sad days! What should I have been without her? and what would many have been without her? To one living with her as I did once, she was unlike any other human being: as unlike as a picture of a sunny scene is to the real light and warmth of sunshine: or as this February lamp we call our sun is to her own Sun of living light in Greece.... Other people live together to make each other worse: she lived with all to make them better. And she was not like a chastened Christian saint: no more like that than Apollo; but she had qualities which no Greek G.o.d ever had--real humility (excepting my dear Father, I never knew any one so really humble), and with it the most active heart and mind and buoyant soul that could well be conceived." Mr. Bracebridge had died eighteen months before (July 18, 1872), and Miss Nightingale had said: "He and she have been the creators of my life. And when I think of him at Scutari, the only man in all England who would have lived with willingness such a pigging life, without the interest and responsibility which it had to me, I think that we shall never look upon his like again. And when I think of Atherstone, of Athens, of all the places I have been in with them, of the immense influence they had in shaping my own life--more than earthly father and mother to me--I cannot doubt that they leave behind them, having shaped many lives as they did mine, their mark on the century--this century which has so little ideal at least in England. They were so immeasurably above any English 'country gentry' I have ever known." Miss Nightingale's estimate of her friends was shared by others who had enjoyed their hospitality. "The death of Mrs. Bracebridge," wrote M. Mohl (Feb. 14), "is a sad blow for you. The breaking of these old a.s.sociations which nothing new can replace impoverishes one's life, and a part of ourselves dies out with old friends even if they have not been to us what Mrs. Bracebridge was to you. _Und immer stiller wird's und stiller auf unserm Pfad_ until the great problem of life opens for ourselves. Two better people than the Bracebridges, different as they were, I have never seen. Madame d'Abbadie has a queer expression for a woman she approves of; she says _elle est honnete homme_, and nothing is more appropriate to Mrs.

Bracebridge. I can never think of Atherstone without emotion; it is people like these in whom lies the glory of England and the strength of the country. They were so genuine, so ready to help and to impoverish themselves for public purposes, and to do it unostentatiously and without fishing for popularity." To the end of her life Miss Nightingale cherished the memory of these faithful and helpful friends. "To my beloved and revered friends," she said in her Will, "Mr. Charles Bracebridge and his wife, my more than mother, without whom Scutari and my life could not have been, and to whom nothing that I could ever say or do would in the least express my thankfulness, I should have left some token of my remembrance had they, as I expected, survived me." The death of her companion at Scutari removed one of the few links with Miss Nightingale's happier past. The death of her father was not only a bereavement which she felt deeply; it also involved her in much distracting business. Her father's landed properties, at Embley and Lea Hurst, now pa.s.sed, under the entail, to his sister, "Aunt Mai," and her husband. Florence did not attend her father's funeral, but soon she went down to Embley to look after her mother. There, and afterwards in London, she was immersed in worrying affairs. Her only comfort, she wrote repeatedly in private notes, was the "goodness" of Mr. Sh.o.r.e Smith--"her boy" of old days. The letters of Mr. Coltman, one of her father's executors, were full of humour, but Florence was never able to take things lightly. There were questions of property and residence to be discussed; servants to be dismissed and engaged; her mother's immediate movements and future mode of life to be settled. Everybody had a different plan, and Florence complained that n.o.body but she had the same plan for two days running. Her letters and notes at this period are of a quite tragic intensity. Something may be ascribed to a characteristic over-emphasis. "We Smiths," she said once of herself, "all exaggerate"; and Mr. Jowett said of some remarks made by her about him: "You are as nearly right as an habitual spirit of exaggeration will ever allow you to be." "We are a great many too many strong characters,"

she wrote of herself and her family, "and very different: all pulling different ways. And we are so dreadfully _au serieux_. Oh, how much good it does us to have some one to laugh at us!"

But there was no exaggeration in one of her woes. A third of her time was taken up with the Nightingale Nurses; another third with Indian affairs (for in relation to India, as we shall hear, she never quite "went out of office"); the remaining third, which might have been devoted to working out a scheme of social and moral science on the statistical methods of M. Quetelet, or on preparing for the press her selections from the Mystics, was being wasted in family worries. M.

