THE LIFE OF
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE

MACMILLAN AND CO., Limited
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BY
SIR EDWARD COOK


IN TWO VOLUMES
VOL. I
(1820–1861)

MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON
1913

COPYRIGHT

[v]

Men and women are divided, in relation to their papers, into hoarders and scatterers. Miss Nightingale was a hoarder, and as she lived to be 90 the accumulation of papers, stored in her house at the time of her death, was very great. The papers referring to years up to 1861 had been neatly done up by herself, and it was evident that not everything had been kept. After that date, time and strength to sort and weed had been wanting, and Miss Nightingale seems to have thrown little away. Even soiled sheets of blotting-paper, on which she had made notes in pencil, were preserved. By a Will executed in 1896 she had directed that all her letters, papers, and manuscripts, with some specific exceptions, should be destroyed. By a Codicil executed in the following year she revoked this direction, and bequeathed the letters, papers, and manuscripts to her cousin, Mr. Henry Bonham Carter. After her death the papers were sorted chronologically by his direction, and they have formed the principal foundation of this Memoir.

Of expressly autobiographical notes, Miss Nightingale left very few. At the date of the Codicil above mentioned she seems to have contemplated the probability of some authoritative record of her life; for in that year she wrote a short summary of what she called “My Responsibility to India,” detailing her relations with successive Secretaries of State, Governors-General, and other administrators. Her memory in these matters was still accurate, for the summary is fully borne out by letters and other papers of the several dates: it adds some personal details. In private letters she sometimes recounted, at later times, episodes or experiences in her life, but such references are[vi] few. Nor, except for a few years, did Miss Nightingale keep any formal diary; and during the Crimean episode she was too incessantly busy with her multitudinous duties to find time for many private notes.

The principal authority for Miss Nightingale's Life is thus the collection of papers aforesaid, and these are very copious in information. The records, in one sort or another, of her earlier years are full. The papers relating to her work during the Crimean War are voluminous, and I have supplemented the study of these by consulting the official documents concerning Miss Nightingale's mission which are preserved, among War Office papers, in the Public Record Office. Her papers relating to public affairs during the years 1856 to 1861 are also very voluminous. After the latter date she seems, as already stated, to have kept almost everything, even every advertisement, that she received. She often made notes for important letters that she sent, and sometimes kept copies of them. Of official documents, of printed memoranda, pamphlets, reports, and returns, she accumulated an immense collection. And though she was not a regular diarist, she was in the habit of jotting down on sheets of notepaper her engagements, impressions, thoughts, meditations, as also in many cases reports of conversations.

The collection of letters received by Miss Nightingale, and of her notes for letters sent by her, has been supplemented, through the kindness of many of her correspondents or their representatives, by letters which were received from her. I am more especially indebted in this respect to the care of the late Sir Douglas Galton, whose docketed collection of letters from Miss Nightingale, taken in conjunction with a long series of his letters to her, forms a main authority for much of the record of her activity in public affairs. Her letters to Julius and Mary Mohl, returned to her after the death of the latter, are, in another way, of peculiar interest. I am particularly indebted, among the lenders of letters addressed to nursing friends, to Miss Pringle and to the father of the late Mrs. Daniel Morris (Miss Rachel Williams). Miss Pringle has also favoured me with personal reminiscences.

For permission to print letters written to Miss Nightingale,[vii] I am indebted to many of her relations, friends, and correspondents, or their representatives; to so many, indeed, that I ask them to accept here a general acknowledgment. I am especially indebted to the King, who has been pleased to permit the publication of letters from Queen Victoria and some other members of the Royal Family. The German Emperor has graciously given a like permission in the case of correspondence with the Empress Frederick. The Dowager Grand Duchess (Luise) of Baden has allowed me to quote from a long series of letters addressed by her to Miss Nightingale.

Next to the letters and other papers, above described, the most valuable material for the Life of Miss Nightingale is contained in her own printed writings—many of them published, some (and these, from the biographical point of view, the most important) privately printed. In the case of the Crimean War, material under both of these heads is particularly abundant. Her published Notes on Hospitals and Notes on Nursing and other works relating to those subjects, together with her privately circulated Addresses to Probationers, supplement her private records. For her inner life, her privately printed book, Suggestions for Thought, is of special importance.

A List of Miss Nightingale's Printed Writings (whether published or privately circulated) is given at the end of the second volume (Appendix A). My purpose in compiling this List was biographical illustration, not bibliographical minuteness. I have not included every scrap from Miss Nightingale's pen which has appeared in print, but have given every piece which is directly or indirectly referred to in the Memoir, or which is of any importance. The List will, I hope, serve a double purpose. It enables me to abbreviate in the text the references to my authorities; and it provides, in chronological order, a conspectus of Miss Nightingale's varied activities, so far as they were reflected in her printed writings.

Lastly, there is much biographical material, not only in Blue-books and official reports, but in writings about Miss Nightingale. Except in the case of the Crimean War,[viii] where many eye-witnesses recorded their observations or impressions, this material is not all of great value. Throughout her subsequent life, Miss Nightingale was screened from the public gaze; a somewhat legendary figure grew up, and it is that which for the most part appears in books about her. This, however, is a subject fully dealt with in an Introductory chapter. In Appendix B I give a short List of Writings about Miss Nightingale. Here, again, the purpose is not bibliographical. There is a great mass of such writing, and a complete list would have been altogether outside the scope of a biography. I have included only first-hand authorities or such other books, etc., as for one reason or another (explained in the notes upon each item) seemed relevant to the Memoir. This second List also serves the purpose of simplifying references in the text.

In a third Appendix (C) I have enumerated the principal portraits of Miss Nightingale. Notes on those reproduced in this book will there be found. I am indebted to the kindness of Sir William Richmond and Sir Harry Verney for the inclusion of the portrait which forms the frontispiece to the second volume, and to Mrs. Cunliffe for the frontispiece to the present volume.

To Miss Nightingale's executors I am indebted for the confidence which they have shown in entrusting her Papers to my discretion. A biography is worth nothing unless it is sincere. The aim of the present book has been to tell the truth about the subject of it, and I have done my work under no conscious temptation to suppress, exaggerate, extenuate, or distort. From Miss Nightingale's executors, and from other of her friends and relations, I have received help and information which has been of the greatest assistance. More especially I am indebted to her cousin, Mrs. Vaughan Nash, who has been good enough to read my book, both in manuscript and in proof, and who has favoured me throughout with valuable information, corrections, suggestions, and criticisms. This obligation makes it the more incumbent upon me to add that for any faults in the book, whether of commission or of omission, I alone must bear the blame.

[ix]

[xxi]

[xxiii]

Among Miss Nightingale's memoranda on books and reading, there is this injunction: “The preface of a book ought to set forth the importance of what it is going to treat of, so that the reader may understand what he is reading for.” The saying is typical of the methodical and positive spirit which, as we shall learn, was one of the dominant strains in Miss Nightingale's work and character. She wanted to know at every stage precisely what a person, or a book, or an institution was driving at. “Of all human sounds,” she said, “I think the words I don't know are the saddest.” Unless a book had something of definite importance to say, it had better, she thought, not be written; and in order to save the reader's time and fix his attention, he should be told at once wherein the significance of the book consists. This, though it may be a hard saying, is perhaps not unwholesome even to biographers. At any rate, as Miss Nightingale's biographer, I am moved to obey her injunction. I propose, therefore, in this Introductory chapter to state wherein, as I conceive, the significance and importance of Miss Nightingale's life consists, and what the work was that she did in the world.

“In the course of a life's experience such as scarcely any one has ever had, I have always found,” said Miss Nightingale,[1] “that no one ever deserves his or her character. Be it better or worse than the real one, it is always unlike the real one.” Of no one is this saying more true than of herself. “It has been your fate,” said Mr. Jowett to her once, [xxiv]“to become a Legend in your lifetime.” Now, nothing is more persistent than a legend; and the legend of Florence Nightingale became fixed early in her life—at a time, indeed, antecedent to that at which her best work in the world, as she thought, had begun. The popular imagination of Miss Nightingale is of a girl of high degree who, moved by a wave of pity, forsook the pleasures of fashionable life for the horrors of the Crimean War; who went about the hospitals of Scutari with a lamp, scattering flowers of comfort and ministration; who retired at the close of the war into private life, and lived thenceforth in the seclusion of an invalid's room—a seclusion varied only by good deeds to hospitals and nurses and by gracious and sentimental pieties. I do not mean, of course, that this was all that anybody knew or wrote about her. Any such suggestion would be far from the truth. But the popular idea of Florence Nightingale's life has been based on some such lines as I have indicated, and the general conception of her character is to this day founded upon them. The legend was fixed by Longfellow's poem and Miss Yonge's Golden Deeds. Its growth was favoured by the fact of Miss Nightingale's seclusion, by the hidden, almost the secretive, manner in which she worked, by her shrinking from publicity, by her extreme reticence about herself. It is only now, when her Papers are accessible, that her real life can be known. There are some elements of truth in the popular legend, but it is so remote from the whole truth as to convey in general impression everything but the truth. The real Florence Nightingale was very different from the legendary, but also greater. Her life was built on larger lines, her work had more importance, than belong to the legend.

The Crimean War was not the first thing, and still less was it the last, that is significant in Miss Nightingale's life. The story of her earlier years is that of the building up of a character. It shows us a girl of high natural ability and of considerable attractions feeling her way to an ideal alike in practice and in speculation. Having found it, she was thrown into revolt against the environment of her home. We shall see her pursuing her ideal with consistent, though with self-torturing, tenacity against alike the obstacles and the[xxv] temptations of circumstance. She had already served an apprenticeship when the call to the Crimea came. It was a call not to “sacrifice,” but to the fulfilment of her dearest wishes for a life of active usefulness. Such is the theme of the First Part, which I have called “Aspiration.”

Many other women have passed through similar experiences. But there is special significance in them in the case of Florence Nightingale—a significance both historic and personal. The glamour that surrounded her service in the Crimea, the wide-world publicity that was given to her name and deeds, invested with peculiar importance her fight for freedom. To do “as Florence Nightingale did” became an object of imitation which the well-to-do world was henceforth readier to condone, or even to approve; and thus the story of Miss Nightingale's earlier years is the history of a pioneer, on one side, in the emancipation of women.

For the understanding of her own later life, the earlier years are all-important. They give the clue to her character, and explain much that would otherwise be puzzling or confused. Through great difficulties and at a heavy price she had purchased her birthright—her ideal of self-expression in work. On her return from the Crimea she was placed, on the one hand, owing to her fame, in a position of special opportunity; on the other hand, owing to illness, in a position of special disability. She shaped her life henceforward so as to make these two factors conform to the continued fulfilment of her ideal. I need not here forestall what subsequent chapters will abundantly illustrate. I will only say that the resultant effect was a manner of life and work, both extraordinary, and, to me at least, of the greatest interest.

The Second Part of the Memoir is devoted to the Crimean War. The popular conception with regard to Miss Nightingale's work during this episode in her life is not untrue so far as it goes, but it is amazingly short of the whole truth as now ascertainable from her Papers. The popular imagination pictures Florence Nightingale at Scutari and in the Crimea as “the ministering angel.” And such in very truth[xxvi] she was. But the deeper significance of her work in the Crimean War lies elsewhere. It was as Administrator and Reformer, more than as Angel, that she showed her peculiar powers. Queen Victoria, with native shrewdness and a touch of humour, hit off the truth about Miss Nightingale's services in the Crimea in concise words: “Such a clear head. I wish we had her at the War Office.”

The influence of Miss Nightingale's service in the Crimea was great. Some of it is obvious, and on the moral side Longfellow's poem said the first, and the last, word. She may also be accounted, if not the founder, yet the promoter of Female Nursing in war, and the Red Cross Societies throughout the world are, as we shall hear, the direct outcome of her labours in the Crimea. The indirect, and less obvious, results were in many spheres. From a sick-room in the West End of London Miss Nightingale played a part—and a much larger part than could be known without access to her Papers—in reforming the sanitary administration of the British army, in reconstructing hospitals throughout the world, in founding the modern art of nursing, in setting up a sanitary administration in India, and in promoting various other reforms in that country.

Miss Nightingale's return from the Crimea, it will thus be seen, was not the end of her active life. In a sense it was the beginning. The nursing at Scutari and in the Crimea was an episode. The fame which she shunned, but which nevertheless came to her, gave her a starting-point for doing work which was destined, as she hoped, and as in large measure was granted, to be of permanent service to her country and the world. The first chapter of the Third Part shows her laying her plans for the health of the British soldier, and the subsequent chapters tell what followed. This is the period of Miss Nightingale's close co-operation with Sidney Herbert. To the writer this later phase of Miss Nightingale's life—with its ingenious adjustment of means to ends, its masterful resourcefulness, its incessant industry, and then with its perpetual struggle against physical weakness and its extraordinary power of devoted concentration—has seemed not less interesting than the Crimean episode.[xxvii]

The Fourth Part describes, as its main themes, the work which Miss Nightingale did, concurrently with that described in the preceding Part, as Hospital Reformer and the Founder of Modern Nursing. Other chapters introduce two topics which might at first sight seem widely separate, but which were yet closely associated in Miss Nightingale's mind. They deal with her, respectively, as a Passionate Statistician and as a Religious Thinker. The nature of her speculations is fully explained in the latter chapters, and elsewhere in the memoir. It will be seen that Miss Nightingale had thought out a scheme of religious belief which widely differed from the creeds of Christian orthodoxy, whether Catholic or Protestant, but which yet admitted of accommodation to much of their language and formularies. It admitted also, as will appear in due course, of close alliance with mysticism. Miss Nightingale believed intensely in a Personal God and in personal religion. The language which expressed most adequately to her the sense of union with God was the language of the Greek and Christian mystics. But “law” was to her “the thought of God”; union with God meant co-operation with Him towards human perfectibility; and for the discovery of “the thought of God” statistics were to her mind an indispensable means.

In the Fifth Part we are introduced to a new interest in Miss Nightingale's life, a new sphere of her work. For forty years she worked at Indian questions. She took up the subject at first through interest in the army. It was a natural supplement to her efforts for the health of the British soldier at home, to make a like attempt on behalf of the army in India. Gradually she was drawn into other questions, and she became a keen Indian reformer all along the line. Her assiduity, her persistence, her ingenuity were as marked in this sphere as in others; it was only her immediate success that was less.

In relation to the primary object with which she began her Indian campaigns, Miss Nightingale's life and work have great importance. The Royal Commission of 1859–63, which was due to her, and the measures taken in consequence of its Report, were the starting-point of a new era in sanitary[xxviii] improvement for the army. The results have been most salutary. Miss Nightingale's friendship with Lord Stanley and with Sir John Lawrence here served her somewhat as that with Mr. Herbert served in the earlier campaign. In the wider sphere of Indian sanitation generally Miss Nightingale's efforts were not so successful. The field was perhaps too vast, the conditions were too adverse, for any great and immediate success to be possible. Yet this and her other efforts for India were the part of Miss Nightingale's life and work to which she attached most importance, and by the record of which she set most store. Even in the Will (afterwards revoked) directing her Papers to be destroyed, she made exception of those relating to India; and, as already stated in the preface, one of her few pieces of autobiographical record related to her Indian work. Perhaps it was the special affection which a mother often feels for the least robust or least successful child. Perhaps it was that she took long views; and that, foreseeing a future time when many of the reforms for which she had toiled might be accomplished, she desired to be remembered as a pioneer. “Sanitation,” said a high authority in 1894, “is the Cinderella of the Indian administrative family.”[2] The difficulty of finding money and a reluctance to introduce Western reforms in advance of Eastern opinion are objections with which we shall often meet in the correspondence of Indian officials with Miss Nightingale, and they are still raised in the present day.[3] On the other hand, the Under-Secretary for India, in his Budget Statement for 1913, declared that “the service which has the strongest claim after education on the resources of the Government is sanitation,” and explained that “the Budget estimate of expenditure for sanitation comes this year to nearly £2,000,000, showing an increase of 112 per cent over the expenditure of three years ago.” So perhaps Cinderella is to go to the ball; if ever the glass slipper is[xxix] found, let it be remembered, as this Memoir will show, that Miss Nightingale was the good fairy.

Her Indian work continued as long as she was able to work at all, and from 1862 onwards it forms one of the recurring themes in our story. The Sixth Part, while continuing that subject, introduces another sphere in which Miss Nightingale's life and work have important significance. From the reform of Hospital Nursing she turned, in conjunction with the late Mr. William Rathbone, to the reform of workhouse nursing. And as one thing led to another, it will be seen that Miss Nightingale deserves to be remembered also as a Poor Law Reformer.

The Seventh Part comprises the last thirty-eight years of Miss Nightingale's life (1872–1910), and a word or two may here be said to explain an apparent alteration of scale. In a biography the scale must be proportionate not to the number of the years, but to their richness in characteristic significance. After 1872, the year in which (as Miss Nightingale put it) she went “out of office,” her life was less full than theretofore in new activities. The germinant seeds had all been sown. But these later years, though they have admitted of more summary treatment, were full of interest. The chapters in which they are recorded deal first with Miss Nightingale's literary work, and more especially with her studies in Plato and the Christian mystics. These studies were in part a result of her close friendship of thirty years with Mr. Jowett. Then, too, occasion is found for an endeavour to portray Miss Nightingale as the Mother-Chief (for so they called her) of the Nurses. It is only by access to her enormous correspondence in this sort that the range and extent of her personal influence can be measured. Her ideal of the nursing vocation stands out very clearly from the famous “Nurses' Battle” which occupied much of her later years. She found an opportunity during the same period to start an important experiment in Rural Hygiene. At the same time she was preaching indefatigably the need of Health missionaries in Indian villages. And then came the end. To the time of labour, there succeeds in every life,[xxx] says Ruskin, “the time of death; which in happy lives is very short, but always a time.” In the case of Miss Nightingale the time was long. She lived for many years after the power to labour was gone.

So much, by way of preface, in explanation of the significance of Miss Nightingale's life and work. But this book endeavours to depict a character, as well as to record a career. There has been much discussion, in our days as in others, of the proper scope and method of biography, and various models are held up, in one sense or another, to practitioners in this difficult art. The questions are propounded, whether biography should describe a person's life or his character? his work or how he did it? If the person did anything worthy of record, a biography should, surely, describe alike the life and the character, the work and the methods. The biographer may fail in his attempt; but in the case of Miss Nightingale the attempt is peculiarly necessary, because all that she did and the manner in which she did it were, as it has seemed to me, characteristic of a strongly-marked personality behind them.

This book is, however, a biography and not a history. It is not a history of the Crimean War, nor of nursing, nor of Indian administration. Something on all these matters will be found in it; but only so much of detail as was necessary to place Miss Nightingale's work in its true light and to exhibit her characteristic methods. So, also, many other persons will pass across the stage—persons drawn from a great many different classes, occupations, walks in life; but the book does not aim at giving a detailed picture of “Miss Nightingale's circle.” Her relations, her friends, her acquaintances, her correspondents only concern us here in so far as their dealings with her affected her work, or illustrate her character.

Here, again—to revert to what has been said above—it will be found, I think, that this book possesses a certain significance as correcting, or supplementing, a popular legend. A preacher, in an obituary sermon upon Miss Nightingale, said that all her work was done “by force of[xxxi] simple goodness.” Assuredly Miss Nightingale was a good woman, and there was also a certain simplicity about her. But there was much else. A man of affairs, who in the course of a long and varied life had come in contact with many of the acutest intellects and greatest administrators of the time, said of Miss Nightingale that hers was the clearest brain he had ever known in man or woman. Strength of head was quite as marked in her as goodness of heart, and she had at least as much of adroitness as of simplicity. Her character was in fact curiously many-sided. A remarkable variety of interests, motives, methods will be found coming into play in the course of this record. The Florence Nightingale who will be shown in it—by her acts, her methods, her sayings, her ways of looking at things and people—is a very different person from Santa Filomena. Miss Nightingale has been given a place among the saints in the popular calendars of many nations; and she deserves the canonisation, but not entirely for the popular reasons. Her character, as I have endeavoured to depict it, was stronger, more spacious, and, as I have felt, more lovable than that of The Lady with the Lamp.

[1]

Browning: Paracelsus.

[3]

To the tender sentiment and popular adoration that gathered around the subject of this Memoir, something perhaps was added by the beauty of a name which linked together the City of the Flowers and the music of the birds. Her surname suggested to Longfellow the title of the poem which has carried home to the hearts of thousands in two continents a lesson of her life. The popularity of “Florence”—in the Middle Ages a masculine name—as a Christian name for English girls is noted by the historian of that subject as due to association with the heroine of the Crimea.

Both of her names were the result of circumstance. Her father came of the old Derbyshire family of Shore of Tapton, and changed his name in 1815 from William Edward Shore to William Edward Nightingale on succeeding to the property of his mother's uncle, Peter Nightingale of Lea, in the same county. Mr. William Nightingale was fond of travel, and the close of the French war, shortly before his marriage (1818), had thrown the Continent open to the grand tour. Mr. and Mrs. Nightingale's only children, two daughters, were born during a sojourn in Italy. The elder was born at Naples in 1819, and was named, firstly, Frances,[4] after her mother, and, secondly, after the old Greek settlement on the site of her birthplace, Parthenope. She afterwards became the second wife of Sir Harry Verney.[4] The younger daughter, the subject of this Memoir, was also named after her birthplace. She was born at Florence on May 12, 1820, in the Villa Colombaia, near the Porta Romana, as a memorial-tablet now affixed to the house records; and there on the 4th of July she was baptized by Dr. Trevor, Prebendary of Chester. The place-names became in familiar intercourse “Parthe” or “Pop,” and “Flo.”

“The surprises of sainthood,” said a speaker at a Congress on Eugenics, “are no less remarkable than those of genius. St. Francis of Assisi, St. Catherine of Siena, and Florence Nightingale could no more have been predicted from their ancestry than Napoleon, Beethoven, Michael Angelo, or Shakespeare.” But the peculiarities of tissue on which some physical characteristics are held to depend can, at any rate, be inherited. Florence Nightingale's mother was one of the eleven children of William Smith of Parndon Hall, Essex, of whom Sir James Stephen said: “When he had nearly completed four score years, he could still gratefully acknowledge that he had no remembrance of any bodily pain or illness, and that of the very numerous family of which he was the head every member still lived to support and gladden his old age.” This statement is not absolutely correct, for one child did not long survive its birth; but of the other sons and daughters of William Smith, none died at an earlier age than 69, two lived to be more than 75, six to be more than 80, and one to be more than 90. This last was Frances, Mrs. Nightingale, who lived to be 92. On the father's side there was longevity also. Mr. Nightingale himself lived to be 80. His mother lived to be 95; he had an aunt who lived to be 90; and “your uncle,” wrote his father, “young at 82, enters into politics of the present moment with all the ardour of 22.” Of the children of Mr. and Mrs. William Nightingale, Parthenope lived to be 75, and Florence, though (or, in part,[5] perhaps, because) she lived for 53 years the life of an invalid, attained the age of 90.

Florence Nightingale, whether saint or not, was certainly conscious of a “call”; but there was nothing in her descent or inheritance which encouraged her parents to allow it to become readily effectual. Because she was a woman, her early life was one long struggle for liberation from circumstance and social prepossessions. Yet there were features in her mental equipment and intellectual outlook which may well have been inherited, and which certainly owed much to environment. Sir James Stephen adds to the remarks quoted above that if William Smith “had gone mourning all his days, he could scarcely have acquired a more tender pity for the miserable, or have laboured more habitually for their relief.” In politics he was a follower of Fox. He was a friend of Wilberforce, with whom he co-operated in the House of Commons in the Abolitionist and other humanitarian movements. Of Wilberforce, as of Thomas Clarkson, “he possessed the almost brotherly love, and of all their fellow-labourers there was none who was more devoted to their cause, or whom they more entirely trusted.”[5] In religion a Unitarian, he was a stout defender of liberty of thought and conscience, a persistent opponent of religious tests and disabilities. The liberal opinions, alike in Church and State, which were thus traditional in the family of Florence Nightingale's mother, were shared by that of her father. Her grandfather Shore, in a letter to his son in 1818, referred to “one of the finest pieces of eloquence either in ancient or modern times, given by Sir Samuel Romilly in the Court of Chancery on a motion respecting the right of Jews to the benefit of a charity in Bedford. It does honour to the man and to human nature.” Florence Nightingale's father was also a Unitarian; and in politics he was a Whig. “How I hate Tories,” he wrote to his wife; and in another letter, after the election of 1835, in which the hated ones had gained ground, he explained that they were mighty only “by Beer, Brandy, and Money.” The Whigs, as is[6] well known, were not all lacking in the latter equipment for political success, and Mr. Nightingale was a frequent subscriber to electoral funds on the Whig side. He was an ardent supporter of Parliamentary Reform. He held that “Bentham has taught great moral truth more effectually than all the Christian divines.” At a later time he was a follower of Lord Palmerston, of whom he was also a neighbour in the country. One of the earliest notices which I find of Florence Nightingale's interest in politics is in a letter from her father describing a meeting at Romsey to which he had taken her. “Florence,” he says, “approved very much Palmerston's exposition of his foreign policy.”

Something else Florence Nightingale owed to, or shared with, her father. He, like some other members of his family, was of a reflective temperament, interested in speculative problems. There is a letter written by him to his wife from his father's sick-room (Sept. 1822) which shows the bent of his thoughts:—

Florence Nightingale's mother accepted the religious standpoint of the day without question. Unitarianism was dropped by her and by her elder daughter; by Florence it was, as we shall hear, transcended. The mother's essential bent was practical, though the scope of it was somewhat[7] limited. The mind of her daughter Florence found room in equal measure for practice and for contemplation. She inherited her mother's organising capacity, though she turned it to directions of her own. It was from her father that she inherited the taste for speculative inquiry which absorbed a large part of her life.

From the worldly circumstances of her parents Florence came to draw conclusions little sympathetic, in some respects, with existing usages and conventions. She accepted, indeed, the position of worldly wealth into which she was born without any fundamental questioning. In later years a young friend, on being urged to visit the villagers around one of Miss Nightingale's country homes, explained that she did not like the relation, she could not bring herself to go from a big comfortable house to instruct poor people how to live. Miss Nightingale laughed, and said, “You surely don't call Lea Hurst a big house.” It had only about fifteen bedrooms. She took for granted the position into which she was born. But she thought that wealth should only be used as a means of work. The easy, comfortable, not very strenuous conditions of her home life as a girl fixed the nature of her earlier years, but her soul did not become rooted in them. They sowed seeds which grew, as the years passed, not into acquiescence, but into revolt. Mr. Nightingale had inherited his great-uncle's property when nine years old. It accumulated for him, and a lead mine added greatly to its value. By the time of his marriage he was blessed (or, as his younger daughter came to think, afflicted) by the possession of a considerable fortune. Whether it were indeed a blessing or an affliction, it involved him in much uncertainty of mind. He and his wife returned from the Continent with their infant daughters in 1821, and the question became urgent, Where to live? The landed property which he inherited from his great-uncle was a comparatively small estate at and around Lea Hall in Derbyshire. To this property he added largely. The Hall, the old residence of his great-uncle, was discarded (it is now used as a farm-house), and[8] Mr. Nightingale built a new house, called Lea Hurst. The charm of its situation and prospect is described in a letter by Mrs. Gaskell:—

The sound of the Derwent was often in Florence's ears. When she was in the Hospital at Scutari any fretting in the Straits recalled it to her. “How I like,” she said on a stormy night, “to hear that ceaseless roar; it puts me in mind of the dear Derwent; how often I have listened to it from the nursery window.”

Lea Hurst became one of Florence Nightingale's earliest homes in England, but it was not the earliest of all. The house was not built when the family returned from the Continent, and Mr. Nightingale took Kynsham Court,[9] Presteigne, in Herefordshire. The place, it seems, was “more picturesque than habitable,” and negotiations for the purchase of it, with a view to improvements, fell through. Mr. Nightingale liked Derbyshire, and was fond of his new house; but the rich, as well as the poor, have their perplexities. “The difficulty is,” wrote Mr. Nightingale to his wife, “where is the county that is habitable for twelve successive months?” And, again, “How would you like Leicestershire? For my part, I think that, provided I could get about 2000 acres and a house in some neighbouring county where sporting and scenery were in tolerable abundance, and the visit to Lea Hurst were annually confined to July, August, September, and October, then all would be well.” While Mrs. Nightingale stayed at Kynsham, or took the children for change of air to the seaside or Tunbridge Wells, Mr. Nightingale divided his time between the management of his property in Derbyshire and the search for a second home elsewhere. Ultimately he found what he wanted at Embley Park in the parish of Wellow, near Romsey. This estate was bought in 1825, and Kynsham was given up. Embley is on the edge of the New Forest, and the rich growth of its woods and gardens is much favoured by sun and moisture. Old oaks and beeches, thickets of flowering laurel and rhododendron, and a profusion of flowers and scents, contrast with the bare breezy hills of Derbyshire. Its new owners had here the variety they wished for, and a full scope for their taste. The most praised of its beauties is a long road almost shut in by masses of rhododendron. One of the occasional pleasures of Miss Nightingale's later life in London was a drive in the Park, in rhododendron-time, “to remind her of Embley.”