Quetelet, with whom she had been corresponding, had recently died. "I cannot say," she wrote to Dr. Farr (Feb. 23, 1874), "how the death of our old friend touches me: he was the founder of the most important science in the whole world. Some months ago I prepared the first sketch of an Essay I meant to publish and dedicate to him on the application of his discoveries to explain the Plan of G.o.d in teaching us by these results the laws by which our Moral Progress is to be attained. I had pleased myself with thinking that this would please him. But painful and indispensable business prevented the finishing of my paper." "O G.o.d,"

she exclaimed in the bitterness of her heart, "let me not sink in these perplexities: but give me a great cause to do and die for." And again: "What makes the difference between man and woman? Quetelet did his work, and I am so disturbed by my family that I can't do mine."

IV

So, then, Miss Nightingale never finished her book on the Mystics; but she did something which, if we take her view of literary work, we may account far better; she lived it. No words of Florence Nightingale's that have been quoted in the course of this Memoir are more intensely autobiographical, none express more truly the spirit in which she lived and moved and had her being, than those which I have put together on a preceding page from her Notes on the Mystics. Her creed may seem cold to some minds, but she invested it with a spiritual fervour which none of the Mystics has surpa.s.sed. This woman, so practical, so business-like, and in her outward dealings with men and affairs so worldly-wise, was a dreamer, a devotee, a religious enthusiast. The Lady-in-Chief, who was to others a tower of strength, was to herself a weak vessel, praying continually for support, and conscious, with bitter intensity, of short-coming, of faithlessness, of rebellion to the will of G.o.d.

Self-possessed in the presence of others, she was tortured and agonized, often to the verge of despair, in the solitude of her chamber. "I have done nothing for seven years," she said to a friend, "but write regulations." And that was broadly true of one side of her life. Of another side, she might have said with almost equal truth, "I have done nothing all my life but write spiritual meditations." She lived with a pen or pencil ever at her side; and reams of her paper are covered with confessions, self-examinations, communings with G.o.d. She suffered much, and especially during these years, from sleeplessness, and in the watches of the night she would turn to read the Mystics for comfort, or to write on her tablets for spiritual exercise. Though she liked best the books of the Catholic saints, her Catholicism was wider than theirs, and she could find spiritual kinship also, as in the lines prefixed to the present Part, with the hymns of American evangelists. At one and the same time mystic and practical administrator, Miss Nightingale had two soul-sides; but each was a reflection of the other. Her religion was her work; and her work was her religion. She read the Mystics, not to lull her active faculties into contemplative ecstasy, but to consecrate them to more perfect service. In one place she makes these notes from St.

Catherine of Siena:--"It is not the occupation but the spirit which makes the difference. The election of a bishop may be a most secular thing. The election of a representative may be a religious thing. It is not the preluding such an election with public prayer that would make it a religious act. It is religious so far as each man discharges his part as a duty and a solemn responsibility. The question is not whether a thing is done for the State or the Church, but whether it is done with G.o.d or without G.o.d." Miss Nightingale's heading to this pa.s.sage was "Drains." She applied her religion to every aspect of her life; and in her meditations, pa.s.sages of solemn profundity are sometimes side by side with entries of a quaint, and almost humorous, directness, like a gargoyle above a church porch or a dog in a Madonna picture. "O Lord I offer him to Thee. He is so _heavy_. Do Thou take care of him. _I_ can't." "I must strive to see only G.o.d in my friends, and G.o.d in my cats." Such pa.s.sages are thought "profane" by professors of a purely formal religion; but are characteristic of the true mystics in all denominations.

The mystical self-abas.e.m.e.nt of the Saints was never more complete than in the private meditations of Florence Nightingale. Once in the middle of the night she started up and saw pictures on the wall by the night-light lamp. "Am I she who once stood on that Crimean height? 'The Lady with a Lamp shall stand.' The lamp shows me only my utter shipwreck." From the year 1872 onwards, when she went "out of office,"

and with increased intensity after her father's death, Miss Nightingale's mood, in all communings with herself, was of deep dejection and of utter humbleness. The notes are often heart-rending in their impression of loneliness, of craving for sympathy which she could not find, of bitter self-reproach. The loss of friends may account for something of all this, and even her friendship with Mr. Jowett had now lost somewhat of its consoling power. She felt that she gave more sympathy than she received; she sometimes found her interviews with him exhausting or disturbing; "he talks to me," she said once, "as if I were some one else." The strange manner of her life should be remembered. Her habit of seeing only one person at a time, and that at set times, must have made intercourse rather formidable for both parties. n.o.body, even if staying in the house, ever _happened_ to come into her room, and no outside visitor appeared unexpectedly. She never had the relief of hearing two other people talk, or of witnessing, even for a moment, two other personalities in contact. Something too must be accounted to the fact that many of her meditations were written at night or in the early morning hours when she could not sleep. Periods of sleepless dejection, which in the lives of most men and women leave little record of themselves behind, were by her spent in writing down their weary tale.

No doubt, the self-expression gave relief; and she would often turn at the instant from her tablets of despair to amuse a visitor with humorous conversation, or write a vivacious letter to a friend.

These are considerations for which allowance must be made in estimating what was morbid in Miss Nightingale's moods. But for the most part the despondency and the self-abas.e.m.e.nt which coloured her meditations, and which sometimes appear in her letters, were the expression of the mystical way of her soul. They are the utterance of a soul which was striving after perfection, and found the path difficult and th.o.r.n.y. Miss Nightingale was masterful and eager; she had often been able to impress her will upon men and upon events; she found it difficult to bear disappointments and vexations with that entire resignation which the mystics taught her. She was "out of office"; she had been interrupted, suddenly and painfully, in a long career of almost unceasing action. The pause in her public life gave her new occasion for self-criticism and fresh consciousness of the difficulty of sustaining in active life that absolute purity of motive which makes light even of success or failure.

She strove to attain, and she taught others to ensue, pa.s.sivity in action--to do the utmost in their power, but to leave the result to a Higher Power. In a poem which gave her much comfort in later years she marked this pa.s.sage:--

Abstaining from attachment to the work, Abstaining from rewardment in the work, While yet one doeth it full faithfully, Saying, "'Tis right to do!"--that is true act And abstinence! Who doeth duties so, Unvexed if his work fail, if it succeed Unflattered, in his own heart justified, Quit of debates and doubts, his is "true" act.[146]

[146] Sir Edwin Arnold's _The Song Celestial_ (translated from the Mahabharata): see below, p. 401.

But the lesson was hard to learn. "There are trying days before us," she wrote to one of her dearest friends (Aug. 1873); "however, we cannot change a single 'hair'; we must look to Him 'Alike who grasps eternity, And numbers every hair.' I don't know that it is ever difficult to me to entrust my 'hair' to Him, but to entrust A.'s, and yours, and poor matron's I find very difficult. And I thought He did not take care of B.'s hairs. What a reprobate I am!" And a worse "reprobate" than this letter says; for in fact she did find it very difficult to entrust even her own "hair to Him"--as she confessed in another letter to the same friend: "G.o.d is displeased when we enquire too anxiously. A soul which has really given itself to G.o.d does His will in the present, and trusts to the Father for the future. Now it is twenty years to-day [Aug. 11, 1873] since I entered 'public life'--and I have not learnt that lesson yet--though the greater part of those twenty years have been as completely out of my hands to mould, and in His alone, as if they had been the movements of the planets." The surrender of her will to the keeping of the Supreme Will was the spiritual perfection at which she most continuously aimed. In consciousness of failure, she reproached herself for censoriousness, rebellion, impatience. She knew that some of all this, and much of her dejection, were morbid, and warned others against the like weakness. "Do not depend, darling," she wrote to a friend, "upon 'light' in one sort of mystical way. There are things, as I know by experience, in which He sends us light by the hard good sense of others, not by our going over in sickness and solitude one thought, or rather feeling, over and over again by ourselves, which rather brings darkness. I have felt this so much in my lonely life." But there was another mystical way in which she found strength. In her spiritual life, which was at once the complement and the sustaining source of her outward life, she followed, as she was fond of writing, "the Way of the Cross." There were moments indeed, but they were rare, in which she was inclined to draw back, and when her faith grew faint. "O my Creator, art Thou leading every man of us to perfection? Or is this only a metaphysical idea for which there is no evidence? Is man only a constant repet.i.tion of himself? Thou knowest that through all these 20 horrible years [1873] I have been supported by the belief (I think I must believe it still or I am sure I could not work) that I was working with Thee who wert bringing every one, even our poor nurses, to perfection." Yet from every doubt her a.s.surance grew the stronger; and as she followed the Way of the Cross, she rose triumphant over suffering, finding in each loss of human sympathy a lesson that she should throw herself more entirely into the Eternal Arms, and in every outbreak of human despondency or rebellion a call to closer union with the Eternal Goodness. "O Father, I submit, I resign myself," she wrote in one of hundreds of similar meditations, "I accept with all my heart this stretching out of Thy hand to save me: Deal with me as Thou seest meet: Thy work begin, Thy work complete. O how vain it is, the vanity of vanities, to live in men's thoughts, instead of G.o.d's." And again: "Wretch that I was not to see that G.o.d was taking from me all human help in order to compel me to lean on Him alone." She had little interest in rites and ceremonies as such, and she interpreted the doctrines of Christianity in her own way; but she found great comfort in the Communion Service, as an expression of the individual believer's partic.i.p.ation in the sufferings and the triumph of the greatest of the Mystics. For some years she entered in her diary a text from the mystical writers for each day. She took to herself their devotion, their communion with G.o.d, their self-surrender; she adjusted their doctrine to her own beliefs. "I believe," she wrote, "in G.o.d the Father Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth. And in Jesus Christ, His best son, our Master, who was born to show us the way through suffering to be also His sons and His daughters, His handmen and His handmaidens, who lived in the same spirit with the Father, that we may also live in that Holy Spirit whose meat was to do His Father's will and to finish His work, who suffered and died saying, 'That the world may love the Father.' And I believe in the Father Almighty's love and friendship, in the service of man being the service of G.o.d, the growing into a likeness with Him by love, the being one with Him in will at last, which is Heaven. I believe in the plan of Almighty Perfection to make us all perfect. And thus I believe in the Life Everlasting."