From her fifth year onwards Florence Nightingale had, then, for her homes Lea Hurst in the summer months and Embley during the rest of the year. The family usually spent a portion of the season in London. The sisters led, it will thus be seen, a life mainly in the country, and Florence as a child became fond of flowers, birds, and beasts. A neatly printed manuscript-book is preserved, in which she made a catalogue[10] of her collection of flowers, describing each with analytical accuracy, and noting the particular spot at which it was picked. Her childish letters contain many references to animal companions. She made particular friends with the nuthatch. She had a pet pig, a pet donkey, a pet pony. She was fond of riding, and fond of dogs. “A small pet animal,” she said many years afterwards, “is often an excellent companion for the sick, for long chronic cases especially.” “The more I see of men,” wrote a cynic, “the more I love dogs.” Florence Nightingale, in the same piece from which I have just quoted, drew a like moral from her experience of some nurses. “An invalid,” she said, “in giving an account of his nursing by a nurse and a dog, infinitely preferred that of the dog. ‘Above all,’ he said, ‘it did not talk.’”[7] There were no babies in the Nightingale family after the arrival of Florence herself, but most of her mother's many brothers and sisters married and had families; and as Mr. and Mrs. Nightingale's houses were often visited by these relations, there was seldom wanting a succession of babies, and in them and their christenings, and teethings, and illnesses, and lessons, Florence took that interest which is often strong in little girls.

Sometimes a baby died, and her letters show that Florence was as much interested in a death as in a birth. She rejoiced in “the little angels in heaven.” One of her favourite poems at this period was The Better Land of Mrs. Hemans, which she copied out for a cousin as “so very beautiful.” The earliest letter which I have seen, written when she was ten, strikes mingled notes. She is staying with Uncle Octavius Smith at “Thames Bank” (a house which then adjoined his distillery at Millbank), and writes to her sister, who is on a visit with the maid to another set of cousins:—

Was Miss W—— an unsympathetic governess? Whoever she was, the exception in her disfavour shows an unregenerate impulse which contrasts naïvely with the following good resolve towards her sister. To a year earlier belongs a little note-book, entitled “Journal of Flo, Embley.” It begins with the reminder, “The Lord is with thee wherever thou art.” And then an entry records, “Sunday, I obliged to sit still by Miss Christie till I had the spirit of obedience.” As a child, and throughout all the earlier part of her life, Florence was much given to dreaming, and in some introspective speculations written in 1851 she recalled the pleasures of naughtiness. “When I was a child and was naughty, it always put an end to my dreaming for the time. I never could tell why. Was it because naughtiness was a more interesting state than the little motives which make man's peaceful civilized state, and occupied imagination for the time?” To Miss Christie, her first governess, Florence became greatly attached, and the death of the lady a few years later threw her into deep grief. She was a sensitive, and a somewhat morbid child; and though she presently developed a lively sense of humour, to which she had the capacity of giving trenchant expression, it was the humour of intellect rather than the outcome of a[12] joyous disposition. Her early letters contain little note of childish fun. They are for the most part grave and introspective. She was self-absorbed, and had the shyness which attends upon that habit. “My greatest ambition,” she wrote in some private reminiscences of her early life, “was not to be remarked. I was always in mortal fear of doing something unlike other people, and I said, ‘If I were sure that nobody would remark me I should be quite happy.’ I had a morbid terror of not using my knives and forks like other people when I should come out. I was afraid of speaking to children because I was sure I should not please them.” Meanwhile, she was perhaps at times, even as a child, a little “difficult” at home. “Ask Flo,” wrote her father to his wife in 1832, “if she has lost her intellect. If not, why does she grumble at troubles which she cannot remedy by grumbling?”

The appeal to his daughter's intellect was characteristic of Mr. Nightingale. He was himself a well-informed man, educated at Edinburgh, and Trinity, Cambridge; and, like some others of the Unitarian circle, he held views much in advance of the average opinion of his time about the intellectual education of women. The home education of his daughters was largely supervised by himself; it included a range of subjects far outside the curriculum current in “young ladies' seminaries”; and perhaps, like Hannah More's father, he was sometimes “frightened at his own success.” Letters and note-books show, it is true, that his daughters were duly instructed in the accomplishments deemed appropriate to young ladies. We hear of them learning the use of the globes, writing books of elegant extracts, working footstools, and doing fancy work. They studied music, grammar, composition, modern languages. “We used to read Tasso and Ariosto and Alfieri with my father,” Florence said; “he was a good and always interested Italian scholar, never pedantic, never a tiresome grammarian, but he spoke Italian like an Italian and I took care of the verbs.” Mr. Nightingale added constitutional history, Latin, Greek, and mathematics. By the time Florence was sixteen, he was[13] reading Homer with his daughters. Miss Nightingale used to say that at Greek her sister was the quicker scholar. Their father set them appointed tasks to prepare. Parthenope would trust largely to improvisation or lucky shots. Florence was more laborious; and sometimes would get up at four in the morning to prepare the lesson. Her knowledge of Latin was of some practical use in later years. In conversations with abbots and monks whom she met during her travels she sometimes found in Latin their only common tongue. Among Florence's papers were preserved many sheets in her father's handwriting, containing the heads of admirable outlines of the political history of England and of some foreign states. Her own note-books show that in her teens she had mastered the elements of Latin and Greek. She analysed the Tusculan Disputations. She translated portions of the Phaedo, the Crito and the Apology. She had studied Roman, German, Italian, and Turkish history. She had analysed Dugald Stewart's Philosophy of the Human Mind. Her father was in the habit, too, of suggesting themes on which his daughters were to write compositions. It was the system of the College Essay. “Florence has now taken to mathematics,” wrote her sister in 1840, “and, like everything she undertakes, she is deep in them and working very hard.” The direction in which Florence Nightingale was to exercise the faculties thus trained was as yet hidden in the future; but to her father's guidance she was indebted for the mental grasp and power of intellectual concentration which were to distinguish her work in life.

It is a natural temptation of biographers to give a formal unity to their subject by representing the child as in all things the father of the man; to date the vocation of their hero or heroine very early in life; to magnify some childish incident as prophetic of what is to come thereafter. Material is available for such treatment in the case of Florence Nightingale. It has been recorded that she used to nurse and bandage the dolls which her elder sister damaged. Every book about the heroine of the Crimea contains, too, a tale of “first aid to the wounded” which Florence administered to Cap, the shepherd's collie, whom she found with a broken leg on the downs near Embley. “I wonder,” wrote[14] her “old Pastor”[9] to her in 1858, “whether you remember how, twenty-two years ago, you and I together averted the intended hanging of poor old Shepherd Smithers's dog, Cap. How many times I have told the story since! I well recollect the pleasure which the saving of the life of a poor dog then gave to your young mind. I was delighted to witness it; it was to me not indeed an omen of what you were about to do and be (for of that I never dreamed), but it was an index of that kind and benevolent disposition, of that I Cor. xiii. Charity, which has been at the root of it.” And it is certainly interesting and curious, if nothing more, that the very earliest piece in the handwriting of Florence Nightingale which has been preserved should be a medical prescription. It is contained in a tiny book, about the size of a postage-stamp, which the little girl stitched together and in which the instruction is written, in very childish letters, “16 grains for an old woman, 11 for a young woman, and 7 for a child.” But these things are after all but trifles. Florence Nightingale is not the only little girl who has been fond of nursing sick dolls or mending them when broken. Other children have tended wounded animals and had their pill-boxes and simples. Much, too, has been written about Florence's kindness as a child to her poorer neighbours. Her mother, both at Lea Hurst and at Embley, sometimes occupied herself in good works. She and her husband were particularly interested in a “cheap school” which they supported at their Derbyshire home. “Large sums of money have been paid,” wrote Mr. Nightingale to his wife in 1832, “to your schoolmistress for many praiseworthy purposes, who works con amore in looking after the whole population, young and old.” Florence took her place, beside her mother, in visiting poor neighbours, in arranging school-treats, in giving village entertainments. But thousands of other squires' daughters, before and after her, have done the like. And Florence herself, as many entries in her diaries show, was not conscious of doing much, but reproachful of herself for doing little. The constant burden of her self-examination, both at this time and for many years to come, was that she was for ever “dreaming” and never “doing.”[15] She was dreaming because for a long time she did not clearly feel or see what her work in life was to be; and then for yet another period of time because, when she knew what she was called to do, she could not compass the means to do it. Her faculties were not brought outwards, but were left, by the conditions of her life, to devour themselves inwardly.

The discovery of her true vocation belongs, then, to a later period of our story; and it was not the result of childish fancy, or the accomplishment of early incident; it was the fruit of long and earnest study. What did come to Florence Nightingale early in life—perhaps, as one entry in her autobiographical notes suggests, as early as her sixth year—was the sense of a “call”; of some appointed mission in life; of self-dedication to the service of God. “I remember her,” wrote Fanny Allen in 1857 to her niece Elizabeth Wedgwood, “as a little girl of three or four, then the girl of sixteen of high promise. When I look back on every time I saw her after her sixteenth year, I see that she was ripening constantly for her work, and that her mind was dwelling on the painful differences of man and man in this life, and on the traps that a luxurious life laid for the affluent. A conversation on this subject between the father and daughter made me laugh at the time, the contrast was so striking; but now, as I remember it, it was the Divine Spirit breathing in her.”[10] In an autobiographical fragment written in 1867 Florence mentions as one of the crises of her inner life that “God called her to His service” on February 7, 1837, at Embley; and there are later notes which still fix that day as the dawn of her true life. But as yet she knew not whither the Spirit was to lead. For three months, indeed, as she notes in another passage of retrospect, she “worked very hard among the poor people” under “a strong feeling of religion.”

Presently, however, a new direction was given to her thoughts and interests. She was now seventeen, her sister eighteen. Their home education had been far advanced, and might seem to require only such “finishing” as masters and society in France and Italy could supply. Mr. Nightingale[16] had, moreover, decided to carry out extensive alterations at Embley. With his wife and daughters, he crossed from Southampton to Havre on September 8, 1837, and they did not return to England till April 6, 1839. Those were days of leisurely travel, such as Ruskin describes, in which “distance could not be vanquished without toil, but in which that toil was rewarded, partly by the power of deliberate survey of the countries through which the journey lay, and partly by the happiness of the evening hours, when from the top of the last hill he had surmounted, the traveller beheld the quiet village where he was to rest, scattered among the meadows beside its valley stream; or, from the long-hoped-for turn in the dusty perspective of the causeway, saw, for the first time, the towers of some famed city, faint in the rays of sunset—hours of peaceful and thoughtful pleasure, for which the rush of the arrival in the railway station is perhaps not always, or to all men, an equivalent.” There were many such hours during the journeys which the Nightingales took with a vetturino through France and Italy; and Florence, writing at a later date, when all her life was fixed on doing, noted that on this tour there was “too much time for dreaming.” Yet it is clear from her diaries that she entered heartily, and with a wider range of interest than some English travellers show, into the life of foreign society and sight-seeing. A love of statistical method which became one of her most marked characteristics may already be seen in an itinerary which she compiled; noting, in its several columns, the number of leagues from place to place, with the day and the hour both of arrival and of departure. They went leisurely through France, visiting, besides many other places, Chartres, Blois, Tours, Nantes, Bordeaux, Biarritz, Carcassonne, Nîmes, Avignon, and Toulon, and then going by the Riviera to Nice. There they stayed for nearly a month (Dec. 1837–Jan. 1838). A month was next spent at Genoa, and two months were given to Florence. The late spring and summer were devoted to travel in the cities of Northern Italy, among the lakes, and in Switzerland. They spent the month of September in Geneva, and reached Paris on October 8, 1838. Miss Nightingale preserved her diary of the greater part of the tour, and it shows her keenly interested[17] alike in scenery and in works of art. It contains also, what records of sentimental pilgrimages often lack, an admixture of notes and statistics upon the laws, the land systems, the social conditions and benevolent institutions of the several states or cantons. Her interest in the politics of the day was keen wherever she was; and the society of many refugees into which she was thrown at Geneva gave her a particularly ardent sympathy with the cause of Italian freedom. The diary contains many biographical notes upon Italian patriots, whose adventures she heard related by their own lips. “A stirring day,” she wrote on September 12 (1838), “the most stirring which we have ever lived.” It was the day on which the news reached Geneva that the Emperor of Austria had declared an amnesty in Italy. The Nightingales attended an evening party at which the Italian refugees assembled and the Imperial decree was read out amidst loud jubilation; which, however, was afterwards abated when it turned out that the “general amnesty” contained many conditions and some exceptions. The Nightingales had the entrée to all the learned society of Geneva. Florence records an evening spent with M. de Candolle, the famous botanist; and the diary gives many glimpses of Sismondi, the historian, who was then living in his native city. He escorted the Nightingale party up the Salève. They made that not very formidable ascent first on donkeys and then “in a sledge covered with straw and drawn by four oxen.” Florence was present on another occasion when “all the company gathered round Sismondi who, sitting on a table, gave us a lecture on Florentine history.” The conscientious Florence made a full note in her diary of the great man's discourse. “All Sismondi's political economy,” she also noted, “seems to be founded on the overflowing kindness of his heart. He gives to old beggars on principle, to young from habit. At Pescia he had 300 beggars at his door on one morning. He feeds the mice in his room while he is writing his histories.” Presently there was a new excitement in Geneva. “What a stirring time we live in,” Florence wrote on September 18; “one day to decide the fate of the Italians, to-morrow to decide the fate of Switzerland.” “To-morrow” was the day fixed for the meeting of the Conseil Représentatif[18] which was to take into consideration the demand of Louis Philippe for the expulsion of Louis Napoleon, the future Emperor. Many pages of Miss Nightingale's diary are given up to this affair. She analysed all the pros and cons, and recorded day by day the course of the debate. Sismondi thought that the refugee ought to be surrendered—on principle because he was a pretender, in expediency because Geneva would be unable to withstand a French assault. He “spoke for an hour” in this sense. The Genevois radicals, on the other hand, while entertaining no great love for the pretender, thought that, cost what it might, “the sacred right of asylum” should be maintained. And so the debate continued. The French Government began to move troops from Lyons; the Genevois, to throw up fortifications. Whereupon Mr. Nightingale, like many other English visitors, thought it time to take his family across the frontier. Miss Nightingale's diary written en route to Paris shows her excitement to obtain news of the crisis. When she learnt that it had been solved by Louis Napoleon being given a passport for England, she did not see that Louis Philippe had gained very much; the pretender would be nearer, and not less dangerous, in London than in Geneva—a very just prediction. Not every girl of eighteen, when taking her first tour abroad, shows so lively an interest in political affairs.

Politics and social observations mingle in the diary with artistic and architectural notes. The city which seems most to have appealed to her imagination was not Florence; though she said that she “would not have missed it for anything,” and, curiously, her sojourn in her birthplace was the occasion of a characteristic incident. An English lady, who afterwards became Princess Reuss Köstritz, was staying in the same lodgings and fell ill, and Florence Nightingale volunteered to nurse her. But the city which she most admired was Genoa La Superba. She notes indeed the excessive indolence of the nobles and excessive poverty of the people, but the palaces “realized an Arabian Nights story” for her. Mr. and Mrs. Nightingale had many friends and brought many introductions. In the various towns where they stayed they mixed in the best society, and their[19] daughters were thrown into a lively round of picnics, concerts, soirées, dancing:

There were Court balls at which Grand Dukes were “exceedingly polite” to Florence Nightingale and her sister. They went to an evening Court at Florence, and found “everyone most courteous and agreeable.” There was a ball at the Casino in Genoa, at which, writes Florence in her diary, “my partner and I made an embrouillement, and a military officer came up with a very angry face to challenge me for having refused him and then not dancing.” But the music was not all to the tune of “A Toccata of Galuppi's.” What gave Florence the greatest pleasure on this tour was the Italian opera. In those days the reigning singers were Grisi, Lablache, Rubini, and Tamburini. Florence Nightingale heard them all. Her Italian diary is nowhere so elaborate as in descriptions of the operas and in notes on the performers. She kept a separate book in which she wrote tabulated details of all the performances. “I should like to go every night,” she said in her diary; and for some time after her return from the Continent she was, as she wrote to Miss Clarke, “music-mad.” She took music-lessons at Florence, and in London studied under German and Italian masters. She played and sang. It was as yet uncertain whether “the call”—to what, as yet also unknown—might not be drowned in the tastes, interests, and pursuits which fill the life of other young ladies in her position.

The fascination of social life must have been brought vividly before her during the winter (1838–39) which they spent in Paris, in apartments in the Place Vendôme (No. 22). She was now introduced into the brilliant circle of the last of the salons. Mary Clarke, afterwards Madame Mohl, was by descent half Irish, half Scottish; by education and residence, almost wholly French. “A charming mixture,” said Ampère of her, “of French vivacity and English originality.”[20] Full at once of esprit and of espièglerie, well read and artistic yet wholly devoid of pedantry, without regular beauty of feature, but alert and piquante, Mary Clarke had gathered round her what Ticknor in 1837 had found the most intellectual circle in Paris. For seven years she and her mother lived in apartments in the Abbaye-au-Bois, adjoining those of Madame Récamier, and Mary was a daily visitor to the famous salon during the reign of Chateaubriand, whose closing years she did much to brighten and amuse. At the time when the Nightingales arrived in Paris, Mrs. and Miss Clarke had left the Abbaye-au-Bois and established themselves in those apartments in the Rue du Bac which for nearly forty years were a haunt of all that was brilliant in the intellectual life of Paris. Mary Clarke took most affectionately to the Nightingale family, who, with some of their connections, remained for long years among her closest friends. She used to pay a yearly visit to Mr. and Mrs. Nightingale, either at Embley or at Lea Hurst, generally staying three weeks or a month; and to her many of Florence's most interesting letters were, as we shall find, addressed. To her other and more superficial qualities, Mary Clarke added great warmth of lasting affection for her intimate friends, and her sympathetic kindness to the Nightingale circle was unfailing. The attraction of Paris to Florence lay principally in its hospitals and nursing sisterhoods, but partly also in that it was the home of “Clarkey,” as they called her. And it was the same with other members of the family. There is a letter from Lady Verney to Clarkey which describes how some one asked Mr. Nightingale, “Are you going to Paris?” “Oh, no,” he replied; “Madame Mohl is ill.” “Then does Paris mean Madame Mohl?” “Yes, certainly,” he replied gravely. During the winter of 1838–39 Miss Clarke, writes Lady Verney, was “exceedingly kind to Florence and me, two young girls full of all kinds of interests, which she took the greatest pains to help. She made us acquainted with all her friends, many and notable, among them Madame Récamier. I know now, better than then, what her influence must have been thus to introduce an English family (two of them girls who, if French, would not have appeared in society) into that jealously guarded[21] sanctuary, the most exclusive aristocratic and literary salon in Paris. We were asked, even, to the reading by Chateaubriand, at the Abbaye-au-Bois, of his Mémoires d'Outre-Tombe, which he could not wait to put forth, as he had intended when writing them, until after his death—desiring, it was said, to discount the praises which he expected, but hardly received. This hearing was a favour eagerly sought for by the cream of the cream of Paris society at that time.”[11] In Miss Clarke's own apartments, the Nightingales met many distinguished men. The intimates who were always there, and who assisted their hostess in making the tea, were MM. Fauriel and Mohl—Claude Fauriel, versed in mediæval and Provençal lore, a man exceedingly handsome, who had captivated Madame de Staël and other ladies besides Mary Clarke in his friendships; and Julius Mohl, one of the first Orientalists in Europe, a more ardent lover whom, after a probation of eighteen years, Miss Clarke married in 1847. M. Mohl was once asked by Queen Victoria why, loving Germany so much, he had given up his native country for France. “Ma foi, madame,” he replied, “j'ètais amoureux.” With M. Mohl, no less than with his wife, Florence Nightingale was on terms of affectionate friendship. Among the frequent visitors whom she and her sister met at Miss Clarke's were Madame Tastu (the poetess), Élie de Beaumont (the geologist), Roulin (the traveller and naturalist), Cousin, Mignet, Guizot, Tocqueville, Barthélemy St. Hilaire, and Thiers. The last-named was one of Miss Clarke's earliest admirers; and many years later, after the Franco-German war, when Thiers was at the head of affairs, Lady Verney heard M. Mohl say to his wife, “Madame, why did you not marry M. Thiers instead of me, for now you would have been Queen of France?”

In such circles as that which gathered around Miss Clarke, Florence Nightingale was well qualified to hold her own and even to play a brilliant part. Her life of gaiety on the Riviera and in Italy must have rubbed away much of the shyness from which she had suffered. If not beautiful, she was elegant and distinguished. She was both widely and deeply read. She had many and varied interests. She[22] had powers of expression, in which clearness was not unmixed with a note of humorous subacidity. These are social advantages, and she was not without the inclination to use them. She chose in the end another path—a path which was beset by many obstacles of circumstance; but there were obstacles in herself also, and one of the last “temptations” to be overcome, before she was free to interpret her call and to act upon it, was (as she wrote in many a page of confession and self-examination) “the desire to shine in society.”

[23]

The home life to which Florence Nightingale returned in April 1839 was rich in possibilities of social pleasure, and might have seemed to promise every happiness. She was well fitted by nature and by education to be an ornament of any country house; to shine in any cultivated society; to become the wife, as many of her best friends hoped and believed, of some good and clever man. But Florence, as she passed from childhood to womanhood, came to form other plans. Her life, as she ultimately shaped it, her example, which circumstances were destined to render far-shining, have been potent factors in opening new avenues for women in the modern world. Thousands of women in these days are, in consequence of Florence Nightingale's career, born free; but it was at a great price, and after long and weary struggles, that she herself attained such freedom. During the years with which, in this Part, we shall be concerned, she lived in some sort the life of a caged bird.

The cage, however, was pleasantly gilded. Florence was not always insensible of the gilding; there were times when[24] she was tempted to chafe no longer at its bars, and to accept a restricted life within the conventional lines. I do not propose to detail, as might be done from her letters, diaries, and other materials, the precise succession of her goings and comings, her visits, and her home pursuits. She herself gives an excellent reason in one of her diaries. “Our movements are so regular,” she said; one year was very like another. The setting of Florence Nightingale's life during this period was such as many women have enjoyed, and many others have envied. The lines of the Nightingale family were laid in pleasant places. Their summer months were spent, as in preceding years, at Lea Hurst. A portion of the season was spent in London, and the rest of the year at Embley. On their return from the Continent in 1839, the Nightingales spent some weeks in London, when the two girls were presented at Court, and a letter to Miss Clarke shows Florence absorbed in music, but not so completely as to conquer a lively interest in the politics of the Bedchamber Plot:—

In another letter to Miss Clarke (Sept. 18), some further gossip is given. Miss Nightingale was on her way back to London from Lea Hurst, and had broken the journey at Nottingham:—

The Nightingales had taken up their residence at Embley in September 1839, and remained there, in accordance with their wont, till the early summer following. The charm of the place is vividly described in a letter from Florence's sister to her cousin, Miss Hilary Bonham Carter:—

Florence and her sister loved each other, but their characters were widely different, as we shall hear, and their love at this time was not that of perfect sympathy, but rather of wistful admiration on the one side, and half-pitying fondness on the other. Parthenope looked upon Florence as upon some strange being in another world, whose happiness she passionately longed to see, and whose rejection of it she could but dimly understand. Florence, on her side, regarded her elder sister's contentment in the beauties of art and nature, and in the world as she found it, with the tender pity which one may feel for a happy child. “It would be an ill return for all her affection,” wrote Florence to one of her aunts, “to drag down my White Swan from her cool, fresh, blue sea of art into our baby chicken-yard of struggling, scratting[14] life. How cruel it would be, as she is rocked to rest there on her dreamy waves, for anybody to waken her.” The difference in temperament between the sisters comes out very clearly in their several descriptions of Embley. Florence was sensible of its beauties, but they came to her with thoughts of a better world beyond, or with echoes from the still sad music of humanity in the world that now is. “I should have so liked you to see Embley in the summer,” she wrote,[15] “for everything is such a blaze of beauty. I had such a lovely walk yesterday before breakfast. The voice of the birds is like the angels calling me with their songs, and the fleecy clouds look like the white walls of our Home. Nothing makes my heart thrill like the voice of the birds; but the living chorus so seldom finds a second voice in the starved and earthly soul, which, like the withered arm, cannot stretch forth its hand till Christ bids it.” A[29] very different note, it will be observed, from that which Parthenope—and Pippa—heard from “the lark on the wing.” And so, too, with regard to the house at Embley. Mr. Nightingale had found it a plain, substantial building of the Georgian period. He enlarged it into an ornate mansion in the Elizabethan style. His wife and elder daughter were much occupied with the interest of furnishing it appropriately, and Mr. Nightingale was greatly pleased with his alterations. “Do you know,” said Florence, as she walked with an American friend on the lawn in front of the drawing-room, “what I always think when I look at that row of windows? I think how I should turn it into a hospital, and just how I should place the beds.”[16]

Embley was now a large house, with accommodation enough to receive at one time, as Florence recorded in a letter, “five able-bodied married females, with their husbands and belongings.” The large number of Mr. Nightingale's brothers and sisters, some of whom had many sons and daughters, made the family circle of the Nightingales a very wide one. Between four of the families the intercourse was particularly close—the Nightingales, the Nicholsons, the Bonham Carters, and the Samuel Smiths. One of Mrs. Nightingale's sisters married Mr. George Thomas Nicholson, of Waverley Abbey, near Farnham, Surrey.[17] Among their children, Marianne was as a girl a great friend of her cousin Florence. In 1851 Miss Nicholson married Captain (afterwards Sir) Douglas Galton, who, some few years later, became closely and helpfully connected with Miss Nightingale's work. To Mr. Nicholson's sister, “Aunt Hannah,” Florence was greatly attached. Another of Mrs. Nightingale's sisters married Mr. John Bonham Carter, of Ditcham, near Petersfield, for many years M.P. for Portsmouth. His eldest daughter, Joanna Hilary, was a particular friend of Florence Nightingale, who said that of all her contemporaries[30] within her circle, her cousin Hilary was the most gifted. One of the sons, Mr. Henry Bonham Carter, was, and is, Secretary of the Nightingale Fund, and Miss Nightingale appointed him one of her executors. Between the Nightingales and the Samuel Smiths the relationship was double. Mrs. Nightingale's brother, Mr. Samuel Smith, of Combe Hurst, Surrey, married Mary Shore, sister of Mr. Nightingale; moreover, their son, Mr. William Shore Smith, was the heir (after his mother) to the entailed land at Embley and Lea Hurst, in default of a son to Mr. Nightingale. The eldest child of Mr. and Mrs. Samuel Smith, Blanche, married Arthur Hugh Clough, the poet, who, as we shall hear, was closely associated with Miss Nightingale. There were many other relations; but without being troubled to go into further details, which might tax severely even the authoress of the Pillars of the House, the reader will perceive that Florence Nightingale was well provided with uncles, aunts, and cousins.

The fact is of some significance in understanding the circumstances of her life at this time, and the nature of her struggle for independence. Emancipated or revolting daughters are sometimes pardoned or condoned if they can aver that they have few home ties. To Mrs. Nightingale it may have seemed that in the domestic intercourse within so large a family circle, any comfortable daughter might find abundance of outlet and interest. And so, in one respect at least, her daughter Florence did. The maternal instinct in her, for which she was not in her own person to find fruition, went out in almost passionate fulness to the young cousin, William Shore Smith, mentioned above. He was “her boy,” she used to say, from the day on which he was put as a baby into her arms when she was eleven years old. Up to the time of his going up to Cambridge, he spent a portion of his holidays in every year at Lea Hurst or Embley. Florence's letters at such times were full of him. She was successively his nurse, playfellow, and tutor. “The son of my heart,” she called him; “while he is with me all that is mine is his, my head and hands and time.”

It generally happens in any large family circle that there is one woman to whom all its members instinctively turn[31] when trouble comes or help is needed. Florence was the one in the Nightingale circle who filled this rôle of Sister of Mercy or Emergency Man—taking charge of one household when an aunt was away, or being dispatched to another when illness was prevalent. In 1845 she spent some time with her father's mother, who was threatened with paralysis, and whom she nursed into partial recovery. “I am very glad sometimes,” she wrote from her grandmother's sick-room to her cousin Hilary, “to walk in the valley of the shadow of death as I do here; there is something in the stillness and silence of it which levels all earthly troubles. God tempers our wings in the waters of that valley, and I have not been so happy or so thankful for a long time. And yet it is curious, in the last years of life, that we should go down-hill in order to climb up the other side; that in the struggle of the spiritual with the material part of the universe, the material should get the better, and the soul, just at the moment of becoming spiritualised for ever, should seem to become more materialised.” She made a similar reflection a little later in the same year (1845), when tending her old nurse, Gale, in her last illness. “The old lady's spirit,” she wrote, “was in her pillow-cases, and one night when she thought she was dying, and I was sitting up with her, she said, ‘Now, Miss Florence, mind you have two new cases made for this bed, for I think whoever sleeps here next year will find them comfortable.’” The death-bed of the nurse of the Queen of Nurses deserves some note. The last words of Mrs. Gale, as reported in other letters, were, “Don't wake the cook,” “Hannah, go to your work,” and “Miss Florence, be careful in going down those stairs.” If the spirit of this old servant was materialised at the moment of passing, the materialising took the form at any rate of faithful service and of consideration for others.