This was the creed by which Miss Nightingale guided her life; this, the path to perfection along which she ever moved. There was nothing ecstatic in her mysticism, though she notes occasionally that she heard "The voice," and often that she was conscious of receiving "strong impressions." They were impressions which came in moments of imaginative insight, but yet which followed rationally from self-examination and meditation on her creed. Patience and resignation were the states of the purified soul which she found hardest of attainment. She marked for her edification many a pa.s.sage from devotional writers in which such virtues are enjoined; as in this from Thomas a Kempis: "Oh Lord my G.o.d, patience is very necessary for me, for I perceive that many things in this life do fall out as we would not.... It is so, my son. But my will is that thou seek not that peace which is void of temptations, or which suffereth nothing contrary; but rather think that thou hast found peace, when thou art exercised with sundry tribulations and tried in many adversities." Her tribulations were often caused, she confessed, by her impatience. "O Lord, even now I am trying to s.n.a.t.c.h the management of Thy world out of Thy hands." The middle path of perfection between the acquiescence of the quietist and the impatience of the worker was hard.

"Too little have I looked for something higher and better than my own work--the work of Supreme Wisdom, which uses us whether we know it or not. O G.o.d to Thy glory not to mine whatever happens, may be all my thought!"

Miss Nightingale's meditations, written in the purgatorial stage, are many and poignant. But there were times also when the mount of illumination was reached, when "the palace of her soul" was enlarged to receive the indwelling Presence, and she found the perfect peace of the mystic in the consciousness of union with the Supreme Wisdom; times when on the wings of the soul she attained with Dante to the empyrean:--

Lume e la.s.su che visibile face Lo Creatore a quella creatura, Che solo in lui vedere ha la sua pace.

Perfected in weakness, she was strong in moments of illumination "to see G.o.d in all things, and all things in G.o.d, the Eternal shining through the accidents of s.p.a.ce and time." [147]

[147] Letter to Mr. Jowett, April 17, 1873.

CHAPTER III

MISS NIGHTINGALE'S SCHOOL

(1872-1879)

Let each Founder train as many in his or her spirit as he or she can. Then the pupils will in their turn be Founders also.-- FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.

Miss Nightingale did not do as she had planned, and go in her own person to St. Thomas's Hospital, but in another sense the year 1872 was the year of her descent upon it. Not, indeed, as we saw in the preceding Part, that she had ever abandoned a personal interest in the Training School, but there were now new conditions which called for additional care, and Miss Nightingale, being out of office, was more free to give it. Henceforth she became, in a yet more direct manner than heretofore, the head of the Nightingale School, and the Chief of the Nightingale Nurses.

The year 1871 had seen the removal of St. Thomas's Hospital from its temporary quarters in the old Surrey Gardens to the present building opposite the Houses of Parliament. The foundation-stone had been laid by Queen Victoria in 1868. Miss Nightingale had been requested to ask the Queen to do this, and she had preferred the pet.i.tion through Sir James Clark. "I never pressed Her Majesty so hard upon anything before," said he, in announcing the Royal pleasure. The Queen had again shown her interest in the Hospital by opening the new building in June 1871. The number of beds was now greatly increased, and with it the number of nurses and probationers. The control of the nurses was likely to be relaxed as it was spread over a larger number, and Miss Nightingale resolved to hold a Visitation.