Florence's sympathy with those in distress is shown in the letter of condolence which she wrote to Miss Clarke upon the death of M. Fauriel:—

It must not be supposed, however, that Florence was in request among the family circle only at times of sad emergency. She sometimes took her place no less effectually on festive occasions. Waverley Abbey, the house of Uncle Nicholson aforesaid, was the scene of family reunions at Christmas-time; and in letters to Miss Clarke from both Mrs. Nightingale and her daughter Parthe, there is a lively account of private theatricals there in 1841. The Merchant of Venice was chosen, and Macready volunteered some assistance.[33] Parthe's artistic gifts were requisitioned, and she was “scene-painter, milliner, and cap-and-fur maker.” The powers of command and organization, which Florence was afterwards to exhibit in another field, seem to have been divined by her cousins, for she was unanimously appointed stage-manager. Miss Joanna Horner, who was one of the party, remembers that the usual little jealousies about parts and costumes used to disappear in presence of Florence. “Flo very blooming,” reported Mrs. Nightingale. “The actors were not very obstinate, and were tolerably good-tempered,” wrote Parthe, “but it was hard work for Flo. There was a Captain Elliot, fresh from China, who could by no means be brought to obey. He was Antonio, and would burst out laughing in the midst of his most pathetic bits, to the horror of Shylock, who was very earnest and hard-working.” The Lady-in-Chief in later years in the Crimea had a rather peremptory way with obstructive military gentlemen. On this occasion, however, she was perhaps satisfied with the assurance given at a well-known pantomime rehearsal, that it would “be all right on the night.” But it was not. “Your flame, Uncle Adams,”[18] continues the letter to Miss Clarke, “was very fine in Lancelot! but, oh, desperation, forgot his Duke's part in the most flagrant way, tho' Flo had been putting it into him with a sledge-hammer all the week.” In the intervals of rehearsing, the girls and their cousins danced and sang, and took large walks, sixteen together. After the performance, dancing was kept up till five in the morning. “Next day,” continues Lady Verney, “we were debating whether ‘Sing a Song of Sixpence’ went on with a bag or a pocket full of rye; and warming on this interesting subject, we young ones dragged in all the old people, sought recruits high and low, and had a regular election scene. Uncle Adams made a hustings speech, giving both parties hopes of his vote; then the boys slunk out after the counting, and came in with large outcries to be counted a second time, with many other corrupt practices much used at such times; then we bribed a little boy to go and make disturbances in the other faction; but you will be happy to hear the pockets had it by a large majority,[34] and we beat the base baggites out of the field. After the holloaing was over, and the alarming rushings and screamings we had made, M. Kroff (a Bohemian), who had listened and assisted, came to Mama, and said, ‘This do give me the great idea of the liberty of your land, your young people are brought up so to understand it in your domestic life; if we were to make such a noise we should have the police in with swords and cutlasses to divide us!’”

The Nightingales had as many friends without as within the family circle. Their two homes brought them in touch with county society alike in Derbyshire and in Hampshire, and acquaintanceships made in London were often ripened in the country, or vice versa. In Derbyshire their friends included the Strutts, and Richard Monckton Milnes, who afterwards took a cordial interest in the Nightingale Fund. In London, Florence and her sister went out a great deal, and saw all that was interesting to well-educated young persons. A letter from Florence to one of her aunts shows her occupied in politics, in literature, in astronomy, with something, perhaps, of the note of a blue; yet with her mind already set on a purpose in life:—

At Embley the Nightingales saw something of the Palmerstons and the Ashburtons. With Miss Louisa Stewart Mackenzie, who afterwards became the second wife of the second Lord Ashburton, Florence formed a friendship which was one of the solaces and supports of her life at this time. Other friends who played a yet larger part in her life were Mr. and Mrs. Bracebridge[20] of Atherstone, near Coventry. Florence sketches the character of some of her friends in a letter to her cousin Hilary (April 1846):—

Dr. Richard Dawes, Dean of Hereford, who was an educational reformer, and Dr. Fowler of Salisbury, who anticipated the open-air treatment, and was otherwise a man of marked originality, were among those whose friendship she valued. If Florence Nightingale was to find her[36] home life empty and unprofitable, it was not for lack of congenial friends.

She saw much, too, of general society, and Embley was often the scene of entertaining. We get a glimpse of its parties from an invitation which Mr. Nightingale sent to Miss Clarke (Oct. 1843) to bring her friend Leopold von Ranke with her on a visit:—

There were return invitations to great houses, and occasionally Florence retails their gossip, or her own reflections, for the benefit of cousins or aunts:—

[37]

Florence's remark that she would only provide the zéro of esprit to Miss Clarke's quatre, is by no means to be taken literally. She was attractive, and she attracted both men and women. She talked well, and often laid herself out to interest her companions, and sometimes confounded them with learning. In 1844 Julia Ward Howe was in England with her husband, Dr. Howe, and they visited the Nightingales at Embley. “Florence,” writes Mrs. Howe in her reminiscences, “was rather elegant than beautiful; she was tall and graceful of figure, her countenance mobile and expressive, her conversation most interesting.”[24] A reminiscence of a later date records an encounter with Sir Henry de la[38] Bèche, the pioneer of the Geological Map of England. Warrenton Smythe and Sir Henry dined at Mr. Nightingale's, and Florence sat between them. “She began by drawing Sir Henry out on geology, and charmed him by the boldness and breadth of her views, which were not common then. She accidentally proceeded into regions of Latin and Greek, and then our geologist had to get out of it. She was fresh from Egypt, and began talking with W. Smythe about the inscriptions, etc., where he thought he could do pretty well; but when she began quoting Lepsius, which she had been studying in the original, he was in the same case as Sir Henry. When the ladies left the room, Sir Henry said to Smythe, ‘A capital young lady that, if she hadn't floored me with her Latin and Greek.’”[25] “I have been dowagering out with Papa,” wrote Florence to Miss Clarke (March 1843), “in the big coach to a formal dinner-party, where, however, Mr. Gerard Noel and I were very thick, he inquiring tenderly after you and your whereabouts.”

Of Miss Nightingale's personal appearance in early womanhood, there are pen-pictures by very competent hands. Lady Lovelace, in her verses entitled A Portrait, Taken from Life, emphasises a certain spiritual aloofness in her friend:—

Mrs. Gaskell's picture in prose gives some lighter touches. “She is tall; very straight and willowy in figure; thick and shortish rich brown hair; very delicate complexion; grey eyes, which are generally pensive and drooping, but when they choose can be the merriest eyes I ever saw; and perfect teeth, making her smile the sweetest I ever saw. Put a long piece of soft net, and tie it round this beautifully shaped head, so as to form a soft white framework for the full oval of her face (for she had the toothache, and so wore this little piece of drapery), and dress her up in black silk, high up to the long, white round throat, and with a black shawl on, and you may get near an idea of her perfect grace and lovely appearance. She is so like a saint.”[26] She dressed becomingly; but had a saint's carelessness in such things, somewhat to her elder sister's despair. “Make Flo wear her white silk frock to-night,” she wrote on one occasion to her mother. Many years later, when stores and comforts were being sent out to the East under cover to the Lady-in-Chief, Lady Verney insinuated “one little gown for Flo,” and who will not love her for it? “When in 1849 she started to winter in the East, her mother says”—I quote again from Mrs. Gaskell—“they equipped her en princesse, and when she came back she had little besides the clothes she had on; she had given away her linen, etc., right and left to those who wanted it.”

Those who have social gifts often find sufficient happiness in their exercise; but Florence, though she sometimes enjoyed the intercourse of intellectual society, reproached herself all the while for doing so. She felt increasingly that she had other gifts which were more properly hers, and that[40] the life of society was a distraction into the wrong path. She found even the London season more congenial than the life of the hospitable country-house. “People talk of London gaieties,” she wrote to Miss Nicholson (“Aunt Hannah”); “but there you can at least have your mornings to yourself. To me the country is the place of ‘row.’ Since we came home in September, how long do you think we have been alone? Not one fortnight. A country-house is the real place for dissipation. Sometimes I think that everybody is hard upon me, that to be for ever expected to be looking merry and saying something lively is more than can be asked mornings, noons, and nights.”

When she was alone with her parents and her sister, she hardly found the life at home more satisfying. This was partly, as she confessed in many a page of self-examination, the result of her own shortcomings. “Ask me,” she wrote to “Aunt Hannah,” “to do something for your sake, something difficult, and you will see that I shall do it regularly, which is for me the most difficult thing of all.” Let those who reproach themselves for a desultoriness, seemingly incurable, take heart again from the example of Florence Nightingale! No self-reproach recurs more often in her private outpourings at this time than that of irregularity and even sloth. She found it difficult to rise early in the morning; she prayed and wrestled to be delivered from desultory thoughts, from idle dreaming, from scrappiness in unselfish work. She wrestled, and she won. When her capacities had found full scope in congenial work, nothing was more fixed and noteworthy in her life and work than regularity, precision, method, persistence. But in part, the failings with which she reproached herself were the fault of her circumstances. The fact of the two country homes militated against steady work in either. Her parents were not, indeed, careless or thoughtless beyond others in their station, but rather the reverse. Mr. Nightingale was a careful landlord and zealous in county business, and his wife took some interest, as I have already said, in village schools and charities. But to Florence's parents, these things were rather graces rightly incidental to their station, than the main business of life. Florence's more[41] eager temperament and larger capacity craved for greater consistency in the energies of life. She was expected to play the part of Lady Bountiful one day, and to be equally ready to play that of Lady Graceful the next. A friend who visited at Lea Hurst recalls how Florence would often be missing in the evening, and on search being made she would be found in the village, sitting by the bedside of some sick person, and saying she could not sit down to a grand seven o'clock dinner while this was going on.[27] But by the time she had schooled herself to any regularity of work at Lea Hurst, the hour had come for moving to Embley. By the time she had settled down to work amongst her poor at Embley, the hour of the London season had struck. “I should be very glad,” she wrote to her aunt from Embley, “if I could have been left here when they went to London, as there is so much to be done, but as that would not be heard of, London is really my place of rest.”

The companionship which Florence had at home was sometimes wearisome to her. The sisters, as we have already seen, were not in full sympathy. The parents were not unintellectual persons, but, again, much the reverse. Mrs. Nightingale was a woman of bright intelligence, and of much social charm. Mr. Nightingale was a highly intellectual man, sensitive, too, and refined. He shot and hunted, but he was not ardently devoted to either sport, and was interested in many things. Perhaps in too many, and yet not enough in any. Florence Nightingale in her later years used sometimes to describe with a twinkle of affectionate humour the routine of a morning in her home life as a girl. Mama, we may suppose, was busy with housekeeping cares. Papa was very fond of reading aloud, and in order to interest his daughters, would take them through the whole of The Times, with many a comment, no doubt, by the way. “Now, for Parthe,” Miss Nightingale used to say, “the morning's reading did not matter; she went on with her drawing; but for me, who had no such cover, the thing was boring to desperation.” “To be read aloud to,” she wrote, “is the most miserable exercise of the human intellect. Or rather, is it any exercise at all? It is like lying on one's back, with[42] one's hands tied, and having liquid poured down one's throat. Worse than that, because suffocation would immediately ensue, and put a stop to this operation. But no suffocation would stop the other.”[28] As the younger daughter of a busily efficient mother, Florence was not often entrusted with household duties; but on one occasion at any rate, she was left in command, and that, during the important season of jam-making. “My reign is now over,” she wrote to her cousin Hilary, who was an art-student (Dec. 1845); “angels and ministers of grace defend me from another! though I cannot but view my fifty-six pots with the proud satisfaction of an Artist, my head a little on one side, inspecting the happy effect of my works with more feeling of the Beautiful than Parthe ever had in hers.” And even housekeeping brought obstinate questionings with it to Florence. She describes a bout of it on another occasion in a letter to Madame Mohl (July 1847):—

Florence was an affectionate and dutiful daughter. She obeyed and yielded for many years. She strove hard to think that her duty lay at home, and that the trivial round and common task would furnish all that she had any right, before God or man, to ask. But as the sense of a vocation elsewhere strengthened and deepened in her mind, she may[43] well have thought that, as her elder sister was contented to stay at home, a life of activity outside might for the other daughter not be inconsistent with affection for her parents.

She had, indeed, intellectual interests of her own. She read a great deal in English, French, German; in devotional works, in poetry, history, philosophy. And what she read she marked, and inwardly digested. A copy (unfortunately not complete) is preserved of the first edition of Browning's Paracelsus, which she annotated with remarks, paraphrases, and illustrative cases as she read. The first scene of the poem—“Paracelsus Aspires”—contains many a passage which aroused a sympathetic echo in her heart. The key-note is struck early. “Pursuing an aim not to be found in life,” is her comment, “is its true misery.” Then she kept commonplace-books, in which, under heads alphabetically arranged—such as Age of Reason, Bigotry, Creeds, Death, Education, and so forth—she copied out passages which struck her. She was accumulating stores of information and reflection. In some remarks upon Lacordaire in one of her note-books I find this passage copied out:—

For her own part, as her powers of reflection were strengthened, so did her sense of a vocation become more insistent with every year. In some autobiographical notes, Miss Nightingale records May 7, 1852, as the date at which she was conscious of “a call from God to be a saviour”; but the thought of devoting herself to be a nurse came much earlier. Mrs. Julia Ward Howe, in the reminiscences quoted above, describes how during the visit of herself and her husband to Embley in 1844, Florence had taken Dr. Howe aside and asked him this question: “If I should determine to study nursing, and to devote my life to that profession, do you think it would be a dreadful thing?” Dr. Howe, it will be remembered, was of wide repute as a philanthropist,[44] and Miss Nightingale thought much of his opinion. It was favourable to her wish. “Not a dreadful thing at all,” he replied; “I think it would be a very good thing.” “My idea of heaven,” she wrote a little time afterwards, “is when my dear Aunt Hannah and I and my boy Shore and all of us shall be together, nursing the sick people who are left behind, and giving each other sympathies beside, and our Saviour in the midst of us, giving us strength.” But, meanwhile, she hoped to realize some little piece of the heaven on earth. She pursued other inquiries, laid her plans, kept her own counsel, and then made a first bid for freedom. The nature of her plans, the nipping of them in the bud by maternal frost, and her following dejection are told in a letter to her cousin Hilary (Dec. 11, 1845):—

And so ended for the time the dash of the caged bird for liberty.

[46]

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[47] 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:—

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[50] 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:—

The state of perfect love, expressing itself in perfect[52] 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[53] 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 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[55] Madame Mohl, ten years apart in date, suggest what was always Miss Nightingale's point of view:—

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[58] 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.

[59]

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[60] 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[61] 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[62] 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[63] 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:—

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[65] “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:—

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[66] 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:—

The letter goes on to speak of a visit recently paid to Mrs. Archer Clive, well known in her day as the authoress of Poems by V. and of Paul Ferroll, a sensational novel of some force,—a lady whose powers of heart and mind were housed in an infirm body. Miss Nightingale admired her talents and her character, and valued her friendship.[68]

But new friendships and varied interests did not bring satisfaction to Miss Nightingale. She was still constantly bent on pursuing a vocation of her own. Her parents caught eagerly at an opportunity which offered itself at the end of this year (1847), for giving, as they hoped, a new turn to her thoughts.

[69]

It was an event of some importance in the Nightingale family when Florence set out with Mr. and Mrs. Bracebridge, in the autumn of 1847, to spend the winter at Rome. The attraction to her was the society of Mrs. Bracebridge, the friend of whom she spoke as “her Ithuriel.” Moreover the mental unrest from which Florence constantly suffered at home was beginning to tell upon her health. “All that I want to do in life,” she wrote to her cousin Hilary, in explaining the motive of the tour, “depends upon my health, which, I am told, a winter in Rome will establish for ever.” She took the foreign tour as a tonic to enable her the better to fulfil her vocation. By her parents and her sister the tour was regarded as a tonic which might divert her from it. They hoped that foreign travel would distract her thoughts, and dispel what they perhaps considered morbid fancies. She would enjoy pleasant companionship. She would see famous and beautiful things. She might return converted to the more comfortable belief that her duty lay in accepting life as she found it. The point of view comes out clearly enough in a letter from her sister to Miss Bonham Carter:—

And Florence herself did find comfort and pleasure in the tour; but it was destined not to divert, but to strengthen, her purpose, as also to lay a train of circumstances which was to lead her to the Crimea.

Florence and her companions reached Paris on October 27, took ship at Marseilles for Civita Vecchia, and stayed in Rome—in the Via S. Bastinello (No. 8)—from the beginning of November till March 29, 1848. Florence entered heartily into all the pursuits and occupations of elegant tourists in Rome. She studied the ruins; explored the catacombs; copied inscriptions; visited the churches and galleries; spent a morning in Gibson's studio and another in Overbeck's; collected plants in the Colosseum; rode in the Campagna, and bought brooches, mosaics, and Roman pearls. Her father had drawn out a programme of famous sights and pretty walks and drives; and the methodical Florence duly ticked them off on the list. She read her own thoughts and aspirations into many of the works of art. She greatly admired the Apollo Belvedere, seeing in it the type of triumphant Free Will. “We can never lose the recollection of our poor selves while we still do things with difficulty, while we are still uncertain whether we shall succeed or not. The triumph of success may be great and[71] delightful, but the divine life—eternal life—is when to will is to do, when the will is the same thing as the act, and therefore the act is unconscious.” Of the Jupiter of the Capitol, again, she says: “Jupiter is that perfect grace in power where the divine Will, pure from exertion, speaks, and It is done.” But what chiefly interested her, what really impressed her mind and stimulated her imagination, was the genius of Michael Angelo:—

The thoughts and emotions which have been suggested by the contemplation of the vault of the Sistine Chapel are countless. None are more enthusiastic than those which it inspired in Florence Nightingale, and few have been so discriminating. It is at once the privilege and a mark of consummate works of art to be capable of as many meanings as they may find of competent spectators. Each man brings to the study of them the insight of which he is capable; and each, perchance, finds in them some image of himself or of his own experience. “There are few moments, most probably,” Florence Nightingale went on to say, “which we shall carry with us through the gate of Death, few recollections which will stand the Eternal Light.” She felt as she came out of the Sistine Chapel that her first sight of Michael Angelo's stupendous work would be one of those few for her. We may surmise that the wistful uncertainty which she found in the face of the Delphic Sibyl had especially appealed to her in its truth to life as she had experienced it; conscious as she was of a call from God, conscious also as she could not but have been of great powers, and yet doubtful whether on this side of the gate of Death it would be[73] given to her to interpret the Divine voice aright. She retained to the end of her life the same reverential feeling for Michael Angelo. She had photographs and engravings of the Sistine ceiling hanging in her rooms, and she sent some framed and inscribed photographs of the symbolical figures on the Medici tombs to hang at Embley on the little private staircase, where her father fell and died. Those at her home were bequeathed specifically in her Will.

The afternoon of the day on which the revelation of the Sistine Chapel came to her was spent by Florence and her friend in walking up the Monte Mario, to enjoy the famous view from the Villa Mellini, not then, as now, included within a fort:—

The obsession of Rome, which sooner or later comes upon every intelligent visitor to the Eternal City, dated in the case of Florence Nightingale from this golden-letter day. She surmounted the sense of confusion which sometimes oppresses the traveller. “I do not feel,” she wrote, “though Pagan in the morning, Jew in the afternoon, and Christian in the evening, anything but a unity of interest in all these representations. To know God we must study Him as much in the Pagan and Jewish dispensations as in the Christian (though that is the last and most perfect manifestation), and this gives unity to the whole—one continuous thread of interest to all these pearls.”

The politics of modern Italy interested her no less than the ruins of ancient Rome or the monuments of mediæval art. She had met many Italian refugees, both at Geneva and in the salon of Madame Mohl in Paris, and was a whole-hearted enthusiast in the cause of Italian freedom. Her present visit to Rome synchronized with that curious and short-lived episode in the struggle during which Pio Nono was playing “the ineffectual tragedy of Liberal Catholicism.” All Rome seemed seized with sympathy for the cities beyond the Papal states, which were fighting for liberty, and within the states themselves Pio Nono's offerings of mild benevolence sufficed to call forth “floods of ecstatic, demonstrative Italian humanity, torchlight processions, and crowds kneeling at his feet.”[38] Miss Nightingale saw the Roman nobles, Prince Corsini, Prince Gaetano, and others, presiding at “patriotic altars,” which had been set up in the public squares for the receipt of gifts in money and in jewellery. She heard the famous Father Gavazzi preach the crusade in the Colosseum. She cheered as the Tricolor of Italy was hoisted on the Capitol. “I certainly was born,” she wrote[75] to her cousin Hilary, “to be a tag-rag-and-bob-tail, for when I hear of a popular demonstration, I am nothing better than a ragamuffin.” She heard the rumble of a distant drum, and rushed up for Mr. Bracebridge, and he and she broke their own windows because they were not illuminated; stayed to see the torchlight procession of patriots singing the hymn to Pio Nono, and were rewarded by the crowd crying “God save the Queen,” as they passed the English “milord” and his companion. “Very touching,” she said; “though royalty was the very last thing I was thinking of”; for at this time, as she often avowed in her letters, her sympathies were Republican. “When this memorable year began with all its revolutions,” she wrote later to Madame Mohl, after disillusion had come (June 27), “I thought that it was the Kingdom of Heaven coming under the fate of a Republic. But alas! things have shown that more of us must slowly ripen to angels here, before the régime of the angels, i.e. the Kingdom of Heaven, will begin.” But for the moment everything seemed radiant. She recorded with pleasure in February that a deputation of Romans had gone up to the Pope to express their “complete confidence in him.” In her note-books she collected particulars of his life and character; and when in March he granted what can only be called a sort of a Constitution, she wrote to Madame Mohl: “My dear Santo Padre seems doing very well. He has given up his Temporal Power. No man took it from him; he laid it down of himself. I think that he will reign in history as the only prince who ever did, and that his character is nearer Christ's than any I ever heard of.” History will hardly confirm this saying; but if Miss Nightingale's words seem ill-balanced in the light of subsequent events, let it be remembered that, as Mr. Trevelyan says, “the cult of Pio Nono was for some months the religion of Italy, and of Liberals and exiles all over the world. Even Garibaldi in Monte Video, and Mazzini in London, shared the enthusiasm of the hour.” A year later, when the Roman Republic had been declared and the Pope had fled, and the French troops besieged Rome on his behalf, Miss Nightingale had only pity for Pio Nono; her anger she reserved for the French “cannibals,” for the one[76] Republic that was devouring another. “I must exhale my rage and indignation,” she wrote in a diary (June 30, 1849), “before I have lost all notions of absolute right and wrong. It makes my heart bleed that the French nation, the nation above all others capable of an ideal, of aspiring after the abstract right, should have lent itself to such a brutal crime against its own brother—one may say its own offspring, for the Roman Republic sprang from the French; it is purest cannibalism; this breaks my heart. When I think of that afternoon at Villa Mellini (now occupied by a French general), of Rome, bathed in her crimson and purple shadows, lying at our feet, and St. Michael spreading his wings over all—the Angel of Regeneration as we thought him then—my eyes fill with tears. But he will be the Angel of Regeneration yet.” The French, she said, might reduce the city and occupy it; but the heroic defence of the Republic “will have raised the Romans in the moral scale, and in their own esteem.” They would never sink back to what they had been. Sooner or later, Rome would be free. She was especially indignant at the talk which she heard on all sides in cultivated society at home about the “vandalism” of the Romans in exposing their precious monuments of art to assault. She loved those monuments, as we have seen; but if the defence of Rome against the French required it, she would have been ready to see them all levelled to the ground. “They must carry out their defence to the last,” she cried. “I should like to see them fight the streets, inch by inch, till the last man dies at his barricade, till St. Peter's is level with the ground, till the Vatican is blown into the air. Then would this be the last of such brutal, not house-breakings, but city-breakings; then, and not till then, would Europe do justice to France as a thief and a murderer, and a similar crime be rendered impossible for all ages. If I were in Rome, I should be the first to fire the Sistine, turning my head aside, and Michael Angelo would cry, ‘Well done,’ as he saw his work destroyed.” It was not only in relation to the restraints of conventional domesticity that Florence Nightingale was a rebel.

[77]

During her own stay in Rome, however, there was something which interested her more than Roman politics or Roman monuments. It was the philanthropic work of a Convent School. Every visitor to Rome knows the Trinità de' Monti. The flight of steps between the church and the Piazza di Spagna is celebrated alike for its own beauty and for the flower-girls and women in peasant-costume who frequent it. The church itself contains many fine works of art, and the choral service is one of the attractions of ecclesiastical Rome. The neighbourhood is rich in artistic and literary associations. Florence Nightingale had sympathetic eyes and ears for all these things; but what attracted her most was the convent attached to the church, with its school for girls, and (in another part of the city) its orphanage. She was broad-minded, as we have seen in an earlier chapter, in relation to church creeds. It was by works, not faith, or at any rate by faith issuing in works, that she weighed the churches. It was characteristic of the thoroughness of her mental character that during this sojourn in Rome she made a methodical study of Roman doctrine and ritual. Among her papers and note-books belonging to this time, there are careful analyses of the theory of Indulgence, of the Real Presence, of the Rosary, and so forth. She made, too, a careful collation of the Latin Breviary with the English Prayer-Book. She summed up her comparative study of the churches in this generalization: “The great merit of the Catholic Church: its assertion of the truth that God still inspires mankind as much as ever. Its great fault: its limiting this inspiration to itself. The great merit of Protestantism: its proclamation of freedom of conscience within the limits of the Scriptures. Its great fault: its erection of the Bible into a master of the soul.” Her deep sense of the self-responsibility of every human soul kept her free from any inclination to Roman doctrine; but she was profoundly impressed by the practical beneficence of Roman sisterhoods. An example of such beneficence she found in the school and orphanage of the Dames[78] du Sacré Cœur. She had picked up a poor girl called Felicetta Sensi, and procured her admission as a free boarder, paying for her care and education for many years. She formed a warm attachment to the Lady Superior, the Madre Sta. Colomba. She studied the organization, rules, and methods of the large school, and for ten days she went into Retreat in the Convent.[39] Her intercourse with the Madre Sta. Colomba, of whose talk and spiritual experiences she made full and detailed notes, made a very deep impression on her mind. She studied rules and organization, but, as in all her studies, she was seeking a motive, as well as, and indeed more than, a method. Many years later, a friend wrote to her: “It seems to me that the greatest want among nurses is devotion. I use the word in a very wide sense, meaning that state of mind in which the current of desire is flowing towards one high end. This does not presuppose knowledge, but it very soon attains it.”[40] This was a profound conviction of her own, often expressed, as we shall hear, in her Addresses and Letters of Exhortation in later years. What she set herself to study at the Trinità de' Monti was the secret of devotion. She made notes of the Lady Superior's exhortations; of the spiritual exercises which were enjoined upon novices; of the forms and discipline of self-examination. She sought to extract the secret, and to apply it to the inculcation of the highest kind of service to man as the service of God. For many years the thought in her mind was to be the foundation of some distinctive order or sisterhood; and though in the end she came to be glad that she had not done this, she never abandoned the high ideal which was behind her thought. Nor, though in some ways and in some cases she came to be disillusioned about nursing sisterhoods, did she ever cease to speak with admiration of what she had seen and learnt in some of them. She thought more often, and with more affectionate remembrance, about the spirit[79] of the best Catholic sisterhoods than of Kaiserswerth, or indeed of anything else in her professional experience.