First, she sent Dr. Sutherland with the consent of the hospital authorities to inspect the new buildings and to consider all the arrangements from the point of view of an expert sanitarian. She examined and cross-examined Sisters and Nurses on the same points, and put into print a list of the defects which needed remedy.[148] Then Miss Nightingale took in hand the education, technical and moral, of her own Nightingale School. She had already observed that the Lady Probationers, appointed to responsible posts, were not always adequate to their duties: the overworked Matron had perhaps sometimes recommended unsuitable persons. She found on questioning the Nurses that their technical education did not reach the high standard which she desired to maintain. She feared that the moral standard similarly fell short of her ideal; nursing was coming to be regarded too much as a business profession, and too little as a sacred calling. Miss Nightingale determined to throw herself into a sustained effort for the better realization of her ideal. Directly or indirectly, she inst.i.tuted sweeping reforms. The result of them was, as she wrote to Mr. Bonham Carter (Aug. 1875), that the Training School became "a Home--a place of moral, religious and practical training--a place of training of character, habits, intelligence, as well as of acquiring knowledge."

Those who saw the Nightingale nurses in these years were struck by the bright, kindly and pleasant spirit which seemed to pervade the company of them, and could well understand that the Inst.i.tution was really, as its foundress intended, a home as well as a school.

[148] See Bibliography A, No. 67.

Mr. Whitfield, the Resident Medical Officer, who had acted since the foundation of the Nursing School as Medical Instructor of the Probationers, resigned that post, and Mr. J. Croft, who had lately become one of the Surgeons to the Hospital, was appointed in his stead.

Miss Nightingale saw and corresponded with Mr. Croft, and liked him much. "I have always dreaded," he wrote (Feb. 24, 1873), "remaining a 'stagnant man.'[149] I hope to become, as you would have me, an active and faithful comrade." He gave clinical instruction to the Probationers; delivered courses of lectures--general, medical, and surgical in the several terms--throughout the year, of which he submitted the syllabus to Miss Nightingale, and at her request drew up a "Course of Reading for Probationers." Other members of the Medical Staff gave courses of lectures also, and examinations were made more regular and searching.

The answers written by the Probationers, and their notes on the lectures, were from time to time sent in to Miss Nightingale, so that she might gain an idea of the general standard of instruction, and perhaps administer rebuke or encouragement to individual pupils. "I think," Miss Nightingale was told on one occasion, "that the ladies are thoroughly ashamed of the appearance they made at Mr. Croft's last examination, and wish to retrieve themselves." Their good resolutions seem to have been successful, for presently one of the Medical Officers reported that "the answers which I have received this year collectively are much better than in former years, they are indeed exceedingly good."

"I read your Case-papers," Miss Nightingale wrote in one of her Addresses, "with more interest than if they were novels. Some are meagre, especially in the history of the cases. Some are good. Please remember that, besides your own instruction, you can give me some too, by making these most interesting cases as interesting as possible by making them accurate and entering into the full history." The new Hospital had greatly increased the demands upon the time of the Matron, Mrs. Wardroper, and left her less able to supervise the Probationers. An a.s.sistant-Superintendent of the School was appointed with the t.i.tle of Home Sister.[150] It was one of her duties to supplement the lectures and bedside demonstration of the medical officers by regular cla.s.s-teaching.

[149] The reference here was to Miss Nightingale's "Address to the Probationers" (1872) in which she had written: "To be a good nurse, one must be an improving woman; for stagnant waters sooner or later, and stagnant air, as we know ourselves, always grow corrupt and unfit for use. Is any one of us a _stagnant woman_?"

[150] The part of Home Sister was "created," and was most efficiently filled for 21 years, by Miss Crossland, who retired on a pension in 1895. "Nearly 600 nurses completed their probationary course under her care, and subsequently entered upon their vocation as nurses in some general Hospital or Infirmary, or in training as District Nurses for the Poor, and a very large number of them became Matrons, Superintendents, or Ward Sisters." (_Nightingale Fund Report_ for 1895).

Miss Nightingale, however, attached even more importance to the Home Sister's influence on the moral and spiritual side of the School. The Home Sister was to encourage general reading, to arrange Bible cla.s.ses, to give interests to the nurses in order "to keep them above the mere scramble for a remunerative place." The two sides of the School are closely joined in the letters to Miss Nightingale from the Home Sister and Matron--letters telling on one page of the progress of Probationers in antiseptic dressing and so forth, and on another of their Bible readings or selected hymns. Miss Nightingale was especially pleased when Canon Farrar allotted some seats at St. Margaret's to her nurses and took a Confirmation cla.s.s among them.