In such studies upon the Trinità de' Monti in the winter of 1847–48, she was taken, as she said in a note of self-examination, out of all interests that fostered her “vanity”; it was her “happiest New Year.” “The most entire and unbroken freedom from dreaming I ever had,” she wrote at a later time. “Oh, how happy I was!” And so again, looking back after twenty years, she wrote: “I never enjoyed any time in my life so much as my time at Rome.”[41]

Another incident of Miss Nightingale's sojourn in Rome was destined, though she knew it not at the time, to have a far-reaching influence upon her career. Among the English visitors who spent the winter of 1847–48 in Rome were Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Herbert. Mr. Herbert had already been Secretary at War under Peel, a post to which he was afterwards to return under Aberdeen. The resignation of Peel's Cabinet in 1846 released Mr. Herbert from official work. Later in the year he married a lady with whom he had been long acquainted, Elizabeth à Court, daughter of General Charles Ashe à Court; and in the following year he and his wife set out for a long Continental tour. Mr. and Mrs. Bracebridge were friends of the Herberts, and thus Florence Nightingale made their acquaintance in Rome. In her retrospect she specially recalled the beginning there of her friendship with Sidney Herbert “under the dear Bracebridges' wing.” Compatriots who meet in this way in any foreign resort are apt to see a good deal of each other, and from this winter dates the beginning of a friendship which was to be a governing factor in the life of Florence Nightingale. Sidney Herbert, when they met in galleries or at soirées, or rode together in the Campagna, must have been struck by Miss Nightingale's marked abilities, and for Mrs. Herbert she formed an affectionate attachment. She noted “the great kindness, the desire of love, the magnanimous generosity”[80] of her new friend. Mr. and Mrs. Herbert saw much of Archdeacon Manning (the future cardinal), who was also spending the winter in Rome, and Miss Nightingale was on friendly terms with him.[42] This also was an acquaintance which had some influence on her future career. Sidney Herbert, aided by the ready sympathy of his wife, was devoting much thought, now liberated from official duties, to schemes of benevolence among the poor on his estates. “He felt strongly the disadvantage at which the poor were placed in being compelled after illness, and perhaps after undergoing painful operations, to return in the earliest stage of convalescence, without rest or change, to their accustomed labour.”[43] He was full of a scheme for a Convalescent Home and Cottage Hospital (such as is now no rarity, but was then almost unknown), and it can be imagined with what zest Miss Nightingale shared his thoughts. One of the first things which she records in her diary after return from the Continent is “an expedition with Mrs. Sidney Herbert to set up her Convalescent Home at Charmouth”; but this was only a passing incident, and return to the habitual home life, after the distraction of foreign travel, left her no more contented than before.

On her return to London in the early summer of 1848 she sent her friends occasionally the talk of the town:—

Her acquaintance with Lord Ashley (afterwards Lord Shaftesbury) brought her in touch with Ragged School work. But society grew more and more distasteful to Miss Nightingale. She explained the reasons in a letter to her “Aunt Hannah.” Why could she not smile and be gay, while yet biding her time and not forsaking her ultimate ideals? It was, she said, because she “hated God to hear her laugh, as if she had not repented of her sin.” There is something obviously morbid in such words, and they might be multiplied indefinitely, if there were good reason for doing so, from her letters, diaries, and note-books. The sins of which she most often convicted herself were “hypocrisy” and “vanity.” She prayed to be delivered from “the desire of producing an effect.” That was the “vanity”; and it was “hypocrisy,” because she was playing a part, responding to friends' conception of her, though all the while her heart was really set on other things, and her true life was being lived elsewhere. The morbidness was a symptom of a mind at war with its surroundings. Then again the kind “Aunt” reminded her, in the spirit of George Herbert, that anything and everything may be done “to the glory of God.” But Miss Nightingale at this time was deep in the study of political economy; and “can it be to the glory of God,” she asked, “when there is so much misery among the poor, which we might be curing instead of living in luxury?”

In the autumn of 1848 an opportunity occurred which promised the realization of the dearest wish of her heart, but once more she was doomed to disappointment. Her mother and sister had been advised to go to Carlsbad for the cure. M. and Madame Mohl were to be at Frankfurt, and they were all to meet in that city. Frankfurt is near[82] to Kaiserswerth, and Florence was to be allowed to go there. But at the very moment disturbances broke out in Frankfurt, and the whole plan was abandoned. “I am not going to consign to paper for your benefit,” she wrote to Madame Mohl (October 1848), “all the cursings and swearings which relieved my disappointed feelings; for oh! what a plan of plans I had made out for myself! All that I most wanted to do at Kaiserswerth, Brussels, and Co., lay for the first time within reach of my mouth, and the ripe plum has dropped.” Florence accompanied her mother to the cure at Malvern instead, where, with many prayers for humility under the will of God, she lived for several weeks upon the dry and bitter fruit of disappointment. During the winter of 1848–49 Miss Nightingale saw something of M. Guizot and his family. The Minister had escaped to London after the fall of Louis Philippe, and was living in a modest house in Brompton. He found in Miss Nightingale “a brave and sympathetic soul, for whom great thoughts and great devotions had a serious attraction.”[44]

During the next year she found some congenial work in London. She inspected hospitals. She worked in Ragged Schools. She spoke of her “little thieves at Westminster” as her “greatest joy in London.” But these unconventional attractions of the London season set her all the more against the life of country houses. “Ought not one's externals,” she wrote in her diary (July 2, 1849), “to be as nearly as possible an incarnation of what life really is? Life is not a green pasture and a still water, as our homes make it. Life is to some a forty days' fasting, moral or physical, in the wilderness; to some it is a fainting under the carrying of the crop; to some it is a crucifixion; to all, a struggle for truth, for safety. Life is seen in a much truer form in London than in the country. In an English country place everything that is painful is so carefully removed out of sight, behind those fine trees, to a village three miles off. In London, at all events if you open your eyes, you cannot help seeing in the next street that life is not as it has been made to you. You cannot get out of a carriage at a party[83] without seeing what is in the faces making the lane on either side, and without feeling tempted to rush back and say, ‘Those are my brothers and sisters.’” She longed to rush back, to be able to go out freely into the slums, to comfort some old woman who was dying unattended, or rescue some child who was going astray untaught. But the proprieties prevented. “It would never do,” she was told, “for a young woman in her station in life to go out in London without a servant.” In the autumn of 1849 the distraction of another foreign tour was offered. Her parents and her sister hoped once more that Florence would return a different and a more comfortable woman. Those with whom we are cast into the nearest intimacy sometimes understand us least.

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Horace.

In the autumn of 1849 Mr. and Mrs. Bracebridge, who were to spend some months in the East, again proposed that Miss Nightingale should travel with them, and again the offer was gladly accepted. Her sister was delighted. The expedition to Rome had not done what was hoped, but here was a second chance. The sister reported to her friends that “Flo had taken tea with the Bunsens to receive the dernier mot on Egyptology,” and that she was going out “laden with learned books.” Perhaps Florence would become absorbed in such studies, and adopt a life of gracefully learned leisure. The literary temptation did, it is true, assail Florence, but she put it behind her.

The party started in October, bound for Egypt, where the winter was to be spent. Thence they were to proceed to Athens, where Mr. Bracebridge had property. The return journey in the summer of 1850 was to be made through Germany, and Kaiserswerth was to be visited. Florence, we may surmise, looked forward most to the last stage in the journey. On November 18 the travellers landed at Alexandria. On the 27th they reached Cairo. On December 4 they started in a dahabiah for the Nile voyage. The boat was christened in honour of Florence's sister.[85] “My work,” she wrote, “is making the pennant, blue bunting with swallow tail, a Latin red cross upon it, and ΠΑΡΘΕΝΟΠΗ in white tape. It has taken all my tape, and a vast amount of stitches, but it will be the finest pennant on the river, and my petticoats will joyfully acknowledge the tribute to sisterly affection, for sisterly affection in tape in Lower Egypt, let me observe, is worth having.” They went up the river as far as Ipsambul (Abu-Simbel), a little below Wady Halfy; on the return journey they spent several days at Thebes. The letters which Florence sent home show that Egypt appealed strongly to her imagination. What struck her most was the solemnity of the country. “Nothing ever laughs or plays. Everything is grown up and grown old.” The letters are full too of Egyptology; for she had made tables of dynasties, copied plans of temples, and analysed the leading ideas in Egyptian mythology as expounded by the best writers of the time:—

It was no wonder that Miss Nightingale pitied the poor[87] people; for the Egypt in which she travelled was as Mehemet Ali, the Lion of the Levant, had left it. She saw girls sold in the open slave market “at from £2 to £9 a head.” She heard how justice was sold to the highest bidder; and “everybody,” she noted, “seems to bastinado everybody else.” “Every man,” she noted further, “is a conscript for the army, and mothers put out their children's right eye to save them from conscription, till Mehemet Ali, who was too clever for them, had a one-eyed regiment, who carried the musket on the left shoulder.” Miss Nightingale was fond of escaping from the dahabiah in order to wander about the desert, “poking my own nose,” as she wrote home, “into all the villages,” and seeing for herself how “these poor people” lived. “They call me ‘the wild ass of the wilderness, snuffing up the wind,’ because I am so fond of getting away.” Egyptian impressions stayed long in her memory, and they recurred to her thirty years later in connection with her Indian studies.[45] As on her earlier visit to Rome, so now in Egypt she utilized all such opportunities as came in her way for studying the work of religious Sisterhoods. At Alexandria she passed her days, she wrote, “much to my satisfaction, as I had travelled with two Sisters of St. Vincent de Paul from Paris to Auxerre, who gave me an introduction to the Sisters here; and I have spent a great deal of time with them in their beautiful schools and Miséricorde. There are only 19 of them, but they seem to do the work of 90.”

In April 1850 Miss Nightingale went with her friends to Athens. Their house was in Eucharis Street, and Florence “slept in the library, which opens on to a terrace looking[88] upon the back of the Acropolis.” She had little taste for the topographical research and nice distinctions between different masters of sculpture which absorb the interest of many modern travellers and students. She was interested in broader speculations. The soul of a people, as expressed in their art, was the object to which she directed her observation, and around which she loved to let her imagination play. In her note-books and letters she discusses the spiritual conceptions embodied in the worship of the several Greek gods; she traces the symbols of Greek mythology to their sources in Greek scenery; she pictures the genius of Aeschylus (her favourite tragedian, preferred by her even to Shakespeare) or of Sophocles developing in relation to local conditions and surroundings. Of the statues, the pensive beauty of the sepulchral bas-reliefs most arrested her attention; and in architecture, she loved most the Doric, for its severity, its simplicity, its perfection of proportion, its image of the ideal republic:—

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It was characteristic of the philosophical bent of her mind that she sought to refer the charm of the scenery to some general law:—

Of the Parthenon by moonlight she wrote that it was “impossible that earth or heaven could produce anything more beautiful.” In other letters she dwells on the beauty of the view from Lycabettus, and the glory of the sunset from Hymettus. One day upon the Acropolis she found some boys with a baby owl that had just fallen from its nest in the Parthenon. She bought it from them and kept it. It used to travel in her pocket, and lived at Embley.

Public affairs in Greece interested her also. She had arrived in Greek waters at the height of the “Pacifico crisis.” There had been a rupture between England and Greece, which threatened also the relations between England and France, and which convulsed political parties at Westminster, over the claims of Mr. Finlay, the historian of modern Greece, and Don Pacifico, a native of Gibraltar.[90] Lord Palmerston had ordered the Mediterranean Fleet to the Peiraeus to enforce the British claims, and Miss Nightingale was sitting beside Mr. Wyse, the British Minister at Athens, at dinner on board H.M.S. Howe, when the submission of the Greek Government was brought to him. Her home letters throw much light on the ins and outs of this affair, which, however, is now only remembered as the occasion of Lord Palmerston's vindication in the House of Commons with its famous peroration about Civis Romanus sum. Miss Nightingale now, as earlier, was a strong Palmerstonian. “The friends of Broadlands,” she wrote to her parents, “need never have been less uneasy for his reputation”; and if parliamentary success be a sufficient test, she was entirely right. She found herself again in the thick of political discussion on leaving Greek waters. Her party sailed from Athens on June 17, and went to Trieste by Corfu—“that fairy island,” she wrote, “where every flower grows twice as big as it does anywhere else, and where no frost can touch the olive and the pomegranate.” She and her parents were acquainted with Sir Henry Ward, then Lord High Commissioner of the Ionian Islands. Sir Henry, who had been an active Liberal at home, had felt himself obliged to adopt sternly repressive measures in the islands. Miss Nightingale was opposed to his policy, as also to the British occupation. He invited her and her friends to the Palace. She went to proffer excuses. “He came out, said that I had often called him ‘Tyrant,’ and took me in his arms like a father, and stood over me in the character of Tyrant (he said) till I had written a letter compelling them all to come, which he then sealed and I sent. So the whole posse comitatus of us spent the day there, they sending the carriage for us, and I am really glad to have seen what is my idea of Eastern luxury.” The tyrant placed his accuser next to him at dinner, deplored his “false position,” and so forth, and they made some sort of peace; though not perhaps till Miss Nightingale had sought to bring him to a conviction of sin for his executions and arbitrary arrests, for she was armed, as her letters show, now as ever, with all the facts and figures marshalled in Blue-book precision.

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Her mind was interested in all these things, but her heart was elsewhere. “Wherever thou art,” said a famous statesman, “it is with the poor that thou should'st live.” It was so with Florence Nightingale's inmost thoughts. Her greatest pleasure in Athens was found in the society of the American missionaries, Mr. and Mrs. Hill, who conducted a school and orphanage. Of Mrs. Hill she wrote, “From heaven she comes, in heaven she lives.” In charge of the mission school was a Greek refugee from Crete, Elizabeth Kontaxaki, and with her too Florence Nightingale formed a warm friendship. Elizabeth had lived an adventurous life before she found security at Athens. Her father had fallen by a Turkish bullet. Her mother had made an heroic escape from a Turkish captor, and the first years of the child's life were spent in the fastnesses of Mount Ida. “Alas,” wrote Miss Nightingale, “how worthless my life seems to me by the side of these women.” A mood of great dejection appears in her diary of this time, to which an attack of low-fever no doubt contributed. She could not find satisfaction in the interests of foreign travel. She was tortured by unsatisfied longings which could find outlet only in a world of dreams. An entry in her diary for June 7 is in these words: “Grotto of the Eumenides. Will this Fury go on increasing till by degrees my mind is more and more taken off the outer world with all its claims, and I am no longer able to command my attention at all?”

Miss Nightingale and her friends landed at Trieste at the end of June, and thence made their way to Dresden and Berlin. The pictures which most impressed her were Raphael's “Sistine Madonna” and the “Reading Magdalen,” then attributed to Correggio. A year later her mother and sister were at Dresden, and she enjoined them, above all things, to see “the Magdalen, the queen of pictures.” “How I feel that picture now,” she wrote to them (August 26, 1851), “dark wood behind, sharp stones in front, nothing to look back upon, nothing to look forward to, clinging to the present as she does to the book, which[92] beams bright light upon me. Oh what a history that picture contains in its little canvass; and how well it hangs near that glorious Sistine Virgin. All that woman might be, all that she will be, near what she is; for it is not a Magdalen, in the common sense of the word, or rather it is in the common sense of what woman commonly is—not what we mean by a Magdalen.” At Dresden Miss Nightingale was still in much dejection. “I have never felt so bad,” she wrote (July 7); “the habit of living not in the present but in a future of dreams is gradually spreading over my whole existence. It is rapidly approaching the state of madness when dreams become realities.” And now when the goal of Kaiserswerth was near, she felt almost unmanned; almost inclined to turn back and follow another path. “It seemed to me now (July 10) as if quiet, with somebody to look for my coming back, was all I wanted.” But this was only a moment of passing weakness. At Berlin her spirits revived; for her vital interests were satisfied, and she spent some days in inspecting the hospitals and other benevolent institutions. On July 31 she reached Kaiserswerth. “I could hardly believe I was there,” she wrote in her diary. “With the feeling with which a pilgrim first looks on the Kedron, I saw the Rhine, dearer to me than the Nile.” She stayed a fortnight with the Pastor and his wife and the Deaconesses, studying their institutions. “Left Kaiserswerth,” says the diary (August 13), “feeling so brave as if nothing could ever vex me again.”[46] She rejoined her friends at Düsseldorf. “They stayed at Ghent actually for me to finish my MS.” (August 17). “Finished my MS. They read it. Mr. Bracebridge corrected it and sent it off” (August 19). Next day they returned to England.[93] The manuscript was of the pamphlet describing “The Institution of Kaiserswerth on the Rhine,” which was issued anonymously soon after Miss Nightingale's return.[47] Some notice of the pamphlet will be found in a later chapter in connection with her longer sojourn at Kaiserswerth in 1851. It was printed by the inmates of the Ragged School at Westminster in which she was interested. She described in it the work of the Deaconesses, and ended with an appeal to Englishwomen to go and do likewise. The fire burnt within her, and she returned home more than ever resolved to consecrate her life to the service of the sick and sorrowful.

Foreign travel, it will thus be seen, had worked no such cure, had created no such diversion, as her family desired. Their hope, even their expectation, was not unreasonable. Florence Nightingale was a woman of learning, and her foreign travels had stimulated her alike to research and to imaginative thought. At home, too, during all the years of restless and unsatisfied yearning for some other life, she had been a diligent reader and student. She had a real gift for literary expression, as her letters may already have indicated, and as her later writings were to prove more decisively. She had, moreover, the instinct for self-expression. She was a constant letter-writer and note-taker. She communed with herself not only in speechless thought, but in written memoranda. Had another impulse not been stronger within her, she might easily have become a literary woman of some distinction. But though she was fond of writing for her own satisfaction, she had a profound distrust of it as a substitute for action. Like one of George Eliot's heroines, “she did not want to deck herself with knowledge—to wear it loose from the nerves and blood that fed her action.” “You ask me,” she had written to Miss Clarke in 1844, “why I do not write something. I think what is not of the first class had better not exist at all; and besides I had so much rather live than write; writing is only a supplement for living. Would you have one go away and[94] ‘give utterance to one's feelings’ in a poem to appear (price 2 guineas) in the Belle Assemblée? I think one's feelings waste themselves in words; they ought all to be distilled into actions, and into actions which bring results. Do you think a babe would ever learn to walk if it were to talk about its living in such ‘strange times,’ ‘I must learn to use my legs,’ and so on? Or do you think anybody ever did anything, who did not go to it with a directness of purpose, which prevented him from frittering away his impressions in words?” She was of Ibsen's persuasion:—

She held in great suspicion and dislike what she called the “artist-like way of looking upon life.” It reduces all religions, she said, and most inward and spiritual feelings “into a sort of magic-lantern, with which to make play for the amusement of the company.” Her mother used to praise her “beautiful letters,” was proud of the “European reputation” she had won among learned men, and wanted to know why she could not be happy in cultivating at home the gifts which God had given her. To Florence Nightingale these things were not gifts to be cultivated, but rather temptations to be subdued. She read with some attention in 1846 a book called Passages from the Life of a Daughter at Home, a religious work containing counsels of submission for women dissatisfied with their home life. “Piling up miscellaneous instruction for oneself,” she wrote in one place in the margin; “the most unsatisfactory of all pursuits!” She strove to say to God, as she wrote in another place, “Behold the handmaid of the Lord! not Behold the handmaid of correspondence, or of music, or of metaphysics!” “That power of always writing a good letter whenever one likes,” she said in one of her pages of self-examination, “is a great temptation”—a temptation, if such it be, to which, it must be confessed, she continually succumbed. But she wished to win no repute from her fall. In 1854 her sister printed the “beautiful letters” from[95] Egypt,[49] and issued a few copies for private circulation. Florence was not pleased, but acquiesced, and corrected the proofs.

Any dreams, then, which she may have harboured of literary distinction, she had put resolutely away from her. “Oh God,” she had written in her diary at Cairo, “thou puttest into my heart this great desire to devote myself to the sick and sorrowful. I offer it to thee. Do with it what is for thy service.” But there was still one other temptation to be subdued.

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“I had three paths among which to choose,” wrote Miss Nightingale in a diary of 1850: “I might have been a literary woman, or a married woman, or a Hospital Sister.” We have seen how she turned away from the first path. Why did she reject the second?

“Our dear Flo,” wrote Mrs. Bracebridge to Miss Clarke in 1844, “has just recovered from a severe cold, but I hear nothing of what I long for, i.e. some noble-hearted, true man, one who can love her as she deserves to be loved, prepared to take her to a house of her own.” And three years later another friend, Fanny Allen, in describing a visit to Embley, said of Florence: “What a wife she would make for a man worthy of her! but I am not sure I yet know the mate fit for her.” The two Nightingale girls, she surmised, would experience a “difficulty in finding any one they would like well enough to forsake such a home.”[50] In the case of Florence, the position was ill understood by outsiders. To her the home was not a happy garden which she would be[97] very reluctant to forsake, but rather a gilded cage from which she eagerly sought a way of escape. To us who have the means of knowing her inmost thoughts and feelings, the question thus presents itself in another light than that in which it appeared to her friends at the time. She craved for a larger, fuller life than she could find at home. Why could she not, or why did she not, seek it in marriage? It is love that sometimes “frees the imprisoned spirit,” that enables it to find and to express itself. That Miss Nightingale remained single was not the result of lack of opportunity to marry. The reason is to be found elsewhere—in feelings, thoughts, and ideals, in reasoned convictions and aspirations, which, if I can present them aright, will illuminate her character and her career.

In 1873 Miss Nightingale, like the rest of the world, was reading Middlemarch, and a paper which she wrote in that year contained some notice of George Eliot's heroine.[51] “A novel of genius has appeared. Its writer once put before the world (in a work of fiction too), certainly the most living, probably the most historically truthful, presentment of the great Idealist, Savonarola of Florence. This author now can find no better outlet for the heroine—also an Idealist—because she cannot be a ‘St. Teresa’ or an ‘Antigone,’ than to marry an elderly sort of literary impostor, and, quick after him, his relation, a baby sort of itinerant Cluricaune (see Irish Fairies) or inferior Faun (see Hawthorne's matchless Transformation). Yet close at hand, in actual life, was a woman—an Idealist too—and if we mistake not, a connection of the author's, who has managed to make her ideal very real indeed. By taking charge of blocks of buildings in poorest London, while making herself the rent-collector, she found work for those who could not find work for themselves; she organized a system of visitors; … she brought sympathy and education to bear from individual to individual, … so that one might be tempted to say, ‘Were there one such woman with power to direct the flow of volunteer help, nearly everywhere running to waste, in every street of London's East End, almost might the East End be persuaded to become Christian.’ Could not the[98] heroine, the ‘sweet sad enthusiast,’ have been set to some such work as this? Indeed it is past telling the mischief that is done in thus putting down youthful ideals. There are not too many to begin with. There are few indeed to end with—even without such a gratuitous impulse as this to end them.” In this passage, as in much that Florence Nightingale wrote, there is an autobiographical note. She did not marry because she held fast to an ideal—an ideal nearer to that of Octavia Hill than to that of Dorothea Brooke.

For two or three years Florence Nightingale was in much trouble of mind from an attachment which one of her cousins had formed for her. In no case would she have thought it right to marry him. “Accident or relationship,” she wrote some years later,[52] “throw people together in their childhood, and acquaintance has grown up naturally and unconsciously. Accordingly in novels it is generally cousins who marry; and now it seems the only natural thing, the only possible way of making an intimacy. And yet we know that intermarriage between relations is in direct contravention of the laws of nature for the well-being of the race.” It was supposed by some of the family circle at the time that this was the only objection to an engagement; but there were others. Florence was in no mood, then or afterwards, to marry for the sake of marrying. Marriage, she had written to Miss Clarke (p. 66), was not an absolute blessing; and though she liked her cousin, she was in no sense in love with him. She felt relief, intense and unmixed, as she recorded in her private meditations, when she learnt that the young man had at last forgotten her. But though this episode left her heart-whole, it had a great and painful influence upon her mind. “Cleanse all my love from the desire of creating an interest in another's heart” is the burden of many of her meditations.

Among other attachments of which Florence Nightingale was the object, there was one which had a deeper effect and called for a more difficult and searching choice in life.[99] She was asked in marriage by one who continued for some years to press his suit. It was a proposal which seemed to those about her to promise every happiness. The match would by all have been deemed suitable, and by many might have been called brilliant. And Florence herself was strongly drawn to her admirer. She had not come to this state of mind in hasty inclination. She was on her guard against any such temptation. Many years before, in a letter to her “brother Jonathan,” as she called Miss Hilary Bonham Carter, she had written:—

In this case, however, the stranger's admiration had stood the test. She felt drawn to him, not by vanity or self-love; but because she admired his talents, and because the more she saw of him the greater pleasure did she find in his society. She leaned more and more upon his sympathy. Yet when the proposal first came, she refused it; and when it was renewed, she persisted. Then, it may be said, she cannot have been “in love” with him. And in one sense that is, I suppose, quite true; for love, as the poets tell us, does not reason, and Florence Nightingale reasoned deeply over her case. But it is certain that she felt at least as much affection as suffices to make half the marriages in the world. She turned away from a path to which she was strongly drawn in order to pursue her Ideal.

In one of the many pages of autobiographical notes which she preserved in relation to this episode in her life,[100] Miss Nightingale thus explained her refusal to marry. “I have an intellectual nature which requires satisfaction, and that would find it in him. I have a passional nature which requires satisfaction, and that would find it in him. I have a moral, an active nature which requires satisfaction, and that would not find it in his life. I can hardly find satisfaction for any of my natures. Sometimes I think that I will satisfy my passional nature at all events, because that will at least secure me from the evil of dreaming. But would it? I could be satisfied to spend a life with him combining our different powers in some great object. I could not satisfy this nature by spending a life with him in making society and arranging domestic things.… To be nailed to a continuation and exaggeration of my present life, without hope of another, would be intolerable to me. Voluntarily to put it out of my power ever to be able to seize the chance of forming for myself a true and rich life would seem to me like suicide.”

Florence Nightingale was no vestal ascetic. A true and perfect marriage was, she thought, the perfect state. “Marrying a man of high and good purpose, and following out that purpose with him is the happiest” lot. “The highest, the only true love, is when two persons, a man and a woman, who have an attraction for one another, unite together in some true purpose for mankind and God.”[53] The thought of God in instituting marriage was “that these two, when the right two are united, shall throw themselves fearlessly into the universe, and do its work, secure of companionship and sympathy.” Miss Nightingale recognized also that for many women marriage, even though it may fall short of this ideal state, is the proper lot in life. But she held, on the other hand, that there are some women who may be marked out for single life. “I don't agree at all (she wrote in 1846) that a woman has no reason (if she does not care for any one else) for not marrying a good man who asks her, and I don't think Providence does either. I think He has as clearly marked out some to be single women as He has others to be wives, and has organized them accordingly for their vocation. I think some have every reason for not[101] marrying, and that for these it is much better to educate the children who are already in the world and can't be got out of it, than to bring more into it. The Primitive Church clearly thought so too, and provided accordingly; and though no doubt the Primitive Church was in many matters an old woman, yet I think the experience of ages has proved her right in this.” And again: “Ours is a system of Christianity without the Cross”; the single life was the life of Christ. “Has Heaven bestowed everlasting souls on men, and sent them upon earth for no better purpose than to marry and be given in marriage? True, there is in this world much more waiting to be done; but is it the man leading a secular life who will do it? He is apt to see nothing beyond himself and the fair creature he has chosen for his bride.” And, as with men, so with women. There are women of intellectual or actively moral natures for whom marriage (unless it realizes the perfect ideal) means the sacrifice of their higher capacities to the satisfaction of their lower. “Death,” she wrote (again in a note-book of 1846), “is often the gateway to the Garden where we shall no longer hunger and thirst after real satisfaction. Marriage, on the contrary, is often an initiation into the meaning of that inexorable word Never; which does not deprive us, it is true, of what ‘at their festivals the idle and inconsiderate call life,’ but which brings in reality the end of our lives, and the chill of death with it.”

In her own case, Miss Nightingale was conscious of capacities within her for “high purposes for mankind and for God.” She could not feel sure that the marriage which was offered to her would enable her to employ those capacities to their best and fullest power. And so she sacrificed her “passional” nature to her moral ideal. “I am 30,” she wrote on her birthday in her diary of 1850; “the age at which Christ began His mission. Now no more childish things, no more vain things, no more love, no more marriage. Now, Lord, let me only think of Thy will.” And amongst her sayings in another book, I find this: “Strong passions to teach the secrets of the human heart, and a strong will to hold them in subjection, these are the keys of the kingdom in this world and the next.” Florence Nightingale[102] turned away from marriage in order that she might remain entirely free to fulfil her vocation.

It was not a sacrifice which cost her little. If, as some may hold, she was not in love, yet she confessed to herself many of a lover's pangs, and there were moments when, as she met her admirer again, or as she thought of him, she was half inclined to repent of her choice of the single life. And the sacrifice, moreover, was of an immediate satisfaction to an ideal which after all she might never be able to realize. The legends of the saints tell of many virgins and martyrs who have crucified the flesh and sacrificed worldly happiness for the love of Christ. But when the sacrifice was made, the love which seemed to them far better was already theirs. In the ears of St. Agnes the Divine Voice had sounded with sweet assurance, and she had tasted of the milk and honey of His lips. St. Dorothea was already espoused in a garden where celestial fruits and roses that never fade surrounded her. And to Florence Nightingale also happiness was to be given, filling all her life for some years, so that she “sought no better heaven”; but at the time when she made her choice, and renounced all else to follow her ideal, the way before her was still dark and uncertain. She was conscious of a call, but she had no assurance of appointed work. To have entered into a marriage which gave no sure promise of her ideal, would have been, she felt, the suicide of a soul; yet, when she was called to choose between the two paths, her present life was starvation.

Perhaps it was the price which she had paid for her ideal that led to what, in later years, some considered a certain hardness in her. When once a woman had devoted her life to the work of nursing, Miss Nightingale had little sympathy with any turning back. She seemed sometimes in such cases to regard marriage as the unpardonable sin.

But another and a loftier train of thought was prompted by her experience. At the end of one of her meditations upon marriage, and her refusal of it, I find these significant words: “I must strive after a better life for woman.” She[103] did not mean a better life than marriage; she meant also a life that should make the conditions of marriage better. In the world in which she lived, daughters, she wrote, “can only have a choice among those people whom their parents like, and who like their parents well enough to come to their house.” One may doubt whether in the mid-Victorian or in any age, young men paid calls only because they liked the parents; but unquestionably restriction in the employments of women involves also limitation in the opportunities for choice in marriage. And at the same time the lack of interest and variety in the lives of girls at home makes many of them inclined to marriage as a mere means of escape. By throwing open new spheres of usefulness to women, Miss Nightingale hoped at one and the same time to improve the lot of those who were marked out to be wives, and to find satisfaction for those marked out for the single life.

[104]

Foreign travel had, as we have seen, in no way changed Florence Nightingale's resolve to devote herself to a life of nursing. She had turned away deliberately from marriage, and was bent upon finding a new field of usefulness for unmarried women. But ways and means of doing this were not yet apparent. She had no independent fortune of her own. She returned to a family circle which understood her cravings no better than before. The call of domestic duties was the same as before. There were aunts and a grandmother to be visited, company at home to be entertained, a sister to be humoured, a father and mother to be pleased.

But she could not please them, because she herself could find no pleasure in their life. She did not say to herself that she was better than they. Still less did she thank God that she was not as they were. But she felt with piteous keenness the gulf that separated her alike from her parents and from her sister. She loved her father, and admired his good impulses and amiable character. But she perceived that his contentment in a life of busy idleness made him constitutionally unable to enter fully into her state of mind. She loved her mother, and considered that she was,[105] within her range, a woman of genius. “She has the genius of order,” she wrote in a character-sketch of her mother, “the genius to organize a parish, to form society. She has obtained by her own exertions the best society in England.” What pained the daughter was the inability to please the mother. “When I feel her disappointment in me, it is as if I was becoming insane.” She loved her sister also, and, I think, yet more tenderly. But as the sister once wrote: “The natures God has given us differ as widely as different races.” Florence was deeply sensible of the attractive side of her sister's character. Lady Verney had indeed a most attractive mind; she was very vivacious, inquiring, and highly gifted, both as an artist and as a writer. She was a perfect hostess, and her memory is pleasant to all who knew her. If she lacked some of her sister's stronger English characteristics, she had a light touch which Florence did not possess. And Florence felt the charm of all this. “No one less than I,” she wrote, “wants her to do one single thing different from what she does. She wants no other religion, no other occupation, no other training than what she has. She has never had a difficulty except with me; she knows nothing of struggle in her own unselfish nature.” But for that very reason she could not sympathize with, because she could not understand, her sister's difficulties. In a passage which is doubtless autobiographical, Florence wrote: “Very few people can sympathise with each other in any pursuit or thought of any importance. If people do not give you thought for thought, receive yours, digest it, and give it back with the impression of their own character upon it, then give you one for you to do likewise, it is best to know what one is about, and not to attempt more than kindly, cheerful outward intercourse. Some find amusement in the outward, do not suffer inwardly, because the attention is turned elsewhere.”[54] Meanwhile Florence felt that everything she said or did was a subject of vexation to her sister, a disappointment to her mother, a worry to her father. “I have never known a happy time,” she exclaimed to herself, “except at Rome and that fortnight at Kaiserswerth. It is not the unhappiness[106] I mind, it is not indeed; but people can't be unhappy without making those about them so.”

She strove to attain happiness. She tried to submit her will to what her spiritual confidantes told her must be taken to be the will of God; to trust that in His own good time He would make her vocation sure; in such confidence to find relief, and to throw herself meanwhile into the round of immediate duties. But the more she struggled, the more she failed. She could not subdue the imperious longing to be up and doing which surged within her. “The thoughts and feelings that I have now,” she wrote, “I can remember since I was six years old. It was not that I made them. A profession, a trade, a necessary occupation, something to fill and employ all my faculties, I have always felt essential to me, I have always longed for, consciously or not. During a middle part of my life, college education, acquirement, I longed for, but that was temporary. The first thought I can remember, and the last, was nursing work; and in the absence of this, education work, but more the education of the bad than of the young. But for this I had had no education myself.” Finding no outlet in active reality, she lived more than ever in a land of dreams. “Everything has been tried,” she exclaimed to herself; “foreign travel, kind friends, everything.” And again, “My God! what is to become of me?” Eighteen months before she had resolved on a great effort to crucify her old self, “to break through the habits, entailed upon me by an idle life, of living, not in the present world of action, but in a future one of dreams. Since then nations have passed before me, but have brought no new life to me. In my 31st year I see nothing desirable but death.” She was perishing, as she put it, for want of food; and she could find no impulse to activity. Her habit of late rising grew upon her; for what had she to wake for? “Starvation does not lead a man to exertion, it only weakens him. O weary days, O evenings that seem never to end! For how many long years, I have watched that drawing-room clock and thought it would never reach the ten! And for 20 or 30 more years to do this!” And again, “Oh, how I am to get through[107] this day, to talk through all this day, is the thought of every morning.… This is the sting of death. Why do I wish to leave this world? God knows I do not expect a heaven beyond, but that He would set me down in St. Giles's, at a Kaiserswerth, there to find my work and my salvation in my work.”

Such cries from the heart, cries for the food for which she was hungering and which her parents could or would not let her take, filled many a sheet of Florence Nightingale's diaries, letters, and memoranda. “Mountains of difficulties,” as she says in one place, were “piled up” around her. Looking forward to a New Year (1851) she could see nothing in front of her but the same unsatisfying routine. “The next three weeks,” she said, in one of her written colloquies with herself, “you will have company; then a fortnight alone; then a few weeks of London, then Embley; then perhaps go abroad; then three months of company at Lea Hurst; next the same round of Embley company.” And then, with a humorous transition not infrequent in her musings, she asks, “But why can't you get up in the morning? I have nothing I like so much as unconsciousness, but I will try.” As the year advanced a more decided spirit of revolt begins to appear in her diaries. One of her perplexities hitherto had been a doubt whether the “mountains of difficulties” were to be taken as occasions for submission to God's will, or whether they were piled up in order to try her patience and her resolve, and were to be surmounted by some initiative of her own. She now began to interpret God's will in the latter sense. “I must take some things,” she wrote on Whitsunday (June 8, 1851), “as few as I can, to enable me to live. I must take them, they will not be given me; take them in a true spirit of doing Thy will, not of snatching them for my own will. I must do without some things, as many as I can, which I could not have without causing more suffering than I am obliged to cause any way.” She would cease looking for the sympathy and understanding of her mother and sister. “I have been so long treated as a child and have so long allowed[108] myself to be treated as a child.” She would submit to such tutelage no longer.

Various plans had at different times found place in her dreams. She would collect funds for founding a sisterhood, an institution, a hospital; but one thing she saw clearly and consistently. If she were ever to have an opportunity of doing good work in nursing or otherwise in service to the poor, she must first learn her business. There is a long letter of 1850 from her to her father in which she argues the point, not specifically with reference to herself, but as a general proposition. Something more than good intention is necessary in order to do good. Philanthropy is a matter of skill, and an apprenticeship in it is necessary. An opportunity occurred sooner than she had dared to hope which enabled her to serve such an apprenticeship. Her sister was still in bad health, and a visit to Carlsbad was again proposed. She insisted on being allowed to start with her mother and her sister, and to spend at Kaiserswerth the time that they would spend upon the cure and subsequent travels.

She reached Kaiserswerth early in July and stayed there as an inmate of the Institution until October 8.

Kaiserswerth is an ancient town on the Rhine, on the right bank, six miles below Düsseldorf. In its Church of the twelfth century a reliquary is shown, in which are preserved the bones of St. Suitbertus, who came there from Ireland to preach the Gospel in 710. Eleven centuries later, a Protestant pastor of Kaiserswerth repaid the debt to the British Isles by founding the famous Institution for Deaconesses which was now to give Florence Nightingale an important part of her training. The order of deaconesses, as she was careful to point out in her account of Kaiserswerth, was known in the Primitive Church; and long before St. Vincent de Paul established the Sisters of Mercy in 1633, Protestant communities had in 1457 organized “Presbyterae,” since “many women chose a single state, not because they expected thereby to reach a super-eminent degree of[109] holiness, but that they might be better able to care for the sick and young.” It was in 1823–24 that the young pastor of Kaiserswerth, Theodor Fliedner, set out on a journey to Holland and England to beg for funds to relieve his parish, which had been ruined by the failure of a silk-mill. In England, the little Princess Victoria headed his list of subscribers. In London he met Mrs. Elizabeth Fry and was greatly impressed with her work in Newgate. Shortly after his return he founded (1826) the Rhenish-Westphalian Prison Association. Presently he met a kindred spirit in Friederike Münster, a woman in comparatively easy circumstances who was devoting herself to reformatory work. They married, and in 1833—in a tiny summer-house in the pastor's garden—a refuge was opened for the reception of a single discharged prisoner. Three years later, they added, on an equally modest scale at first, an Infant School, and a Hospital in which to train volunteer-nurses as deaconesses. From these humble beginnings has grown a great congeries of institutions, the fame of which has spread throughout the philanthropic world. There are thirty branch or daughter houses in various parts of Germany. They are to be found also at Jerusalem, Alexandria, Cairo, Beirut, Smyrna, and Bucharest. “Not only its own daughter houses, but all independent institutions for deaconesses, owe their existence to Kaiserswerth, for all subsequent work wrought by deaconesses whether in France, Switzerland, or America, whether Lutheran, Methodist, or Episcopalian, has been the fruit of the Kaiserswerth tree.”[55]

But the forest began as a tiny acorn. Pastor Fliedner started his work not with grandiose schemes or full-fledged programmes, but with individual cases and personal devotion. This was a point to which Miss Nightingale called particular attention in her account of the place. “It is impossible not to observe,” she said, “how different was the beginning from the way in which institutions are generally founded—a list of subscribers with some royal and noble names at the head—a double column of rules and regulations—a collection of great names begin (and end) most new enterprises. The[110] regulations are made without experience. Honorary members abound, but where are the working ones? The scheme is excellent, but what are the results?” Miss Nightingale's intensely practical genius had ever a holy horror of prospectuses. In some notes written on June 15, 1848, I find this passage:—

A few years were to pass, and Florence Nightingale herself was to begin her work in the world not with a programme, but with a deed.

The institutions of Kaiserswerth, when she was there in 1851, were still on a comparatively modest scale. They comprised, as she enumerates them, a Hospital (with 100 beds), an Infant School, a Penitentiary (with 12 inmates), an Orphan Asylum, and a Normal School for schoolmistresses. There were in all 116 deaconesses, of whom 94 were “consecrated,” the remainder being still on probation. The “consecration” consisted only of “a solemn blessing in the Church, without vows of any kind.” Of the 116 deaconesses, 67 were on service in other parts of Germany, or abroad; the rest were engaged in working the various institutions at Kaiserswerth itself. After six months' trial they received a modest salary, just enough to provide their clothes. There was no other reward, except that the Mother House stood open to receive those who might fall ill or become infirm in its service. Everything was clean and well ordered, but there was no luxury; the board was simple to the verge of roughness. The place was pervaded by two notes. It was a place of[111] training, and a place of consecrated service. The training was both in practice and by precept. Every week the pastor gave a conversational lecture to the deaconesses, finding out from each the difficulties she might have experienced in her work, and suggesting how they could best be met. The education of the young, the ministration of the sick, the art of district visiting, the yet more difficult work of rescue and reformation, all were taught.

In such a place as this, Florence Nightingale found by actual experience, as already she had learnt to expect from reading the reports, the realization in some degree of her most earnest desires. The training in nursing was, it is true, not particularly good; it fell far short of the professional standard which the Nightingale School was afterwards to set up. She objected strongly in later years to current statements that her own training was confined to Kaiserswerth. “The nursing there,” she wrote, “was nil. The hygiene horrible. The hospital was certainly the worst part of Kaiserswerth. I took all the training that was to be had—there was none to be had in England, but Kaiserswerth was far from having trained me.” On the other hand “the tone was excellent, admirable. And Pastor Fliedner's addresses were the very best I ever heard. The penitentiary out-door work and vegetable gardening under a very capable Sister were excellently adapted to the case. And Pastor Fliedner's solemn and reverential teaching to us of the sad events of hospital life was what I have never heard in England.”[56] But here, at Kaiserswerth, Miss Nightingale found “a better life for women,” a scope for the exercise of “morally active” powers. And here, though the field was limited, was provided in some sort the training which alone could fit women for larger responsibilities elsewhere. Here was “the service of man” organized as “the service of God”; here was opportunity for the Dedicated Life, as she had found it also in the Trinità de' Monti.

Her manner of life at Kaiserswerth and her joy in it were told in letters to her mother:—

The room in which Miss Nightingale slept during her residence at Kaiserswerth was in the Orphan Asylum. She took her meals with the Deaconesses. The Spartan severity, but no less the beautiful spirit of the place, were clear in her recollection nearly half a century later. In 1897 the authorities of the British Museum applied to her for a copy of the pamphlet on Kaiserswerth which she had printed in 1851. The pencilled note which she sent with a torn copy of the pamphlet, the only one she could find, is preserved in the Museum Library. “I was twice in training there myself,” she wrote (September 24, 1897). “Of course[113] since then, Hospital and District nursing have made giant strides. Indeed District nursing has been invented. But never have I met with a higher tone, a purer devotion, than there. There was no neglect. It was the more remarkable because many of the Deaconesses had been only peasants—none were gentlewomen (when I was there). The food was poor. No coffee but bean-coffee. No luxury; but cleanliness.” Pastor Fliedner told a visitor to Kaiserswerth that “no person had ever passed so distinguished an examination, or shown herself so thoroughly mistress of all she had to learn, as Miss Nightingale.”[57]

Happy as Miss Nightingale was at Kaiserswerth, there was yet one thing lacking. She wished, it is true, for no other earth; she had found her pictured heaven; her life was full and rich. Yet with all her self-reliance, and even in the moment of first victory in her long struggle for self-expression, she yearned, woman-like, for sympathy. Nay, and not only woman-like. “Not till we can think,” said Carlyle, “that here and there one is thinking of us, one is loving us, does this waste earth become a peopled garden.” It was not enough to Florence that she should have had her way and that her parents should have acquiesced. Her loving heart craved for their positive sympathy; her mind, half leaning for all its masterfulness, demanded that what she had decided should be accepted by those dear to her as their choice also. “I should be as happy here,” she wrote to her mother (August 31), “as the day is long, if I could hope that I had your smile, your blessing, your sympathy upon it; without which I cannot be quite happy. My beloved people, I cannot bear to grieve you. Life and everything in it that charms you, you would sacrifice for me; but unknown to you is my thirst, unseen by you are waters which would save me. To save me, I know would be to bless yourselves, whose love for me passes the love of women. Oh how shall I show you love and gratitude in return, yet[114] not so perish that you chiefly would mourn! Give me time, give me faith. Trust me, help me. I feel within me that I could gladden your loving hearts which now I wound. Say to me, ‘Follow the dictates of that spirit within thee.’ Oh my beloved people, that spirit shall never lead me to anything unworthy of one who is yours in love.”[58] But her mother and her sister, though they loved and admired her, or perhaps from their point of view because they did so, were unable to give any such active sympathy as that for which she craved. Her sister hoped that the visit to Kaiserswerth would be only an episode. It was a good thing, she had written to her mother, for Florence to go there, “as we can get her back sooner to Lea Hurst.” To Florence herself she wrote affectionately, but yet with gentle irony. She sent a lively letter describing in detail the birth of a friend's twins: “I tell you, as you are going to be a sage femme, I suppose.” Mrs. Nightingale, for her part, had acquiesced in the visit to Kaiserswerth, but was already wondering what people would think of her daughter's escapade. “I have not mentioned to any one,” wrote Florence (July 16), “where I am, and should also be very sorry that the old ladies should know. With regard, however, to your fear of what people will say, the people whose opinion you most care about, it has been their earnest wish for years that I should come here. The Bunsens (I know he wishes one of his own daughters would come), the Bracebridges, the Sam Smiths, Lady Inglis, the Sidney Herberts, the Plunketts, all wish it; and I know that others—Lady Byron, Caroline Bathurst, Mr. Tremenheere, Mr. Rich (whose opinions however I have not asked)—would think it a very desirable thing for everybody.… With regard to telling people the fact (afterwards) of my having been here, I can see no difficulty. The Herberts, as you know, even commissioned me to do something for them here. The fact itself will pain none of them.” Mr. and Mrs. Herbert, who were at Homburg, presently paid her a visit at Kaiserswerth.

Mrs. Nightingale and her elder daughter reached Cologne[115] on their way home in October 1851, and there Florence rejoined them. “Our dear child Florence,” wrote the mother to Madame Mohl (October 9), “came to us yesterday, and is gone this morning to visit certain Deaconesses and others. I long to be at home and among our people. Daily and hourly I congratulate myself that our home is where it is. Oh what a land of justice and freedom and all good things it is, compared to what we have seen, and how surprising that with all our advantages and our freedom won we should not be so much better than other people. Well, I hope Florence will be able to apply all the fine things she has been learning, to do a little to make us better. Parthe and I are much too idle to help and too apt to be satisfied with things as they are.”

[116]

Who would be free, themselves must strike the blow.—Byron.

The three months which Miss Nightingale spent at Kaiserswerth in 1851 were a turning-point in her career, but they were not immediately effectual in altering the tenor of her life. The battle for freedom was not yet completely won; but the “mountains of difficulty” in her way had been turned, and henceforth the resistance offered to her was but a rear-guard action.

A note of serenity, in marked contrast to the storm and distress of earlier years, now appears in some of her letters. She had firmly resolved on taking her life into her own hands; and at Kaiserswerth she had already served some apprenticeship. She was resolved no less firmly to follow up the advantage; and, though there were still to be some difficulties ahead, she could afford to be patient for a while:—

There were various reasons for the comparative serenity of Miss Nightingale's mind during this period of pause. One[118] was the obvious call of filial duty for the moment. Her father was in poor health, and had been advised to take the water-cure under Dr. Johnson at Umberslade Park, in Worcestershire. Florence, being herself convalescent at the time from an attack of the measles, was the more ready to companion her father. She was at Umberslade with him for some weeks at the beginning, and again at the end, of the year. Her observation of some of the patients there, as in a former year at Malvern, was the origin of an epigrammatic definition which I find in one of her note-books: “The water-cure: a highly popular amusement within the last few years amongst athletic invalids who have felt the tedium vitae, and those indefinite diseases which a large income and unbounded leisure are so well calculated to produce.” Then, again, towards the end of the year, her kinswoman, “Aunt Evans,” was smitten down. She was the sister of her father's mother, and died at the age of ninety. Florence attended her in her last illness, and as emergency-man made all the arrangements for her funeral. George Eliot was, I believe, distantly connected with “Aunt Evans's” family; and it was in this year that she and Florence met. “I had a note from Miss Florence Nightingale yesterday,” wrote George Eliot in July 1852; “I was much pleased with her. There is a loftiness of mind about her which is well expressed by her form and manner.”[59] Florence also at this time called upon Mrs. Browning, who in a letter to a friend, three years later, said: “I remember her face and her graceful manner and the flowers she sent me afterwards. She is an earnest, noble woman.”[60] In August 1852 Miss Nightingale visited Ireland, and inspected the Dublin hospitals, somewhat, it seems, to her disappointment. She went in September with her father to stay with Sir James Clark, Queen Victoria's physician, at Birk Hall, near Ballater. She always got on well, as we have just heard, with medical men, and the opportunity of discussing her plans and thoughts with so eminent a physician must have pleased her greatly.

[119]

The letter to her father, given above, refers to Miss Nightingale's “Works”; and herein is to be found a second explanation of this peaceful interlude in her life. She had, as I have said, renounced a literary career; but she drew a sharp distinction between what she called literature for its own sake, and writing as subservient to action. She was intensely anxious to find some theological sanction, less assailable than she deemed the popular creeds to be, for her religion of practical service. Again, as I have also said, she was determined to open up a new sphere of usefulness for women. These were the subjects of her “Works,” which comprised “a Novel” and a book on “Religion.” Of the novel, no manuscript has been found among her papers. But in one of three volumes of Suggestions for Thought, which she printed privately in 1860, there is a section entitled “Cassandra,” dealing with the life at home of an ordinary English gentlewoman. It may be conjectured that the form of the novel was abandoned after 1852, and the theme treated instead in the pages of “Cassandra.” The manuscript book on “Religion” was doubtless enlarged between 1852 and 1860 into the main portion of the Suggestions for Thought, of which the first volume was dedicated “To the Artizans of England.”

Already in 1851, in a sheet of good resolutions, Miss Nightingale had planned to devote some portion of her life at home to giving “a new religion to the Tailors.” The hero of Alton Locke, published in 1850, was, it will be remembered, a tailor. Miss Nightingale herself had some acquaintance with operatives in the North of England and in London, “among those of what are called ‘Holyoake's party.’”[61] She met these latter through Mr. Edward Truelove, whom some readers of earlier generations may still remember as a publisher and vendor of radical and “free-thinking” literature. “The Literary and Scientific Institution” in John Street, Fitzroy Square, was in the 'forties the headquarters of Owenite Socialists, the Secularists[120] (whose chief prophet was George Jacob Holyoake) and other “advanced” persons. In 1846 Mr. Truelove had come up from “Harmony Hall,” the Owenite community at Tytherley in Hampshire, to act as Secretary of the Institution in John Street; and in a small house next door he set up his shop—afterwards removed, successively, to the Strand and High Holborn. A west-end lady, who did not at first give her name, used to pay occasional visits to the shop in John Street, and have long conversations with the wife of the proprietor. The lady was Miss Nightingale, and the acquaintance developed into a friendship with Mrs. Truelove, which extended over many years. Mr. Truelove was an unworldly man, conducting his affairs with entire disregard for “business principles,” conventional opinions, and constituted authorities. His shop, as Mr. Holyoake said, was one of the “fortresses of prohibited thought, not garrisoned without daring”; and provisioned, it may be added, scantily enough. Miss Nightingale continued to see Mrs. Truelove from time to time in later years; wrote to her occasionally; sent her books and various presents regularly; and in times of her husband's difficulties and (literally) trials, never withheld sympathy.

Miss Nightingale's object, in her first expeditions to John Street, had been to discover and discuss the kind of literature affected by the more intelligent working-men. The conclusion at which she arrived was that “the most thinking and conscientious of the artizans have no religion at all.”[62] She set to work, accordingly, to find a new religion for them. In this undertaking she took much counsel with one of her aunts. This was “Aunt Mai,” her father's sister, Mary Shore, married to Mr. Samuel Smith, her mother's brother. A large number of her letters on religious subjects was preserved by Miss Nightingale. They show spiritual insight, and a considerable talent in speculative thought. The postscript of Miss Nightingale's letter to her father, given above, contains one of the fundamental ideas in her scheme of theology—the idea of Perfect Goodness, willing that mankind shall create mankind by man's own experience. The same idea was suggested by Aunt Mai when she wrote[121] to her niece: “The purpose of God is to accomplish the welfare of man, not as a gift from Him, but as to be attained for each individual and for the whole race by the right exercise of the capabilities of each.”

During 1851 and 1852 aunt and niece corresponded at great length on these high matters, and by the end of the latter year Miss Nightingale had her new religion ready for the criticism of her friends. “Many thanks,” she wrote (Nov. 19) to her cousin Hilary, “for your letter of corrections and annotations, all of which I have adopted. I should much like to have a regular talk with you about the Novel. I have not the least idea whether I shall have to remodel the Novel and ‘Religion’ entirely; for I am so sick of it that I lose all discrimination about the ensemble and the form.” Her object is explained in a letter of about the same date to another friend:—

Lord Houghton read the manuscript attentively, and did not forget it. Several years later, when Miss Nightingale was ill, and thought likely to die, he wrote to her suggesting that if she had made no other arrangements for the preservation and possible publication of her essay, she might think of entrusting it to him. “I have often thought,” he said (March 11, '61), “of asking you what you meant to do with the papers you have written on social and speculative subjects. They surely should not be destroyed; and yet I hardly know to whom you will entrust them, who would not misunderstand, misinterpret, and misuse them. If you were to leave them in my hands, they would be, at any rate,[122] safe from irreverent handling or crude exposure, and could be used in any way more or less future that you might think fit.” By that time, however, the work had been submitted to the judgment of other men of letters; and to that later period further reference to the subject had better be postponed.

The formulating of a religion, whether for the tailors or others, is no short task, and Miss Nightingale's “Works” must have well filled her mind during otherwise unoccupied hours in 1852. But the “Works” were only bye-work. Her main concern was to continue her apprenticeship in nursing. Some vexatious delays and difficulties were still to be encountered, but she faced them with a brighter confidence than before, and the last stage of the struggle wears an aspect more of comedy than of tragedy. She had successfully asserted her independence once in going to Kaiserswerth. In an imaginary dialogue with her mother, she makes herself say, “Why, my dear, you don't suppose that with my ‘talents’ and my ‘European reputation’ and my ‘beautiful letters,’ and all that, I'm going to stay dangling about my mother's drawing-room all my life! I shall go and look out for work, to be sure. You must look upon me as your son. I should have cost you a great deal more if I had married or been a son. You must now consider me married or a son. You were willing to part with me to be married.” In presenting the case in this light to her parents, Florence had now a valuable ally in her Aunt Mai. Something of a diplomatist, as well as of a philosopher, was within the powers of that excellent woman. Without any interference which could be resented, by insinuating a word here, suggesting a phrase there, and pouring oil upon troubled waters everywhere, Aunt Mai did a good deal to smooth the last stages in her niece's struggle for independence.

Like all good diplomatists, the aunt sought first for a basis of compromise. She was able to sympathize with both sides. She was wholly favourable to her niece's aspirations and claims. But as a mother herself, she could enter into the case of her brother and his wife. It was not[123] that they were selfishly obstructive; it was that, finding so much interest and enjoyment themselves in their own way of life, they desired in all love that the daughter should not deprive herself of the same privileges. But could not a compromise be arranged? Let it be agreed that Florence should spend part of each year in pursuit of what the mother considered her daughter's fancies, and spend another part at home. This was the arrangement which was in fact now in force.

The compromise served well enough for a while, but Florence wanted something more; and here, again, Aunt Mai's diplomacy prepared the way. With a good strategic eye, she saw that Mrs. Nightingale held the key of the position. Mr. Nightingale in his heart was at one with Florence. He admired her and believed in her; he was quite willing that she should go her own way, and was not reluctant to make her some independent allowance, such as would enable her to conduct a mission or an institution. But, as he said to his sister, whenever he broached anything of the kind to his wife and elder daughter, he found them united against him. Mr. Nightingale was one of those amiable men who are inclined to take the line of least resistance. It was Mrs. Nightingale's opposition, therefore, that had to be overcome. “Your mother,” reported the aunt, “would, I believe, be most willing that you undertake a mission like Mrs. Fry or Mrs. Chisholm,[64] but she thinks it necessary for your peace and well-being that there should be a Mr. Fry or Captain Chisholm to protect you, and in conscience she thinks it right to defend you from doing anything which she thinks would be an impediment to the existence of Mr. F. or Captain C.” A good many mothers, even in these days, will, I doubt not, be on Mrs. Nightingale's side. But Aunt Mai, having made her sister-in-law define the position, pressed the advantage in an ingenious way. Florence was already thirty-two; and a time comes soon after that age when even the most sanguine mother begins to despair. It was agreed, accordingly, that “at some future specified age” Florence[124] should be free to do the work of a Mrs. Fry or a Mrs. Chisholm without the protection of a Mr. F. or a Captain C. There was even some talk of obtaining a written agreement to that effect, specifying the age; but Aunt Mai thought better of such a plan, and contented herself with calling in another witness to the verbal understanding. This was the lady—Mrs. Bracebridge—who two years later was to accompany Miss Nightingale on a mission more renowned even than that of Mrs. Fry or Mrs. Chisholm. But from the point gained by Aunt Mai's diplomacy and Florence's own persistence, a logical consequence followed. Presently, at some future unspecified age, Florence was to be free to control some philanthropic institution; but what would be the use of being free to do so, unless she were also trained and qualified?