II

Miss Nightingale relied, however, upon her own influence also. During her residence in London she now made a point of seeing regularly all the Sisters, Nurses, and Probationers attached to her School. She had resolved, when Agnes Jones died, to "give herself up to finding more Agnes Joneses." This was the task to which she now devoted a large part of her life. She was still untiring in the attempt to procure promising raw material. She applied to Mr. Spurgeon, among others, who in reply (July 29, 1877) hoped that from his church "there would come quite a little army of recruits for your holy war. Rest a.s.sured that to me in common with all my country-men your name is very fragrant." When applications came to her for trained nurses from provincial towns, she used to tell them what Pastor Fliedner said when similar applications came to him for trained Deaconesses from Kaiserswerth: "Have _you_ sent _me_ any Probationers? I can't stamp material out of the ground." From 1872 onwards all the "raw material" pa.s.sed under Miss Nightingale's own eye.

She was a shrewd judge of character. A collection of extracts from Mr. Jowett's notes to her about his pupils, and of her pencilled notes upon her pupils, would furnish a gallery of types of young English men and English women. He used to write to her very freely about his undergraduates; and she liked it--teasing him sometimes about his dukes and marquises and inventing humorous nicknames for them. "Why do I write to you," he said, "about all these young men? Because it pleases me, and because I know that you are a student of human nature." She was indeed.

She read her visitors through and through. As soon as a Sister or a Nurse took leave, Miss Nightingale wrote down a memorandum of the attainments, knowledge, and character of each. The character-sketches are terse and vivid, expressed sometimes in racy English. "Miss A.[151]

t.i.ttupy, flippant, pretension-y, veil down, ambitious, clever, not much feeling, talk-y, underbred, no religion, may be persevering from ambition to excel, but takes the thing up as an adventure like Nap. III." "Nurse B. A good little thing, spirited, too much friends with G., shares in her flirtations." "Miss C. Seems a woman of good feeling and bad sense; much under the meridian of anybody who will try to persuade her. I think her praises have been sung exaggerated-ly. She wants a very steady hand over her. Such long-winded stories 5 points or at least half the compa.s.s off the subject in hand. Had I not been intent on persuading her I should have been out of all patience." "Miss D. As self-comfortable a jacka.s.s (or Joan-a.s.s) as ever I saw." "Nurse E. A most capable little woman, no education, but one can't find it in one's heart to regret it, she seems as good as can be." "Miss X. More cleverness than judgment, more activity than order, more hard sense than feeling, never any high view of her calling, always thinking more of appearances than of the truth, more flippant than witty, more petulance than vigour." "Nurse Y. As poor a two-fisted thing as ever I saw, a mawkin to frighten away good nurses." There were many Sisters and Nurses so excellent in every respect that they needed nothing but encouragement; she was more careful to mark defects, and sometimes she would write a note of warning or remonstrance immediately after an interview, as to Miss Z.: "A wise man says that true knowledge of anything whether in heaven or earth can only be gained by a true love of the Ideal in it--that is, _of the best that we can do_ in it. Forgive me, dear Miss Z., do you think that you have the true _love_ of the _best_ in nursing? This is a question I ask myself daily in all I do. Do not think me governess-ing. It is a question which each one of us can only ask of, and answer to, herself." The notes which Miss Nightingale took of conversations with Probationers did not refer only to those ladies themselves. She questioned them closely of the state of the wards, the kind and extent of instruction they received, and the influence exerted by the several Sisters. She came to the conclusion that the Probationers were not always adequately taught by the Sisters, and she drew up accordingly a "Memorandum of Instruction to Ward Sisters on their duties to Probationers." In one of her cross-examinations of herself, she wrote, "G.o.d meant me for a reformer and I have turned out a detective." But the reformer must needs on occasion play the detective--especially if she cannot herself be on the scene. The close hand which Miss Nightingale kept upon her School during these years from her room in South Street or at Lea Hurst is extraordinary, but it was done at a prodigious expenditure of labour. She notes the point herself: it was one of the sore trials of her lot that she had to "write 100 letters to do one little thing instead of being able to do it directly."

"It takes a great deal out of me," she wrote to a friend. "I have never been used to influence people except by leading in _work_; and to have to influence them by talking and writing is hard. A more dreadful thing than being cut short by death is being cut short by life in a paralysed state."