Having lived and learnt among the Protestant Deaconesses in Germany, Miss Nightingale was next determined to do the like among the Catholic Sisters in France. She sought the good offices of Manning, whose acquaintance she had made in Rome five years before, and who had now lately been received into the Roman Communion. Manning put himself into communication with his friend, the Abbé Des Genettes, in Paris. The Abbé obtained leave from the Council of the Sisters of Charity for the English lady to study their institutions. It had been explained to him that Miss Nightingale was also desirous of studying the hospitals in Paris. The Abbé accordingly selected a House belonging to the Sisters which would offer every advantage in this respect. Her cousin, Miss Hilary Bonham Carter, who was intent on the study of art and had been invited to stay with M. and Madame Mohl, was to accompany her to Paris; and Lady Augusta Bruce was also to be of the party. It was in the salon of Madame Mohl that Lady Augusta met her future husband, Dean Stanley.

Thus, then, it had been arranged. The necessary authorization from the Sisters had been obtained in September. The start was to be made in November. But as the time approached, Mrs. Nightingale drew back. She wrote[125] of the plan, not as something agreed upon, but as a new proposition. “I am afraid,” she said to Aunt Mai, “that Flo is thinking of some new expedition, perhaps to Paris. I cannot make up my mind to it.” Florence was staying at a friend's house in London. Her father came in, and reported that her mother was greatly distressed. There was company coming to Embley, and could Florence have the heart to leave her mother? “Parthe would be in hysterics.” Every one would be in despair. Could she not delay? An aged kinswoman, moreover, was ill, as already related. Florence yielded, perhaps more to this last consideration than to the others, and the start was postponed. There was a lingering hope that the expedition to Paris might be abandoned, and a suggestion was made to that end. Why must Florence go to the Sisters, and Roman Catholic Sisters, too—abroad? Why should she not stay at home, and conduct some small institution on her own account? There was a house available for such a purpose at Cromford Bridge, close to their own Lea Hurst, and Mr. Nightingale would provide the necessary funds. In this way the best might be made of both worlds—of theirs, and of hers. Florence was touched, but remained of her own mind:—

Miss Nightingale refused Cromford Bridge House: it[126] was most unsuitable for the purpose; the only more unsuitable place was the “Forest Lodge” at Embley, which her sister Parthe had suggested. In the following year, Florence joined the Sisters of Charity in Paris. And thus, after many struggles and delays, was she launched upon her true work in the world.

[127]

F. W. H. Myers.

The institution in which Florence Nightingale was to serve her apprenticeship in Paris was the Maison de la Providence, belonging to the Sœurs de la Charité in the Rue Oudinot (No. 5), Faubourg St. Germain. The Abbé Des Genettes described in a letter to Manning the attractions which it would offer to his protegée. The principal House, managed by twenty Sisters, received nearly two hundred poor orphans, and also conducted a crêche. A hospital was attached to it, next door, for aged and sick women. Within ten minutes' walk Miss Nightingale would find two other hospitals, one a general hospital, the other a children's hospital. The English demoiselle would conform, in accordance with her desire, to the rules of the House as a postulante, rendering all necessary service to the sick. The only restrictions were that she would not be able to enter the refectory or the dormitory of the Sisters. She would have to sleep and take her meals in her own room. But she would be free to visit the poor in company with the Sisters, to serve the sick under their direction in various hospitals and infirmaries, and to assist in the care of the orphans alike in class and at play.

Such was the life in Paris to which Miss Nightingale was looking forward eagerly. She left London for Paris on February 3, 1853, with her cousin, Miss Bonham Carter, and[128] they stayed with M. and Madame Mohl in the Rue du Bac. Before entering the Maison de la Providence, Miss Nightingale desired to visit and study other institutions in Paris. She was armed with a comprehensive permit from the Administration Générale de l'Assistance Publique to study in all the hospitals of the city. She availed herself indefatigably of this permission, spending her days in inspecting hospitals, infirmaries, and religious houses, and having the advantage of seeing the famous Paris surgeons at their work. Now, as at all times, she was a diligent collector and student of reports, returns, statistics, pamphlets. Among her papers of this date are elaborately tabulated analyses of hospital organization and nursing arrangements both in France and in Germany, and a circular of questions bearing on the same subjects which she seems to have addressed to the principal institutions in the United Kingdom. Her evenings were spent in company with her host and hostess. There were soirées dansantes in the Rue du Bac. She went once or twice with Madame Mohl to balls elsewhere, and also to the opera. She met many English visitors and distinguished Parisians. Having completed her general inquiries into the Paris hospitals, she presented herself to the Reverend Mother of the Maison de la Providence, and had arranged a day for her admission, when she was suddenly recalled to England by the illness of her grandmother, who died at the age of ninety-five. “Great has been the occasion for Flo's usefulness,” wrote Mr. Nightingale to his wife. And “I shall never be thankful enough,” wrote Florence herself to her cousin in Paris, “that I came. I was able to make her be moved and changed, and to do other little things which perhaps smoothed the awful passage, and which perhaps would not have been done as well without me.” A family event of a different kind interested Miss Nightingale at this time. Her cousin Blanche Shore Smith had become engaged to Arthur Hugh Clough. Miss Nightingale greatly liked him. As a long engagement seemed likely, Miss Nightingale interested herself in the future of the young couple; discussing the proper limits of parental allowances in such matters; drawing up elaborately detailed estimates of household expenditure,[129] not forgetting to include future charges for a young family, as by the statistics of the average birth-rate they might be calculated. Statistics were already almost a passion with her.

Negotiations were now on foot for Miss Nightingale to take charge of a benevolent institution in London, and Madame Mohl advised her to keep in their places the great ladies who were concerned in it. Neither now, nor at any time, was she much in love with committees, but not every word in the following account of the negotiations need be taken very seriously:—

What specially annoyed Miss Nightingale was that some of the fashionable ladies in the course of gossip had begun to wonder whether her appointment would have the approval of her family. Some officious friend had suggested that “it would be cruel to take her away from her home.” This difficulty was disposed of by Miss Nightingale's assurance that the appointment would be submitted to the approval of her mother and father. Her father now agreed to make her an independent allowance, paid quarterly in advance. It was on a scale sufficiently liberal to enable her to offer her services to the Institution entirely gratuitously. She also agreed to pay all the charges (board and lodging included) of the matron (Mrs. Clarke), whom she was to bring with her. Another difficulty was then raised. The superintendent of a nursing-home ought to be present when the doctors went their rounds and when operations were performed. But would it be seemly for a gentlewoman[131] to do this? Miss Nightingale insisted, and an agreement was arrived at in April. She was to enter upon her duties as superintendent as soon as new premises had been secured, and meanwhile she was free to resume her studies in Paris.

She returned to Paris on May 30, and after a week spent with M. and Madame Mohl, during which she again inspected various hospitals, she entered the Maison de la Providence in the Rue Oudinot on June 8. From Paris she kept up correspondence with regard to the new premises for the institution in London. “The indispensable conditions of a suitable house are,” she wrote to Lady Canning (June 5), “first, that the nurse should never be obliged to quit her floor, except for her own dinner and supper, and her patients' dinner and supper (and even the latter might be avoided by the windlass we have talked about). Without a system of this kind, the nurse is converted into a pair of legs. Secondly, That the bells of the patients should all ring in the passage outside the nurse's own door on that story, and should have a valve which flies open when its bell rings, and remains open in order that the nurse may see who has rung.” The letter continues for some pages to describe other requirements—about a hot-water supply and the like; points which are now in the A B C of hospitals or nursing-homes, but which then were novel counsels of perfection. The idea of a lift, in particular, was new; inquiries were made by the ladies in various parts of the country, and there were many hitches before a suitable apparatus was installed. The correspondence is significant of the attention to practical detail which characterized all Miss Nightingale's work. Meanwhile her work with the Sisters of Charity among the poor came to a tiresome pause. The nurse had herself to be nursed. The nature of the calamity is described in a letter to Madame Mohl, who was paying visits in England at the time:—

[133]

M. Mohl required no comfort. Miss Nightingale's father wrote to thank him for his kindness to her. The kindness, he gallantly replied, was on her side in giving him the advantage of her society and conversation. “Her gentle manner,” he wrote (July 25), “covers such a depth and strength of mind and thought, that I am afraid of nothing for her, but that her health should fail her.”

Convalescence was rapid. On July 13 she returned to London, and a month later, on August 12, 1853, Miss Nightingale went into residence in her first “situation.” The place in question, already briefly described in one of her letters to Madame Mohl, was that of Superintendent of an “Establishment for Gentlewomen during Illness.” This institution had been founded a few years before, at 8 Chandos Street, Cavendish Square, to give medical assistance and a home to sick governesses and other gentlewomen of narrow means. It was managed by a Council, which in its turn appointed a “Committee of Ladies” and a “Committee of Gentlemen.” We need not trouble ourselves with the relations between the two committees, though they much troubled Miss Nightingale; but it is characteristic of the ideas of the time that the ladies made over to the gentlemen “all payments, contracts, and financial arrangements,” as also “the selection of medical officers and male servants.” Some years later Kinglake devoted several pages of his most elaborate satire to a comparison of the male pretensions and the female performances in their respective spheres in the hospitals of the Crimea; but on the present occasion Miss Nightingale found the ladies more difficult than the gentlemen. The institution had languished in Chandos Street. She was called in to give it new life. Suitable new premises had been found at No. 1 Upper Harley Street, and there Miss Nightingale lived, with a few brief intervals, until October 1854. She had also a pied-à-terre in some lodgings taken for her by her aunt in Pall Mall, where she occasionally saw her friends, and whither she resorted on Sunday mornings, in order not to scandalize the patients in Harley Street by being known[134] not to go to church. She had stipulated for extensive powers of control, and she was not one to let any agreed powers suffer diminution from desuetude. The ladies on the Council and the Committee included (besides Lady Canning already mentioned) Lady Ellesmere, Lady Cranworth, Lady Monteagle, Lady Caroline Murray, and others well known in the worlds of society and philanthropy. Miss Nightingale had her special friends and allies among them, such as Lady Canning and Lady Inglis, and Mrs. Sidney Herbert presently joined the Committee in order to lend her support. Since their meeting in Rome, Mrs. Herbert and Miss Nightingale had seen much of each other, for Wilton House was within calling distance of Embley. Miss Nightingale had assisted at the birth of one of Mrs. Herbert's children; and amongst Miss Nightingale's papers belonging to this period is a “Syllabus of Religious Teaching for a Girls' School,” which they had adapted from the Madre S. Colomba's lessons to girls. Mrs. Herbert now wrote from Wilton, offering to come up to a committee meeting: “I thought some wicked cats might be there who would set up their backs; and if so, I should like to have mine up too.” And, again: “I hope you will write to me, dearest Flo, should any little difficulties arise whilst we are out of town.”

Difficulties did arise in plenty, but Miss Nightingale was sometimes peremptory, and at other times showed herself a master in the gentle art of managing committees:—

By such arts, and by such readiness to shoulder responsibility, Miss Nightingale reduced chaos to order, and her management of the Institution won praise in all quarters. It was hard work, for the Lady Superintendent was here, there, and everywhere, shepherding those who had cure of souls, managing the nurses, assisting at operations, checking waste in the coal-cellar or the larder. When a thing wanted to be done, she did it herself. Mrs. Herbert[137] heard with anxiety that her friend had strained her back by lifting a patient, though she was suffering from lumbago at the time. There were smaller worries too. The British workman, and the British tradesman also, tried her sorely. “The chemists,” she wrote to her father, “sent me a bottle of ether labelled S. spirits of nitre, which, if I had not smelt it, I should certainly have administered, and should have had an inquiry into poisoning. And the whole flue of a new gas-stove came down the second time of using it, which, if I had not caught it in my arms, would certainly have killed a patient.” Then there were the anxieties necessarily incident to a nursing home. “We have had an awful disappointment,” she wrote to her father (1854), “in a couching for a cataract, which has failed. The eye is lost (through no fault of Bowman's), and I am left, after a most anxious watching, with a poor blind woman on my hands, whom we have blinded, and with a prospect of insanity. I had rather ten times have killed her. These are the cases, not those like the poor German who died, which make our lives so anxious.” What was afterwards to characterize her work in a larger field was already observed in Harley Street. It was the combination of masterful powers of organization with womanly gentleness and sympathy. Letters of gratitude, which she received from patients after their discharge from Harley Street, speak of her “unwearied and affectionate attention.” They were often addressed to her as “My good, dear, and faithful Friend,” or “My darling Mother.” And a friend and mother she was indeed to many of the young women who came under her care. She had a large and influential circle of friends and acquaintances, and she was indefatigable in finding convalescent homes or sympathetic care, or openings in the Colonies, for those who stood in need of such assistance. She was much interested in the scheme for Female Emigration, which Sidney Herbert had started in 1849, and in which he and his wife superintended every detail.[65]

Though the work was hard and the anxieties many, Miss Nightingale did not lose heart. “Our vocation is a difficult one,” she wrote to Miss Nicholson (Jan. 10, 1854), “as you,[138] I am sure, know; and though there are many consolations, and very high ones, the disappointments are so numerous that we require all our faith and trust. But that is enough. I have never repented nor looked back, not for one moment. And I begin the New Year with more true feeling of a happy New Year than ever I had in my life.” She had found her vocation. But her family had not yet quite fully accepted it. On their side there was still some looking back. Her father, indeed, took pride in his daughter's success, and the correspondence between them at this time is very pleasant. He was himself a county magistrate, concerned in the administration of hospitals and asylums; and he followed every move in his daughter's strategy with lively interest. He admired her masterfulness, but was not quite sure that she might not carry it too far. “You will have,” he wrote, “to govern by a representative system after all. In England we go this way to work, and a good way it is, for a good autocrat is only to be found at intervals. Despots do nothing in teaching others. Republicans keep teaching each other all day long.” He was most sympathetic in her difficulties, but he was not sure that those about him would be so. There is a postscript in one of his letters which tells a good deal between the lines: “Better write to me at the Athenæum so as not to excite inquiry.” Her mother and sister seem to have thought that while they were in London Florence might have lived at home, or, at any rate, have often been with them. Why should she be wearing herself out away from them? Their point of view was put by Madame Mohl, who was the affectionate friend of both sisters:—

Having at so great difficulty won her freedom, Florence clearly felt that any policy of half-and-half now might necessitate in the future a renewal of the struggle. Her sister was still in very delicate health, and Florence was advised, by the family doctor himself, that her visits involved much disturbing excitement. Besides, the work at Harley Street, if it was to be done efficiently, required constant residence and unremitting attention. And it was written: “He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me.”

In August 1854 Miss Nightingale took a few days' holiday at Lea Hurst, where Mrs. Gaskell, the authoress, was on a visit to Mr. and Mrs. Nightingale. It was then that Mrs. Gaskell wrote the description of Florence's personal appearance, which has already been given (p. 39). Mrs. Gaskell was struck no less by the beauty of her character. She gave a sketch of Miss Nightingale's career, and then continued: “Is it not like St. Elizabeth of Hungary? The efforts of her family to interest her in other occupations by allowing her to travel, etc.—but the clinging to one object! She must be a creature of another race, so high and angelic, doing things by impulse or some divine inspiration, not by effort and struggle of will. But she seems almost too holy to be talked about as a mere wonder. Mrs. Nightingale says with tears in her eyes (alluding to Andersen's Fairy Tales), that they are ducks, and have hatched a wild swan. She seems as completely led by God as Joan of Arc. I never heard of any one like her. It makes me feel the livingness of[140] God more than ever to think how straight He is sending His Spirit down into her as into the prophets and saints of old.…” And in another letter:[66] “I am glad that Miss—— likes North and South. I did not think Margaret was so over good. What would she say to Florence Nightingale? I can't imagine! for there is intellect such as I never came in contact with before in woman!—only twice in man—great beauty, and of her holy goodness who is fit to speak?” A famous writer has said of the saints, that the greatest and most helpful of them have always shown some wit or humour;[67] and of Florence Nightingale Mrs. Gaskell noted further: “She has a great deal of fun, and is carried along by that, I think. She mimics most capitally.”

Miss Nightingale cut short her holiday on hearing that an epidemic of cholera had broken out in London. She volunteered to give help with the cholera patients in the Middlesex Hospital. She was up day and night receiving the women patients—chiefly, it seems, outcasts in the district of Soho—undressing them, and ministering to them. The epidemic, however, subsided, and she returned to her normal work in Harley Street.

The work there did not fail within its appointed scope, but in another way the failure which Miss Nightingale had predicted in her letter to Madame Mohl soon became apparent. The scale of the undertaking was more restricted than Florence had desired, and she saw no means of widening it. She had wanted to receive patients of all classes, to enrol many volunteer nurses, to have opportunities for training them. Among a wide circle, both at home and abroad, her knowledge and her talents were well understood; and already, in her correspondence for a year or two past, she appears as a woman to whom reference was made as to one speaking with authority. A missionary in Paris applied to her for two well-qualified matrons. “Alas,” she had to reply, “I have no fish of that kind.” She was[141] making the most of her present opportunity, but it was narrow. Some of her friends had thought from the first that she was wasting her powers on unsuitable soil in Harley Street. Monckton Milnes, who paid a visit to Embley in December 1853, wrote to his wife: “They talk quite easily about Florence, but her position does not seem very suitable. I wish we could put her at the head of a Juvenile Reformatory.”[68] Her own primary object was to train nurses; and other friends—Mrs. Bracebridge among the number—advised her to leave Harley Street, since there she found no scope for so doing. King's College Hospital had just been rebuilt, and another friend, Miss Louisa Twining, opened negotiations in August 1854 for securing Miss Nightingale's appointment as Superintendent of Nurses there. Some of the medical men, who had been impressed at Harley Street with her rare combination of gifts, were most anxious that she should consent to take up such a post. Dr. William Bowman in particular strongly pressed her, and was confident that, if she agreed, he could get the appointment en train in the autumn. Miss Nightingale's mother and sister sought as strongly to dissuade her. The sister laid stress on Florence's “doubtful health.” The mother added objections on the score of the medical students. They both urged that, if she must do something of the kind, Great Ormond Street and work among children were more suitable and convenient. Florence herself was greatly drawn to King's College Hospital, and began devising plans, on the model of Kaiserswerth, for enrolling a staff of nurses among farmers' daughters.

But the immediate future hid in it another fate for Florence Nightingale. “Thy lot or portion in life,” said the Caliph Ali, “is seeking after thee; therefore be at rest from seeking after it.” So Miss Nightingale may have read in Emerson; and in homelier phrase her good Aunt Mai had said to her, “If you will but be ready for it, something is getting ready for you, and will be sure to turn up in time.” Which things Florence, I doubt not, laid up in her heart. When news began to arrive from the East, did she recall a prophecy which had been made about her by a friend long[142] before the Crimean War was dreamt of? Lady Lovelace, the daughter of Lord Byron, the “Ada sole daughter of my home and heart,” had, before her death in 1852, written a poem in honour of her friend, Florence Nightingale. I have quoted some of it already. The piece ends with a presage:—

Wordsworth.

[145]

Walt Whitman.

On September 20 the Battle of the Alma was fought, and the country, as Greville noted, was “in a fever of excitement.” The disembarkation of the allied British and French forces for the invasion of the Crimea had begun on the 14th. Their advance was not resisted until they reached the bank of the Alma, where the Russian commander was awaiting attack, in so strong a position that he was confident of victory. In less than three hours the allied troops had driven the enemy from every part of the ground. Lord Raglan, the Commander of the Forces, congratulated the troops on “the brilliant success that attended their unrivalled efforts in the battle, on which occasion they carried a most formidable position, defended by large masses of Russian infantry, and a most powerful and numerous artillery.” The river which the Russian commander had hoped to make the grave of the invaders became famous in the annals of British valour:—

Thou, on England's banners blazoned with the famous fields of old,
Shalt, where other fields are winning, wave above the brave and bold;
And our sons unborn shall nerve them for some great deed to be done,
By that twentieth of September, when the Alma's heights were won.
O thou river! dear for ever to the gallant, to the free,
Alma! roll thy waters proudly, proudly roll them to the sea!

Nearly forty years had passed since the British army[146] had been engaged in European warfare. The Battle of the Alma, though it disclosed little tactical skill, and though it was not followed up as it might have been, had at any rate shown the desperate courage of the British soldier. The note of exultation which inspired the verses of Archbishop Trench expressed the popular mood.

Presently there was a change. The number of killed and wounded was very large; but though many homes were thrown into mourning, it was felt, in the words of the official bulletin, that such a victory “could not be achieved without a considerable sacrifice.” The country did not at the time grudge the sacrifice; but Lord Raglan's dispatch was followed by another. The Crimean War was the first in which the “Special Correspondent” played a conspicuous part, and the dispatches sent to the Times by Mr. William Howard Russell availed even to overthrow a Ministry. In the Times of October 9, attention was drawn to the futility of the nursing arrangements on the British side. The old pensioners, who had been sent out for such service, were “not of the slightest use”; the soldiers had to “attend upon each other.” On the 12th a long letter from “Our Special Correspondent,” dated “Constantinople, September 30,” ended with the following passage:—

On the following day a further letter from the “Special Correspondent” was published. “It is impossible,” he wrote, “for any one to see the melancholy sights of the last few days without feelings of surprise and indignation at the deficiencies of our medical system. The manner in which the sick and wounded are treated is worthy only of the savages of Dahomey.… The worn-out pensioners who were brought as an ambulance corps are totally useless, and not only are surgeons not to be had, but there are no dressers or nurses to carry out the surgeon's directions, and to attend on the sick during the intervals between his visits. Here the French are greatly our superiors. Their medical arrangements are extremely good, their surgeons more numerous, and they have also the help of the Sisters of Charity, who have accompanied the expedition in incredible numbers.[69] These devoted women are excellent nurses.” These scathing attacks changed the mood of the country. There was still exultation in victory, and still readiness to pay its price; but the “Special Correspondent's” charges of neglect towards the sick and wounded raised a feeling of bitter resentment—of resentment against the authorities, but also of pity for the victims. The Times accompanied the “Special Correspondent's” letter on October 12 by a leading article, making appeal to its readers, who were[148] sitting comfortably at home, to bestir themselves, and render such help as might be possible to the soldiers in the East. A letter was published next day from Sir Robert Peel, who had enclosed £200 to start a fund for supplying the sick and wounded with comforts. Other contributions were quickly forthcoming, and on October 14 a letter was published asking: “Why have we no Sisters of Charity? There are numbers of able-bodied and tender-hearted English women who would joyfully and with alacrity go out to devote themselves to nursing the sick and wounded, if they could be associated for that purpose, and placed under proper protection.”

There were those among the ladies of England who had not waited to be stung into action by such appeals. On the first news of the failure of the British nursing arrangements, they had asked themselves whether they might not help, not merely by money, but by personal service. One of the first to move was Lady Maria Forester. She must have read and marked the letter in the Times on October 9, for already by October 11 she had placed herself in communication with Miss Nightingale, offering money to send out some trained nurses. “I was so anxious something should be done,” she said to Lady Verney, “that I would have gone myself, only I knew that I should not have been the slightest use.” Happily the minds of those who could be of the greatest use were moving in the same direction. If a party of women nurses were to be sent out to the East with any prospect of success, there were two persons in England whose co-operation was essential, and by fortunate chance they were personal friends.

One was Mr. Sidney Herbert, the Secretary at War. The preposition which I have placed in italics must be noted. The reader would not thank me for entering at length into all the intricacies of War Office organization, disorganization, and reorganization, which went on during the Crimean War, and have continued to our own day. But this much it is necessary to remember, that in 1854 there was a Secretary for War (the Duke of Newcastle) and a Secretary at War[149] (Mr. Sidney Herbert). The curious part of the arrangement was that the Secretary at War had nothing to do with war, as such; he was, technically, only a financial and accounting official. But Mr. Sidney Herbert, in the emergency created by the Crimean War, stepped courageously beyond the strict bounds of his office. He had already shown himself by many beneficent measures of practical reform to be the Soldiers' Friend. He was deeply interested, as we have heard (p. 80), in the care of the sick. He knew how over-worked was his colleague, the Duke of Newcastle, and in this matter of hospitals he assumed the position of volunteer delegate of the Secretary of State. “I wish,” wrote Mr. Gladstone to Monckton Milnes (Oct. 15, 1855), “that some one of the thousand who in prose justly celebrate Miss Nightingale would say a single word for the man of ‘routine’ who devised and projected her going.”[70] Lord Stanmore has said not a word, but a volume, in that sense; what was truly admirable was “the man of routine's” bold departure from routine. The employment of female nurses in the army was in this country entirely novel. It would probably excite some jealousy in the medical profession; it was sure to be criticized by the military men. The Cabinet had much else to think of. The Duke of Newcastle had more on his hands than any one human being could properly accomplish. Mr. Herbert, from his influence in the Cabinet, from his winning manner and general popularity, was the man to carry through the new departure. He had pondered long over the problems of nursing, both in military hospitals and in civil life. He could see no reason why a task, which in civil life was entrusted almost exclusively to women, should in the case of military hospitals be confined to men. The French Government had sent out fifty Sisters of Mercy. Mr. Herbert could see no reason why England should not do something of a like kind. He determined to make the experiment.

He was strengthened in his resolve by the fact that he was intimately acquainted with the character and the powers of the second indispensable person. He knew Miss Florence Nightingale. The preceding Part of this volume[150] has shown by “what circuit first” her life had been one long preparation for precisely such work as was now wanted. She and the Minister had read the dispatch in the Times with equal, if different, interest. To Mr. Herbert it came as a call for something to be done, if the Ministry were to avoid dangerous criticism; and to this motive, which must rightly actuate every Minister, there was added the conscience of a high-minded man, sincerely and eagerly anxious to do all that was possible to improve the treatment of the sick and wounded soldiers. To Miss Nightingale, as she read the dispatch, and the stirring appeal which accompanied it, the words came with something of the force of a call from Above. For nearly ten years of her life she had consciously yearned, and half-consciously for a much larger period, after ample scope in which to exercise her power of organization, and her desire to serve the sick and suffering. During many of those years she had been training herself so as to be ready to use her opportunity when it should occur. And here was the opportunity at hand, in which patriotism confirmed her personal aspirations. “God's good time” had come.

The minds of the Minister and of Miss Nightingale were kindled together. They reached the flash-point of action at almost an identical moment. Private initiative forestalled official overtures only by a few hours. Working in harmony, they carried the scheme into operation with an unparalleled rapidity.

Within two days of the publication of the dispatch from Constantinople, Miss Nightingale and her friends had made their plans. She submitted them to the Minister in the following letter addressed to his wife:—

This letter was posted on Saturday. Mr. Herbert had left London to spend Sunday at Bournemouth, and thence, unaware of the communication which was on its way to him from Miss Nightingale, he addressed the following letter to her:—

There was no hitch, such as Sidney Herbert half feared, from reluctance on the part of Miss Nightingale's parents. Her uncle, Mr. Samuel Smith (husband of her Aunt Mai, of whose helpfulness we have heard), had already half obtained their consent to her going as a volunteer. All hesitation was removed when the news came that she was asked to go by and for the Government itself:—

And to the same friend a day or two later:—[155]

Yes, and perhaps even the difficulties which affectionate solicitude had placed in Florence Nightingale's way might have been counted among her preparations for a task involving great power of will and determination.

Miss Nightingale saw Mr. Herbert on Monday, October 16, and the matter was arranged between them. Mrs. Sidney Herbert and the other ladies of the Harley Street Committee readily released their Superintendent. Her faithful friends, Mr. and Mrs. Bracebridge, agreed to accompany her. Mr. Herbert had assured Miss Nightingale of their willingness, without any previous consultation—a fine instance, surely, of friendly confidence. The Duke of Newcastle, who had some slight personal acquaintance with Miss Nightingale, and the other members of the Cabinet cordially approved the initiative of their colleague, and three days later Miss Nightingale received her official appointment and instructions:—

The instructions promised in this letter were duly sent to the Commander of the Forces, the Purveyor-in-Chief, and the Principal Medical Officer;[72] and the way was smoothed for Miss Nightingale, as they thought in Downing Street, by supplementary letters to some of the officials. A letter was sent to the Purveyor-General (Oct. 19), in which “Mr. Sidney Herbert trusts that you will use every endeavour to assist Miss Nightingale in the performance of the arduous duties she has voluntarily undertaken, the success of which must necessarily depend upon the assistance and co-operation of others, and cannot fail to be of great benefit to those Gallant Men who have suffered in the service of their country.” Similarly Sir Charles Trevelyan, Assistant-secretary to the Treasury, remarking that the commissariat officers are the bankers and stewards of the army, wrote, as he told Miss Nightingale (Oct. 20), “to Commissary-General Filder and Deputy-Commissary-General Smith, the Senior Officer at Scutari, to request that they will from the first give you all the support they are able, and instruct their officers of every grade to do the same.” Any difficulties which might confront her would not be caused, it seemed, by lack of support at home.

Private support was forthcoming as readily as official. Mr. Henry Reeve, an old friend of Miss Nightingale and her family, rejoicing that she had now “an opportunity of action worthy of her,” spoke to the great Delane, and requested him to direct Mr. Macdonald—who was being sent out to administer the Times Fund—to co-operate with Miss Nightingale. Mr. Macdonald was a man, as Mr. Reeve testified, and as Miss Nightingale was to discover—to the[158] great advantage of their common cause,—“of remarkable intelligence and activity.”

Two days after the receipt of her official instructions, five days after her interview with Mr. Herbert, Miss Nightingale and her party left London (Oct. 21). The amount of work which fell upon Miss Nightingale during the ten days (Oct. 12–21) was enormous, and some of the details she was obliged to delegate to others. The headquarters of the expedition during its outfit were established at Mr. Sidney Herbert's house in Belgrave Square, and there Miss Mary Stanley and Mrs. Bracebridge interviewed applicants. Miss Nightingale, foreseeing (only too truly, as the event was to show) the difficulty both of finding suitable women and of supervising them, was inclined to limit the number to twenty. Mr. Herbert, thinking that such a new departure should be made on a considerable scale, proposed a larger number, and Miss Nightingale gave way. Forty was the number agreed upon; but the material which offered itself was not promising. “Here we sit all day,” wrote Miss Stanley; “I wish people who may hereafter complain of the women selected could have seen the set we had to choose from. All London was scoured for them. We sent emissaries in every direction to every likely place.… We felt ashamed to have in the house such women as came. One alone expressed a wish to go from a good motive. Money was the only inducement.”[73] Ultimately thirty-eight nurses were obtained.

Mr. Herbert, in the concluding passage of his Instructions, relied on Miss Nightingale's vigilance to prevent religious “tampering.” This was an instruction which she had discussed with him, for she foresaw (again only too well) the odium theologicum that might confront her. She was primarily concerned to get the best nurses as such, but she was anxious also that the different churches or shades should be represented. In this desire she was in large measure disappointed. Application was made both to St. John's House, an institution inclined towards Tractarianism, and to the Protestant Institution for Nurses in Devonshire Square. In each case the answer was returned that nurses[159] could only be supplied if they were to be subject to their own Committees; the Government's condition of subjection to Miss Nightingale's control was rejected. The authorities of St. John's House proposed that their nurses should be accompanied by the Master of the House, to act as “their guardian.” It will readily be imagined how impossible Miss Nightingale's position would have been on such terms. The proposal shows incidentally how little some people understood of the conditions of discipline necessary in a military hospital. Mr. Sidney Herbert, the Chaplain-General of the Forces, and Miss Nightingale met the Council of St. John's House; the point of Miss Nightingale's exclusive control was conceded, and the Master stayed at home. The Lady Superior of St. John's House at this time was Miss Mary Jones, who to the end of her life remained one of the most valued and tenderly devoted of Miss Nightingale's friends.[74] The authorities in Devonshire Square, on the other hand, would not surrender the point of separate control, and accordingly no nurses were supplied by the distinctively Protestant institution. “We are only vexed,” wrote Lady Verney, “because Flo so earnestly desired to include all shades of opinion, to prove that all, however they differed, might work together in a common brotherhood of love to God and man.”

The party, as ultimately recruited, was composed of ten Roman Catholic Sisters (five from Bermondsey and five from Norwood), eight Anglican Sisters (from Miss Sellon's Home at Devonport), six nurses from St. John's House, and fourteen from various English hospitals. It has often been supposed that the nurses who accompanied Miss Nightingale were ladies of gentle birth, but, with a few exceptions, this was not the case. On the eve of their departure, the nurses were addressed by Mr. Herbert in his dining-room. He told them that if any desired to turn back, now was the time of decision, and he impressed upon them that all who went were bound implicitly to obey Miss Nightingale in all things. “All started on their ways,” we are told,[75] “strengthened[160] by his heart-stirring words, and cheered no less by the sunny brightness of his presence than by his kindly and unfailing sympathy.” Unhappily the effect was not in all cases permanent, as we shall hear.

“Do not answer this,” wrote a Minister to Miss Nightingale; “for I am sure you must have more on your hands now than a Secretary of State.” But what struck those about her was her perfect calm. “No one is so well fitted as she to do such work,” wrote Lady Canning to Lady Stuart de Rothesay (Oct. 17); “she has such nerve and skill, and is so wise and quiet. Even now she is in no bustle and hurry, though so much is on her hands, and such numbers of people volunteer services.” She had only one worry. Her pet owl had died. When her family were leaving Embley to see her off, the feeding of the owl was forgotten in the hurry and flurry. It was embalmed, and “the only tear its mistress shed through that tremendous week,” says her sister, “was when I put the little body into her hands. ‘Poor little beastie, it was odd how much I loved you.’”[76] For the rest, she was “as calm and composed in this furious haste,” wrote her sister (Oct. 19), “with the War Office, the Military Medical Board, half the nurses in London to speak to, her own Committee and Institution, as if she were going out for a walk.” She was quiet because, like Wordsworth's Happy Warrior, in the heat of excitement, she “kept the law in calmness made, and saw what she foresaw.” Like the character drawn by another master-hand, “in the tumult she was tranquil,” because she had pondered when at rest.

A small black pocket-book is preserved in which were found, at Miss Nightingale's death, a few of the many letters received just before she left England for the East. Perhaps they were the very last letters received; perhaps they were there for other reasons. One spoke of a mother's love:—

Another letter reminded her of the love of God:—

And a third among them was from the friend whose life she had declined to share, but whose sympathy was still precious to her:—

[162]

Miss Nightingale and her party left London on Saturday, October 21. Among those who saw them off was her cousin, Arthur Hugh Clough. The principal halts were made in Paris and Marseilles. At Paris, Miss Nightingale had hoped to recruit some Sisters for nursing service. She went to the headquarters of the Order of St. Vincent de Paul, furnished with letters from the British Government and the French military authorities, and accompanied by the British Ambassador's private secretary in order to strengthen her application; but it was refused.[77] At Marseilles, with what turned out to be admirable forethought, she laid in a large store of miscellaneous provisions. Her uncle, Mr. Sam Smith, accompanied the party to Marseilles, and from his letters we obtain vivid glimpses of the expedition en route:—

A correspondent wrote to the Times from Boulogne,[163] describing how the arrival of the party there caused so much enthusiasm, that the sturdy fisherwomen seized their bags and carried them to the hotel, refusing to accept the slightest gratuity; how the landlord of the hotel gave them dinner, and told them to order what they liked, adding that they would not be allowed to pay for anything; and how waiters and chambermaids were equally firm in refusing any acknowledgment for their attentions. Lady Verney, in a letter to a friend, acutely noted a yet more remarkable thing, “the railroad would not be paid for her boxes.”

At Marseilles the expedition excited lively interest, and its Chief was overwhelmed with attentions:—

And again in another letter:—

She sailed from Marseilles on board the Vectis on Friday,[164] October 27, loudly cheered from an English vessel in the harbour, carrying with her, as a friend had written, “the deep prayers and gratitude of the English people.”

From the moment when public announcement of her mission was made, she had, indeed, become a popular heroine. Though well known in Society, she had been as yet a stranger to public fame; so much so that the Times itself, in printing the announcement (Oct. 19), said: “We are authorised to state that Mrs. Nightingale,” etc. Delane cannot have kept his eye on the news-columns, for not until some days had elapsed was it discovered to the public that “Mrs.” Nightingale was in fact “Miss.” “Who is ‘Mrs.’ Nightingale?” was a heading in the Examiner (Oct. 28), and the question was answered in a biographical article. Some passages of it deserve record here, for it went the round of the press throughout the world, and was the source from which, from that day to this, the popular idea of Florence Nightingale has been derived. The article stated succinctly, and with substantial accuracy, the course of her life; dwelt upon the facts that she was “young, graceful, feminine, rich, and popular”; enlarged, with less accuracy, upon her delight in the “palpable and heart-felt attractions” of her home; described her forsaking the “assemblies, lectures, concerts, exhibitions, and all the entertainments for taste and intellect with which London in its season abounds,” in order to sit beside the sick and dying; and concluded thus: She had set out for the scene of war

The discovery by the public that the head of the Nursing Expedition was not “Mrs.” Nightingale, a matron, but a young lady, “graceful, rich, and popular,” added to the enthusiasm which her devotion called forth. Her services were rendered gratuitously; her necessary expenses were to be defrayed by the Government, and officialdom opined that no voluntary contributions, either in money or in kind, were needed. Happily for the comfort of our soldiers in the East, private individuals took a different view, and—in addition to the Times Fund—donations were sent to Miss Nightingale personally, both by her friends and by the general public. An account rendered after her return[78] from the East shows that from the general public she received nearly £7000 in money. This fund, added to the help which she obtained from the Times, and supplemented by expenditure out of her private purse, enabled Miss Nightingale greatly to extend the scope of her work. The statement that she was rich requires some qualification. Her father was rich, but the personal allowance which he had made to her, when she declared her independence in 1853, was £500 a year, and it remained at this figure for several years. During her mission to the East she devoted the whole of it to her work.

Gifts in kind and offers of personal service also poured in. Now that Miss Nightingale was at sea, the task of dealing with such matters was undertaken by her sister and a friend. The Nightingale family had taken a house for the time in[166] Cavendish Square (No. 4), which became the headquarters of a charitable bureau.

It is worth noting, in view of an unfortunate dispute that presently arose, that both Lady Verney and Miss Stanley distinctly understood that additional nurses would only be sent “if Flo asks.” All applicants were so informed; but so keen was the desire to serve, that “many ladies,” so Lady Verney wrote, “are undergoing hospital training on chance.”

Miss Nightingale, meanwhile, was at sea on her way to Constantinople, revolving many things in her mind. She had been called to a mission upon which issues very near to her heart depended. If it succeeded, then, as Mr. Herbert had written to her, not only would an enormous amount of good be done now to the sick and wounded, but “a prejudice would have been broken through, and a precedent established, which would multiply the good to all time.” And so, as we all know, it was destined to be. But at the time the fate of the experiment was doubtful. It was Mr. Herbert's conviction that no one except Florence Nightingale could make it succeed, but it was by no means certain that even she could do so. She took in her hands the reputation of the Minister who trusted her, and her own; and not her reputation only, but the hopes, the aspirations, the ambitions which had ruled her life.

She determined to succeed, and she counted the difficulties which would confront her. Writing two years later[167] and giving account of her stewardship, she paid her tribute of thanks to those “among the officials, medical as well as military, to whose benevolence, ability, and unselfish devotion to duty she was indebted for facilities, without which, in a position such as hers, new to the service, and exposed to much criticism and difficulty, she would have been utterly unable to perform the work entrusted to her.”[79] She saw from the start that she would be exposed, in the very nature of the case, to some medical jealousy and much military prejudice.

The idea of employing female nurses at Scutari had been mooted before the army left for the East, but was abandoned, as the Duke of Newcastle explained, because “it was not liked by the military authorities.”[80] Of the military prejudice against the intrusion of women, even for the gentle office of nursing, into the rough work of war, some entertaining illustrations are happily on record. Lieutenant-Colonel Sterling, afterwards Sir Anthony Sterling, K.C.B., was on active service during the Crimean campaign, first as brigade-major, and afterwards as assistant adjutant-general to the Highland division. He was an elder brother of Carlyle's John Sterling, and himself possessed of some literary skill. “A solid, substantial man,” Carlyle calls him; he was also a man who loved to stand by the ancient ways. He wrote a series of lively letters during the campaign, and in his will directed that they should be published. Nowhere, so clearly as in Sterling's Highland Brigade in the Crimea, have I found contemporary evidence of the prejudices against which the experiment of Mr. Herbert and Miss Nightingale had to contend. During Miss Nightingale's visit to Balaclava in 1855, some dispute arose among the nurses. “Miss—— has added herself,” wrote Colonel Sterling, “to the hospital of the 42nd; and will not acknowledge the voice of the Nightingale, who has written an official letter to Lord Raglan on the subject. I suppose he will order a court-martial composed of nurses, who will administer queer justice.” Our Colonel is something of a wag. He cannot help laughing at “the Nightingale,” because, as he explains, he has such “a keen sense of the[168] ridiculous.” He is so pleased with his quip about the female court-martial that he returns to it in another letter. He is tickled, too, by a saying of the mess-room, that “Miss Nightingale has shaved her head to keep out vermin.” One can almost hear the honest Colonel's guffaw as he wonders whether “she will wear a wig or a helmet?” Women, he supposes, imagine that “war can be made without wounds”; they will be teaching us how to fight next; and as for their ideas of nursing, why some of the ladies actually took to “scrubbing floors”! It amused him, but angered him no less. He has to admit that he believes “the Nightingale” has been of some use; but he bitterly resents her “capture” of orderlies for mere purposes of nursing, and when he is asked, “When will she go home?” answers with Christopher Sly, “Would it were done.” “However,” he writes, “—— (presumably Sidney Herbert) is gone; and I hope there is not to be found another Minister who will allow these absurdities.” Miss Nightingale read Sir Anthony's book when it came out in 1895, and made some severe marginalia upon it; remarking upon his “absolute ignorance of sanitary things,” noting the “misprints as a fair index to the whole,” and finally dismissing the book as “one long string of Seniority complaints.” But I protest that she need not have been so angry. And, indeed, perhaps she was not so angry as she seemed, for her caustic pen was not always a true index of her mind. For my part I take my hat off to Sir Anthony Absolute. His honest, old-fashioned outbursts let in a flood of light upon one side of the difficulties which were to confront Miss Nightingale upon landing at Scutari.

She pondered much also upon the possibilities of friction with the medical officers; and here, too, our Colonel has some light to give us. “The Chief Medical Officer out here,” he wrote, “ought to have been intrusted with Nightingale powers.” The Service in all its branches stuck together, it will be seen, and no blame to it for that! But if a fighting colonel smarted under what he deemed a slight upon an army medical officer, how much more might the Medical Service itself be expected to resent any encroachment upon its appointed province! How keenly it did resent such[169] encroachment may be gathered from the Life and Letters of Sir John Hall, M.D., by Mr. Mitra, whose book supplies us with the same kind of illustration in regard to the army doctors that we may gather from Colonel Sterling's in regard to the soldiers. Sir John, like Sir Anthony, thought the whole thing “very droll.” He was stationed in the Crimea, and we shall hear something of the strained relations between him and Miss Nightingale, when we follow her thither. But at Scutari also, there were some few medical officers who retained even to the last a ridiculous jealousy of any “meddling” by Miss Nightingale and her staff.[81] She foresaw this danger, and made up her mind to avert it by every means in her power.

And there was a third danger which she foresaw also. Not only had she to overcome military prejudice and to avert medical jealousy, but she had also to prevent religious disputation. This last task was beyond her powers, as it has ever proved beyond those of men, women, and angels; for by this cause even the angels fell. No work, however beneficent, has ever yet been found beyond the capacity of the odium theologicum to mar and embitter. Miss Nightingale's mission did not escape the common lot, as we shall hear; but she was keenly sensible of the danger.

Miss Nightingale pondered over all these things as the ship sped on its way to the Golden Horn; and the more she pondered, the more she was driven to decide upon a course of action, very different from what many people supposed that she would adopt, but entirely consonant with the bent of her own mind. She saw quite clearly that, if she was to avoid the rocks ahead of her, what was needed was not so much genial, impulsive kindness, reckless of rules and defiant of constituted authority, but rather strict method, stern discipline, and rigid subordination. The criticisms to which she exposed herself in the superintendence of her nurses were based, not upon laxity, but upon her alleged severity.[82] As for her own conduct, she supposed that her work, when she landed, would be that of the matron of a hospital. If, as it turned out, she became rather (as she[170] put it) mistress of a barrack, it was because she found herself in the midst of conditions which the constituted authorities at home had not foreseen, and before which those on the spot stood powerless. Miss Nightingale was happily possessed of an original mind and a resolute will. She saw evils which cried out for remedies; and new occasions taught new duties.

[171]

Miss Nightingale reported the arrival of her expedition at Constantinople in a short note to her parents:—

The Hospital, to which Miss Nightingale refers, was to be the chief scene of her labours for the next six months, and a few particulars about it and other hospitals, in which the nursing was under her superintendence, must be given in order to make future proceedings intelligible. The principal hospitals of the British army during the Crimean War—four in number—were at Scutari (or in its immediate neighbourhood), the suburb of mournful beauty which looks across to Constantinople from the Asiatic side of the Bosphorus.

The first hospital to be established was in the Turkish Military Hospital. This was made over to the British in May 1854, and was called by them The General Hospital. Having been originally designed for a hospital, and being given up to the English partially fitted, it was, wrote Miss Nightingale, “reduced to good order early, by the unwearied efforts of the first-class Staff Surgeon in introducing a good working system. It was then maintained in excellent condition till the close of the war.”[83] It had accommodation for 1000 patients, but the Battle of the Alma showed that much larger accommodation would be wanted.

North of the General Hospital, and near to the famous Turkish cemetery of Scutari, are the Selimiyeh Barracks—a great yellow building with square towers at each angle. This building was made over to the British for use as a hospital after the Battle of the Alma, and by them was always called The Barrack Hospital. This is the hospital in which Miss Nightingale and her band of female nurses were first established, and in which she herself had her headquarters throughout her stay at Scutari. It is built on rising ground, in a beautiful situation, looking over the Sea of Marmora on one side, towards the Princes' Islands on[173] another, and towards Constantinople and up the Bosphorus on a third. “I have not been out of the Hospital Walls yet,” wrote Miss Nightingale ten days after her arrival, “but the most beautiful view in all the world, I believe, lies outside.” Her quarters were in the north-west tower, on the left of the Main Guard (or principal entrance). There was a large kitchen or storeroom, of which we shall hear more presently, and out of it on either side various other rooms opened. Mr. Bracebridge and the courier slept in one small room; Miss Nightingale and Mrs. Bracebridge in another. The nurses slept in other rooms. The whole space occupied by Miss Nightingale and her nurses was about equal to that allotted to three medical officers and their servants, or to that occupied by the Commandant. “This was done,” she explained, “in order to make no pressure for room on an already overcrowded hospital. It could not have been done with justice to the women's health, had not Miss Nightingale later taken a house in Scutari at private expense, to which every nurse attacked with fever was removed.”[84] The quarters were as uncomfortable as they were cramped. “Occasionally,” wrote Miss Nightingale, “our roof is torn off, or the windows are blown in, and we are under water for the night.” The Hospital was infested also with rodents and vermin; and, among other new accomplishments acquired under the stress of new occasions, Miss Nightingale became an expert rat-killer. This skill was afterwards called into use at Balaclava. In the spring of 1856, one of the nuns whom she had taken with her to the Crimea—Sister Mary Martha—had a dangerous attack of fever. Miss Nightingale nursed the case; and one night, while watching by the sick-bed, she saw a large rat upon the rafters over the Sister's head; she succeeded in knocking it down and killing it, without disturbing the patient.[85] The condition of physical discomfort in which, surrounded by terrible scenes of suffering, she had to do her work, should be remembered in taking the measure of her fortitude and devotion.[86]

The maximum number of patients accommodated at[174] any one time (Dec. 23, 1854) in the Barrack Hospital was 2434. It was half-an-hour's walk from the General Hospital, and an invalided soldier records that he used to accompany Miss Nightingale from one hospital to another in order to light her home on wet stormy nights, across the barren common which lay between them.

Farther south of the General Hospital, in the quarter of Haidar Pasha, was what was known as The Palace Hospital, consisting of various buildings belonging to the Sultan's Summer Palace. These were occupied as a hospital in January 1855. Miss Nightingale had no responsibility here; but in the summer of 1855, the female nursing of sick officers, quartered in one of these buildings, was placed under the superintendence of Mrs. Willoughby Moore, the widow of an officer who had died a noble death in the war, and four female nurses, sent out specially from England.

Finally, there were hospitals at Koulali, four or five miles farther north, upon the same Asiatic shore of the Bosphorus. These hospitals were opened in December 1854. The nursing in them was originally under Miss Nightingale's supervision, but she was presently relieved of it (p. 193 n.). The hospitals were broken up in November 1855, when, of the female nursing establishment, a portion went home, and the rest passed under Miss Nightingale into the hospitals at Scutari.

There were also five hospitals in the Crimea, but particulars of these may be deferred till the time comes for following Miss Nightingale upon her expeditions to the front. For the nursing in the Civil Military Hospitals (i.e. hospitals controlled by a civilian medical staff) at Renkioi (on the Dardanelles) and at Smyrna, and for the Naval Hospital at Therapia, Miss Nightingale had no responsibility, though there is voluminous correspondence among her papers showing that she was constantly consulted upon the site and arrangements of these hospitals. The medical superintendent of the hospital at Renkioi was Dr. E. A. Parkes, with whom Miss Nightingale formed a friendship which endured to the end of his life.

[175]

The state of the hospitals when Miss Nightingale arrived requires some description, which, however, need not be long. The treatment of the sick and wounded during the Crimean War was the subject of Departmental Inquiries, Select Committees, and Royal Commissions, which, when they had finished sitting upon the hospitals, began sitting upon each other. Enormous piles of Blue-books were accumulated, and in the course of my work I have disturbed much dust upon them. The conduct of every department and every individual concerned was the subject of charge, answer, and countercharge innumerable. Each generation deserves, no doubt, the records of mal-administration which it gets; but one generation need not be punished by having to examine in detail the records of another. Some of the details of the Crimean muddle will indeed necessarily be disinterred in the course of our story; but all that need here be collected from the heaps aforesaid are three general conclusions.

The reader must remember, in the first place, that, apart from controverted particulars, it was made abundantly manifest that there was gross neglect in the service of the sick and wounded. The conflict of testimony is readily intelligible. It was easy to give an account based upon the facts of one hospital or of one time which was not applicable to another. At Scutari, for instance, the General Hospital was from the first better ordered than the Barrack Hospital. Then, again, different witnesses had different standards of what was “good” in War Hospitals; to some, anything was good if it was no worse than the standard of the Peninsular War. Of Sir George Brown, who commanded the Light Division in the Crimea, it was said: “As he was thrown into a cart on some straw when shot through the legs in Spain, he thinks the same conveyances admirable now, and hates ambulances as the invention of the Evil One.”[87] Miss Nightingale had much indignant sarcasm for those who seemed content that the soldier in hospital should[176] be placed in the condition of “former wars,” instead of perceiving that he “should be treated with that degree of decency and humanity which the improved feeling of the nineteenth century demands.” But the principal reason for the conflict of testimony was that the very facts of protest and inquiry put all the officials concerned upon the defensive. Any suggestion of default or defect was resented as a personal imputation. There is a curious illustration in the letter which the Head of the Army Medical Department wrote to his Principal Medical Officer in view of the Roebuck Committee. “I beg you to supply me, and that immediately”—with what? with the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth? No—“with every kind of information which you may deem likely to enable me to establish a character for it [the Department], which the public appear desirous to prove that it does not possess.”[88] But though there was much conflict of evidence, the final verdict was decisive. What Greville wrote in his Journal—“the accounts published in the Times turn out to be true”—was established by official inquiry and admitted by Ministers. In consequence of the indictment in the Times, a Commission of Inquiry was dispatched to the East by the Secretary of State. The Commission arrived at Constantinople simultaneously with Miss Nightingale, and four months later it reported to the Duke of Newcastle.[89] I need not trouble the reader here with many particulars of its Report; for they were adopted and confirmed by a Select Committee of the House of Commons a few months later (the famous “Roebuck Committee”), which pronounced succinct sentence that “the state of the hospitals was disgraceful.” The ships which brought the sick and wounded from the Crimea were painfully ill-equipped. The voyage from Balaclava to Scutari usually took eight days and a half. During the first four months of the war, there died on a voyage, no longer than from Tynemouth to London, 74 out of every 1000 embarked. The landing arrangements added to the men's sufferings. To an unpractised eye the buildings used as[177] hospitals at Scutari were imposing and convenient; and this fact accounts for some of the rose-coloured descriptions by which persons in high places were for a time misled. Even the Principal Medical Officer on the spot was naïvely content with whitewash as a preparation to fit the Barrack for use as a hospital. In fact, however, the buildings were pest-houses. Underneath the great structures “were sewers of the worst possible construction, loaded with filth, mere cesspools, in fact, through which the wind blew sewer air up the pipes of numerous open privies into the corridors and wards where the sick were lying.”[90] There was also frightful overcrowding. For many months the space for each patient was one-fourth of what it ought to have been. And there was no proper ventilation. “It is impossible,” Miss Nightingale told the Royal Commission of 1857, “to describe the state of the atmosphere of the Barrack Hospital at night. I have been well acquainted with the dwellings of the worst parts of most of the great cities in Europe, but have never been in any atmosphere which I could compare with it.” Lastly, hospital comforts, and even many hospital necessaries, were deficient.[91] The supply of bedsteads was inadequate. The commonest utensils, for decency as well as for comfort, were lacking. The sheets, said Miss Nightingale, “were of canvas, and so coarse that the wounded men begged to be left in their blankets. It was indeed impossible to put men in such a state of emaciation into those sheets. There was no bedroom furniture of any kind, and only empty beer or wine bottles for candlesticks.” Necessary surgical and medical appliances were often either wanting or not forthcoming. There was no machinery, until Miss Nightingale came, for providing any hospital delicacies. The result of this state of things upon patients arriving after a painful voyage in an extreme state of weakness and emaciation, from wounds, from frost-bite,[178] from dysentery, may be imagined, and it is no wonder that cholera and typhus were rife. In February 1855 the mortality per cent of the cases treated was forty-two. No words are necessary to emphasize so terrible a figure.

Mr. Herbert had not waited for the reports of Commission and Committee to reach the conclusion that things were wrong:—

By admission, then, and by official sentence, there were things amiss at Scutari which urgently called for amendment. This is the first general conclusion which has to be remembered in relation to Miss Nightingale's work.

To what individuals the disgrace of “a disgraceful state of things” attached, it is happily no concern of ours here to inquire. But as I have called Mr. Sidney Herbert as a witness to the fact of the disgrace, I must add my conviction that his own part in the business was wholly beneficent. Some research among the documents entitles me, perhaps, to express entire agreement with Mr. Kinglake's remark upon “what might have been if the Government, instead of appointing a Commission of enquiry on the 23rd of October, had then delegated Mr. Sidney Herbert to go out for a month to the Bosphorus, and there dictate immediate action.” At home, Mr. Herbert was a good man struggling in the toils. The fact is that, though there were some individuals palpably to blame, the real fault was everybody's or nobody's. It[179] was the fault of a vicious system, or rather the vice was that there was no system at all, no co-ordination, but only division of responsibility. The remarks of Mr. Herbert, just quoted, point to the evil, and on every page of the Blue-books it is written large. There were at least eight authorities, working independently of each other, whose co-operation was yet necessary to get anything well done. There was the Secretary of State; there was the War Office (under the Secretary-at-War); there were the Horse Guards, the Ordnance, the Victualling Office, the Transport Office, the Army Medical Department, and the Treasury. The Director-General of the Medical Department in London told the Roebuck Committee that he was under five distinct masters—the Commander-in-Chief, the Secretary of State, the Secretary-at-War, the Master-General of Ordnance, and the Board of Ordnance. The Secretary of State said that he had issued no instructions as to the hospitals; he had left that to the Medical Board. But the Medical Director-General said that it would have been impertinent for him to take the first step.[92] If I were writing the history of the Crimean War, or of the Government Offices, other fundamental reasons for the disgraceful state of things in the hospitals—notably the miscalculated plan of military campaign—would have to be taken into account; but I am writing only the life of Miss Nightingale, and all that under this head the reader need be asked to bear in mind is this: That the root of the evils which had to be dealt with was division of responsibility, and reluctance to assume it.

The third conclusion of the official inquiries, which I want to emphasize, is contained in a passage in the Roebuck Committee's Report, which prefaced a reference to Miss Nightingale's mission: “Your Committee in conclusion cannot but remark that the first real improvements in the lamentable condition of the hospitals at Scutari are to be attributed to private suggestions, private exertions, and private benevolence.”

So, then, we see that there were disgraceful evils at Scutari needing amendment, and that in order to amend them what was needed was bold initiative. This it was that[180] Miss Nightingale supplied. The popular voice thought of her only or mainly as the gentle nurse. That, too, she was; and to her self-devotion in applying a woman's insight to a new sphere, a portion of her fame must ever be ascribed. But when men who knew all the facts spoke of her “commanding genius,”[93] it was rather of her work as an administrator that they were thinking. “They could scarcely realize without personally seeing it,” Mr. Stafford told the House of Commons, “the heartfelt gratitude of the soldiers, or the amount of misery which had been relieved” by Miss Nightingale and her nurses; and, he added, “it was impossible to do justice, not only to the kindness of heart, but to the clever judgment, the ready intelligence, and the experience displayed by the distinguished lady to whom this difficult mission had been entrusted.” These were the qualities which enabled her to reform, or to be the inspirer and instigator of reforms in, the British system of military hospitals. She began her work, where it lay immediately to her hand, in the Barrack Hospital at Scutari. She did the work in three ways. She applied an expert's touch and a woman's insight to a hospital hitherto managed exclusively by men. She boldly assumed responsibility, and did things herself which she could find no one else ready to do. And, thirdly, she was instant and persistent in suggestion, exhortation, reproaches, addressed to the authorities at home. It will not be possible to keep these three branches of our subject entirely distinct; but in the main they will form the topics successively of the next three chapters.

[181]

R. M. M.: “A Monument for Scutari,”
Times, Sept. 10, 1855.

Miss Nightingale arrived at Scutari, as we have seen, on November 4, and was immediately in the midst of heavy work in nursing. The Battle of Balaclava was fought on October 25; and on the day after her arrival, the Battle of Inkerman.

“Miss N. is decidedly well received,” reported Mr. Bracebridge to Mr. Herbert (Nov. 8). A few days later, the Commander of the Forces, in a letter dated “Before Sevastopol, Nov. 13th, 1854,” bade her a hearty welcome, tendering to her a “grateful acknowledgment for thus charitably devoting yourself to those who have suffered in the service of their country, regardless of the painful scenes you may have to witness.” With some of the military officers she had difficulties; from the Commander she received nothing but courtesy, sympathy, and support.

The behaviour of some (but not all) of the military officers, and of the men who caught their manners from the officers, was at first different. There was sometimes ill-disguised jealousy, and consequent sulkiness. Outwardly, there was politeness; but difficulties were put into the way of “the Bird,” as some of them called her behind her back, and she was left to shift for herself, when a little help might have eased the burden. “It is the Bird's duty,” they would say. Miss Nightingale, however, kept perfect command of her temper. “She was always calm and self-possessed,” says one of the Roman Catholic Sisters; “she was a perfect lady through everything—never overbearing. I never heard her raise her voice.”

Upon most of the medical men on the spot she made a good impression at once, because she proved herself to be efficient and helpful. She applied the expert's touch. But there were doctors and doctors. Some welcomed her and her staff, and made as much use of them as possible. Others resented their presence, and threw obstacles in their way. There was one ward in which the junior medical officers had been advised by their superior to have as little to do with Miss Nightingale as possible. She showed exemplary patience under this kind of opposition, and gradually won her way into the confidence of most of the doctors.[95] “Miss Nightingale told us,” says one of her staff, “only to attend to patients in the wards of those surgeons who wished for our services, and she charged us never to do anything for the patients without the leave of the doctors.”[96] “The number of nurses admitted into each division of a hospital depended,” Miss Nightingale herself explained, “upon the medical officer of that division, who sometimes accepted them, sometimes refused them, sometimes accepted them after they had been refused; while the duties they were permitted[183] to perform varied according to the will of each individual medical officer.”[97] That this ill-defined state of things called constantly for tact and diplomacy on the part of the Lady Superintendent, and often for severe self-restraint, will readily be perceived.

On the first arrival of Miss Nightingale and her staff, the wounded were pouring in fast, and the nurses were told off to the worst surgical cases:—

A letter from Miss Nightingale herself to her friend of Harley Street, Dr. Bowman, the ophthalmic surgeon, gives a lively account of some of her difficulties, and a vivid picture of the horrors amid which her work was done (Nov. 14):—

The Senior Chaplain had the sense, among other things, to appreciate Miss Nightingale. “The Chaplain says,”[186] wrote Mr. Nightingale to a friend (Dec. 12), “‘Miss Nightingale is an admirable person; none of us can sufficiently admire her. A perfect lady, she wins and rules every one, the most rugged official melts before her gentle voice, and all seem glad to do her bidding.’”

Florence Nightingale had that “excellent thing in woman”: Lady Lovelace, in the poem already quoted, spoke of her friend's “soft, silvery voice”; but it could command, as well as charm, unless indeed it were the charm that commanded. “She scolds sergeants and orderlies all day long,” wrote Mr. Bracebridge to her parents (Nov. 20); “you would be astonished to see how fierce she is grown.” That was written, of course, in fun; but there was always a note of calm authority in her voice. A Crimean veteran recalled her passing his bed with some doctors, who were saying, “It can't be done,” and her replying quietly, “It must be done.” “I seem to hear her saying it,” writes one who knew her well; “there seemed to be no appeal from her quiet conclusive manner.”

With regard to the nurses, Miss Nightingale, as may be gathered from the letter to Dr. Bowman, found them rather a difficult team to drive, and this fact should be remembered in considering an episode presently to be related (II.). She had to send one nurse back to England at once, filling the vacancy by a German Sister from the Kaiserswerth colony at Constantinople. Of the six nurses supplied by St. John's House, “four, alas! returned shortly from Scutari, not being prepared to accept the discipline and privations of the life out there.”[99] We need not be too impatient with Mrs. Lawfield (who turned out an excellent nurse) for her objection to the cap. The uniform, devised on the spur of the moment, seems to have been very much less becoming than that of the “Staff Nurse, New Style,” with her “gown of silver gray, bright steel chain, and chignon's elegant array.”[100] The Nightingale nurses in the East wore “grey tweed wrappers, worsted jackets, with caps and short woollen cloaks, and a frightful scarf of brown holland, embroidered[187] in red with the words, ‘Scutari Hospital.’”[101] Such is the description of the costume worn by the seculars which is given by one of the Roman Catholic Sisters, not without some pity as she thought of her own religious habit. But the short cloak should not be so contemptuously dismissed. “The red uniform cape worn by the ladies of the Queen Alexandra's Imperial Military Nursing Service is modelled on that originally introduced by Florence Nightingale for the nurses whom she took with her to Scutari. This cape may therefore be regarded as a memorial to the great founder of military nursing.”[102] As for the “frightful scarf” some such distinctive badge was a very necessary precaution amid the rough-and-tumble of a military depot and its camp-followers. A raw new-comer was seen to approach one of the nurses in the street. “You leave her alone,” said his mate, “don't you see she's one of Miss Nightingale's women?” Their cloth was respected throughout the camps; but Miss Nightingale had to dismiss two or three for levity of conduct. On arriving at Scutari, she had placed ten in the General Hospital and twenty-eight in the Barrack Hospital, and in neither did she find it easy to maintain discipline. From time to time she transferred nurses, sending the best to other hospitals, keeping the less trustworthy under her own eye; and sending some home, who were unwilling to stay or found incompetent, as other recruits arrived. Of the thirty-eight in the first party, she considered that not more than sixteen were really efficient, whilst five or six were in a class of excellence by themselves.

The difficulties—including the great Dress Question—which Miss Nightingale had with her staff, appear clearly enough in the “Rules and Regulations for the Nurses attached to the Military Hospitals in the East,” which Miss Nightingale presently sent home to Mr. Herbert, who had them printed, and handed to every candidate for appointment as nurse. “As it has been stated,” says the preamble, “that the nurses who have gone to the hospitals in the East,[188] have in some instances complained of being subject to hardships and to rules for which they were not previously prepared, and of having to do work differing from what they expected, it has been thought desirable to state distinctly the regulations relative to the outfit, clothing, duties, and position of nurses in military hospitals.” The nurses, it is then set forth, “are required to appear at all times in the regulation dress with the badge, and never to wear flowers in their bonnet-caps, or ribbons, other than such as are provided for them, or are sanctioned by the superintendent.” Another rule defines the precise quantities of spirituous liquor which a nurse will be allowed; a third states that “no nurse will be allowed to walk out except with the housekeeper, or with a party of at least three nurses together, and never without leave previously obtained.” The whole code shows the necessity which Miss Nightingale had found for enforcing strict discipline.[103] And even with these new regulations to back her, she still found discipline hard to enforce. Her official letters to the War Office complain of unsuitable recruits being sent out to her, and of the greater number of them as being “wholly undisciplined.”

In December 1854 Miss Nightingale was astonished to receive an announcement that a party of forty-seven more nurses, under the care of her friend, Miss Mary Stanley, were on their way to join her. She remonstrated, and threatened to resign:—

Mr. Herbert replied, as his biographer states, in terms[189] of courtesy and kindliness, and without any trace of the bitterness which Miss Nightingale's vehemence might have evoked in a smaller-minded man. There is a letter to Mrs. Bracebridge (Dec. 27) in which Mrs. Herbert says: “I am heart-broken about the nurses, but I do assure you, if you send them all home without a trial, you will lose some really valuable women.” The Minister had authorized Miss Nightingale, if on full consideration she thought fit, to return Miss Stanley's party to England at his own private expense. Her good sense soon showed her that such a course would be, as she wrote, “a moral impossibility”; and in the end she made the best she could of what she considered a bad job—to the great advantage, as it was to turn out, of the wounded soldiers, though at a great increase to her own responsibilities and difficulties.

Much has been made in some quarters[104] of this episode, and it may be well here to explain Miss Nightingale's position clearly; for the affair throws strong light upon the difficulties of her task. It is essential to know, in the first place, that Mr. Herbert had distinctly stated that the selection of nurses was to be exclusively in Miss Nightingale's hands. This is implied in his official instructions (p. 156), and was stated with the utmost emphasis in a letter “to a correspondent,” which he had caused to be inserted in the newspapers of October 24. Already the cry had been raised that more nurses should be sent, and volunteers were clamouring for enlistment. Mr. Herbert thereupon wrote:—

Miss Nightingale had not written home in that sense at all, but Mr. Herbert had sent the nurses. That was what she meant when she said that he had “sacrificed his own written word.” “Had I had the enormous folly,” she wrote to Mr. Herbert (Dec. 15), “at the end of eleven days' experience, to require more women, would it not seem that you, as a statesman, should have said, ‘Wait till you can see your way better.’ But I made no such request.” She was an expert, and did not wish to be inundated with amateurs. Moreover, everybody at Scutari knew, as she wrote, the terms of Mr. Herbert's letter to the newspapers, and the medical men knew that she had not asked for any more nurses. Yet here was a new party sent out; and, to make the encroachment on her domain the more marked, Miss Stanley had received instructions to, and reported herself to, not the Superintendent of the Nurses, but other officials. Miss Nightingale felt that her authority had been flouted, her position undermined. But personal considerations were not the cause of her vexation. It was not a case of “pique,” as some people in England imagined. Mr. Herbert and she were engaged in making a new experiment. It was full of difficulties, and the only chance of success lay in the maintenance of undivided responsibility and clearly established authority. Miss Nightingale could not quietly have accepted the new situation without sacrificing the key of the position. Had she acquiesced, she would have admitted that Mr. Herbert might henceforth send out nurses without consulting her, and without placing them expressly under her orders. She would have left herself at the mercy of any well-meaning person in England who thought that this or that might be[191] helpful to her. Her judgment would no longer have been the governing factor; while yet for any confusion or failure that might follow, she would be held responsible. Mr. Herbert thought, no doubt, that already the experiment had been a great success, as indeed it was, and he was eager to increase the scale of it. He might not unreasonably think that, as the number of the wounded increased, so should the number of female nurses be increased also. Mr. Osborne's remark, cited above (p. 183), must have confirmed him in such an opinion. But to Miss Nightingale on the spot the case wore a very different aspect. We must remember the severe mental strain of her position; the high pressure of work and emotion at which she was living, all the higher to one of her intensely sensitive conscientiousness; the continual failure (to her critical mind) of attempts to reform cruel abuses; the danger of real, acknowledged failure always present. In such a position, the arrival of a fresh batch of nurses, unexpected and unsolicited, must have seemed to her the break-up of all her plans, the destruction of the standard of nursing which she was painfully creating, the gravest peril to an experiment, still on its trial, and ever subject to hostile criticism.

Immediate and practical difficulties were also great. There was no accommodation in the hospitals at Scutari available for additional female nurses. “The 46,” wrote Mr. Bracebridge to Mr. Smith (Dec. 18), “have fallen on us like a cloud of locusts. Where to house them, feed them, place them, is difficult; how to care for them, not to be imagined.” The Principal Medical Officer flatly refused to have any more, and Miss Nightingale herself felt that she could not manage any more:—

And there was a further objection. A considerable[192] number of the second party were Roman Catholics, and Miss Stanley herself (as Miss Nightingale well knew) was on the verge of joining the Roman Communion. How much this factor in the case added to the force of Miss Nightingale's objections, we shall learn in a later chapter. Mr. Herbert thought, I suppose, that the additional nurses would be welcome to her because they came under the escort of a friend. But so strongly did Miss Nightingale feel on the subject, that Miss Stanley's part in the affair rankled the more. It was in the house of her friends, she felt, that she had been wounded. Their personal relations were further embittered by the case of a nurse whom Miss Nightingale (with the concurrence of the other authorities) felt obliged to dismiss, but whom Miss Stanley believed to be ill-used. Miss Nightingale's friendship with Mr. and Mrs. Herbert was in no way impaired. They had confessed themselves in the wrong; and so she was deeply touched, as she wrote, by their kindness and generosity. But between her and Miss Stanley the breach was never healed. Their later lives took different directions, and they did not meet again.

Miss Nightingale's resentment was perfectly justified. Her remonstrances to Mr. Herbert were necessary. His well-intentioned action was calculated to undermine her authority, and to aggravate her difficulties; and, in both of these ways, to imperil the success of their joint experiment. Her handling of the crisis which had burst upon her was, perhaps, in relation to the subordinates unfortunate. Miss Stanley was accompanied by Dr. Meyer, a medical man, and Mr. Jocelyne Percy, who had gone out (as Mrs. Herbert wrote to Mrs. Bracebridge) devoted to Miss Nightingale, “saying he would be her footman, etc.”[105] “We picked out,” added Mrs. Herbert plaintively, “the two men in England who, we thought, would help Flo most,” and they returned sad and sore at their cold reception. Miss Nightingale, acting on advice she received on the spot, asked them to sign notes of their conversation with her;[106] this rankled[193] with them, and Mr. Percy made a grievance of it in England. Mrs. Herbert, in reporting all this to Mrs. Bracebridge (Jan. 7, 1855), made the final reflection: “Perhaps it is wholesome for us to be reminded that Flo is still a mortal, which we were beginning to doubt.” Mortals have to deal with entanglements as best they may on the spur of the moment; and those at a distance hardly made enough allowance for the difficulties with which Miss Nightingale was suddenly confronted, for the danger which Mr. Herbert's dispatch of unsolicited reinforcements involved, and, therefore, for the importance which she attached to having all the conditions defined in black and white.

Her practical genius and good sense speedily triumphed, however, over the difficulties of the case. In agreement with the medical authorities, the number of female nurses at Scutari was raised to 50, and Miss Nightingale weeded out some of her original staff in favour of new-comers. Others of them were sent to the hospitals at Balaclava (p. 254); and others to those at Koulali (p. 174). Miss Stanley, whose intention it had been to return to England as soon as she had deposited her party, remained for several months in charge at the latter place, not administering the nursing service altogether according to Miss Nightingale's ideas,[107] but rendering aid to the afflicted of which her brother, the Dean, has left us so charming and sympathetic a memorial.[108]

In the end, then, the scope of Miss Nightingale's experiment was considerably enlarged; and the deeper significance of the episode is to be found in the emphasis which it throws upon the novelty and difficulties of Miss Nightingale's enterprise. In these days, nurses, trained and distinctively attired, are so much part of everyday life, women-nurses serving under the Red Cross are so normal a feature of war, and Territorial nurses, smartly uniformed, are so familiar a unit of auxiliary forces, that some effort of imagination is required to realize the conditions which existed sixty years[194] ago. We remember that a staff of nearly 800 female nurses was maintained for service in the South African War, and may be tempted to smile at the question between 20 and 40, or 40 and 90 for the Crimea. But it was Miss Nightingale who showed the way, and the way of the pioneer is rough. No one who reads this volume will suspect her of timidity, or think her wanting in self-confidence; yet so conscious was she of the difficulties that in this instance she under-rated her power, and was anxious to keep the experiment within much narrower limits than it assumed. Her original idea had been to limit the number of female nurses to 20, but at various dates after Miss Stanley's arrival she sent home for more nurses, and, before the war was over, she had had control of 125.

Miss Nightingale's reluctance to assume the superintendence of additional nurses will be the more readily understood when we pass to the multifarious duties which circumstances led her to discharge.

This suggestion to the Ambassador, made on the third day after Miss Nightingale's arrival, serves to introduce two main directions in which she applied a woman's insight to the condition of things at Scutari. Efficient nursing requires, she well knew, cleanliness and delicately cooked food. She set herself with characteristic energy to supply these necessities. She found “not a basin, nor a towel, nor a bit of soap, nor a broom,” and instantly requisitioned 300[195] scrubbing brushes. "The first improvements took place," said Mr. Macdonald, “after Miss Nightingale's arrival—greater cleanliness and greater order. I recollect one of the first things she asked me to supply was 200 hard scrubbers and sacking for washing the floors, for which no means existed at that time.”[109] Miss Nightingale had foreseen that washing would be one of the first things necessary. During the voyage out, as the ship was approaching Constantinople, one of the party went up to her and said earnestly, “Oh, Miss Nightingale, when we land, don't let there be any red-tape delays, let us get straight to nursing the poor fellows!” “The strongest will be wanted at the wash-tub,” was the reply. Until Miss Nightingale arrived, the number of shirts washed during a month was six.[110] Up to the date of her arrival, the Purveyor-General had contracted for the washing of the hospital bedding, and of the linen of the patients. Simultaneously, however, with the arrival of the wounded from Inkerman, it was found that the contractor had broken down in the latter part of his contract. And even with regard to the former part, the bedding was washed, Miss Nightingale discovered, in cold water. She insisted upon hot; the more since it was found, as the Duke of Newcastle's commissioners reported, that many of the articles sent back from the wash as clean, had to be destroyed as being in fact verminous. Miss Nightingale accordingly took a Turkish house, had boilers supplied in it by the Engineer's Office, employed soldiers' wives to do the washing, and thus gave the sick and wounded the comfort of clean linen. All this was paid for partly out of her private funds and partly by the Times fund.

Yet more important, perhaps, to the comfort and recovery of the sick, were Miss Nightingale's “Extra Diet Kitchens.” When she came to the Barrack Hospital she found that all the cooking was done in thirteen large coppers, situated at one end of the vast building. The patients' beds extended over a space of from three to four miles (including,[196] of course, both wards and corridors); it took three or four hours to serve the ordinary dinners, and there were no facilities whatever for preparing delicacies between times. Within ten days of her arrival, Miss Nightingale had remedied this defect. She opened two “extra diet kitchens” in different parts of the building, and had three supplementary boilers fixed on one of the staircases for the preparation of arrowroot and the like. As explained more fully below (p. 201), nothing was supplied except in accordance with medical directions; and she met the doctors' requisitions out of her private stores only when the government stores failed. “It is obvious,” she explained, “that Miss Nightingale would have shielded herself from heavy responsibility by adhering, and by obtaining the adherence of the medical officers, to the strict precedents of Military Hospital Regulations, according to which the materials for the Extra Diets would have been sent in to her by the purveyor without requisition, in the same manner as is practised in the case of the ordinary diets; but she felt that in doing so she would most frequently be defeating the object she was sent to carry out, for in the majority of cases the purveyor had either no supply, or a supply of a very indifferent quality of the articles required.”[111] It is safe to say that many lives were saved by the application by Miss Nightingale of the good housewife's care to the kitchen of the hospitals. The woman's eye was not above distinguishing between bone and gristle and meat in the men's dinner, and she wanted to have the meat issued from the stores boned, so that one patient should not get all bone, another all gristle, and another all meat. But on this point she was beaten. The Inspector-General informed her that it would require a new “Regulation of the Service” to “bone the meat”!! The notes of exclamation are hers.[112] In the culinary department an invaluable volunteer arrived in 1855 in the person of Alexis Soyer, once famous as the chef of the Reform Club, and still alive as M. Mirobolant in Thackeray's Pendennis. M. Soyer rearranged and partly superseded Miss Nightingale's kitchens at Scutari. We shall meet with him and his good work again when we accompany her to the Crimea.

Miss Nightingale was not long at Scutari without being[197] touched by the pitiable condition of the women camp-followers, separated often from their regiments, and in a very forlorn state. Miss Nightingale deputed the care of them in large measure to Mrs. Bracebridge, who, with her husband, collected and administered a separate fund for giving assistance to the wives, women, and children of soldiers at Scutari. A Lying-in Hospital was organized; and Miss Nightingale found employment for many of the women, both in washing as aforesaid, and in making up old linen into various hospital requisites. Here, too, helpful volunteers presently arrived. The Rev. Dr. and Lady Alicia Blackwood were moved after the Battle of Inkerman to go out to Scutari and see if they could be of use. Dr. Blackwood asked and obtained an appointment as a military chaplain; and, on their arrival, Lady Alicia went straight to Miss Nightingale and asked what she could do to help:—

Lady Alicia went, and with her husband was of great assistance. Miss Nightingale was mindful also of the families of her nurses. Some of them were wives and widows[198] who had left children at home. “Many things turn up,” wrote Lady Verney to a friend, “for us to do for Florence; as in looking after the children of her nurses.” And Mrs. Nightingale wrote similarly (April 1855):—

Before the Roebuck Committee, Dr. Andrew Smith, the head of the Army Medical Department in London, was asked, “What do you think was the result of Miss Nightingale's mission?” “I daresay,” he answered, apparently with some reluctance, “it was very advantageous”; and then, pulling himself together like a man and seeking to be just, he added: “There is no doubt about it; because females are able to discover many deficiencies that a man would not think of, and they will look at things that a man will have no idea of looking to.” A very true statement; and perhaps as much as could reasonably be expected from an official on the defensive. But I think we shall find in the next chapter that some of the things which Miss Nightingale saw and did were not unworthy of the more comprehensive sweep claimed by Dr. Smith for the male faculty of vision.

[199]

Ostensibly, and by the strict letter of her original instructions, Miss Nightingale was only Superintendent of the Female Nursing establishment. In fact, and by force of circumstances, she became a Purveyor to the Hospitals, a Clothier to the British Army, and in many emergencies a Dea ex machina.

She became, first, Purveyor-Auxiliary to the hospitals at Scutari. My statements under this head might seem to be the inventions of a satirist if I did not disclaim credit for such ingenuity by adding that they are in every case extracted from official sources. Of the ignorance existing in high places of the true state of things at Scutari, the best illustration is the answer which the British Ambassador gave when he was asked by the Commissioner of the Times Fund what things were most needed in the hospitals. “Nothing is needed,” said Lord Stratford, and the only suggestion he could make to the Times was that it should devote its fund to building an English Church at Pera. Miss Nightingale thought that the service of God included the service of man, and Mr. Macdonald, the Times Commissioner, agreed with her. Between them, they established not a church, but a store. The Ambassador of course formed his conclusions from what he was told; and the Principal Medical Officer at[200] Scutari “stated that he wanted nothing in the shape of stores or medical comforts at a time when his patients were destitute of the commonest necessaries. Assistance which had been discouraged as superfluous was eventually found essential for the lives of the patients.”[114]

The caravanserai was the large kitchen aforesaid (p. 173). “From this room,” wrote one of the lady volunteers, “were distributed quantities of arrowroot, sago, rice puddings, jelly, beef-tea, and lemonade upon requisitions made by the surgeons. This caused great comings to and fro; numbers of orderlies were waiting at the door with requisitions. One of the nuns or a lady received them, and saw they were signed and countersigned before serving. We used, among ourselves, to call this kitchen the tower of Babel. In the middle of the day everything and everybody seemed to be there: boxes, parcels, bundles of sheets, shirts, and old linen and flannels, tubs of butter, sugar, bread, kettles, saucepans, heaps of books, and of all kinds of rubbish, besides the diets which were being dispensed; then the people, ladies, nuns, nurses, orderlies, Turks, Greeks, French and Italian servants, officers and others waiting to see Miss Nightingale; all passing to and fro, all intent upon their own business, and all speaking their own language.”[115]

There was also in “The Sisters' Tower,” as this part of the Barrack Hospital came to be called, a small sitting-room; and in it “were held those councils over which Miss Nightingale so ably presided, at which were discussed the measures necessary to meet the daily-varying exigencies of the hospital. From hence were given the orders which regulated the female staff. This, too, was the office from[201] which were sent those many letters to the Government, to friends and supporters at home, telling of the sufferings of the sick and wounded.”[116] In the Report of the Duke of Newcastle's Commission, as also in Miss Nightingale's Statement to Subscribers, the full list of articles supplied by her may be found, tabulated with a precision and amplitude of detail characteristic of her. It included the miscellaneous utensils, etc., enumerated above, and also various articles of food required for the “extra diets” mentioned in the preceding chapter. The supplies were furnished partly by the Times Fund, partly out of moneys sent to her by benevolent persons, and partly out of the private purse of herself and her immediate friends. Much of the expenditure was ultimately refunded to her by the Government. The sick and wounded soldiers at Scutari would, I fear, have felt ill requited for the lack of linen, sheets, utensils, and extra diet by hearing that a beautiful new church was being built at Pera.

But, it may be asked, were the things which Miss Nightingale procured and issued really wanted? May they not have been her fads? and was not hers perhaps a work of supererogation, for could not the official Purveyor have supplied them? Such statements were widely made at the time, and one can readily understand the reason. By drawing upon her own stores, Miss Nightingale not only furnished the soldiery with the things they were needing, but “administered to the defaulting administrators a telling, though silent, rebuke; and it would seem that under this discipline the groove-going men winced in agony, for they uttered touching complaints, declaring that the Lady-in-Chief did not choose to give them time (it was always time the males wanted), and that the moment a want declared itself, she made haste to supply it herself.”[117] But such complaints were entirely unfounded; for it was[202] shown by the Duke of Newcastle's Commission that she never issued anything from her stores, nor did she allow any one else to do so, except upon the demand of the medical officers, and after inquiry of the Purveyor if he could supply them. I find among Miss Nightingale's papers a few of the original requisitions from medical officers. Here is one of them:—

The list, said the commissioners drily, “must not be regarded as conclusive proof that the articles mentioned in it were invariably wanting in the [Government] stores.” Goods, they explained, “have been refused, although they were, to our personal knowledge, lying in abundance in the store of the Purveyor.” Why refused? Because the Purveyor took it upon himself to override the requisition of the medical officers? Not at all. “This was done because they had not been examined by the Board of Survey. On one occasion, in the month of December last [1854], we found that this was the case with respect to Hospital rugs, and it is probable that this has not been the only instance of such an occurrence.” Miss Nightingale's letters to Mr. Herbert show that it was a frequent occurrence. For instance, in February 1855, she received a requisition from the medical officers at Balaclava for shirts. She knew that 27,000 shirts had at her instance been sent by Government from home, and they were already landed. But the Purveyor would not let them be used; “he could not unpack them without a Board.” Three weeks elapsed before the Board released the shirts. The sick and wounded, lying shivering for want of rugs and shirts, would have expressed themselves forcibly, I fear, if it had been explained that they must shiver still until the Board of Survey's good time had arrived.

Miss Nightingale's impatience at such delays was the origin, doubtless, of a story which had wide currency at[203] the time that on one occasion she ordered a Government consignment to be opened forcibly, while the officials wrung their hands at the thought of what the Board of Survey might presently say. The story was mentioned in the Roebuck Committee; and, though it was not confirmed, I think that Miss Nightingale was quite capable of the dreadful deed. Certainly she often insisted on obtaining first-hand evidence for herself, instead of trusting to the report of others; for in one of her letters to Mr. Herbert (Dec. 21, 1854), I find this passage: “This morning I foraged in the Purveyor's Store—a cruise I make almost daily, as the only way of getting things. No mops, no plates, no wooden trays (the engineer is having these made), no slippers, no shoe-brushes, no blacking, no knives and forks, no spoons, no scissors (for cutting the men's hair, which is literally alive), no basins, no towelling, no chloride of zinc.” Then she enumerates the things which Mr. Herbert should send from London, adding, “The other articles mentioned above as not now in store can be had at Constantinople” or Marseilles; whence, I imagine, she proceeded to get them. Shopping at Scutari was not an afternoon's easy amusement:—

But, somehow or other, Miss Nightingale was able to supply from her stores in hand, or to obtain from Constantinople or Smyrna or elsewhere, many things which the Purveyor-General could not, or would not, obtain. She[204] had the forethought, as already related, to lay in at Marseilles on her way out a large supply of articles which she deemed likely to be useful; and at Scutari Mr. Macdonald of the Times was untiring and resourceful. In the course of time, as funds continued to pour in, and the Government purveying became more efficient, Miss Nightingale was able on emergency to supply, not only the British, but their allies. In the spring of 1856, when the scourge of typhus committed sad ravages among the French, and the amour propre of the Intendance prevented the acceptance of the humane offer of medical comforts as a loan from the British Government, Miss Nightingale paved the way in overcoming this scruple by sending, as a present to the French Sisters and Medical Officers, large quantities of wine, arrowroot, and meat-essence. The Sardinian Sisters of Mercy also experienced much kindness at her hands when the destruction of a supply-ship by fire had left them without many things needed by their patients. She sent supplies also to the Prussian Civil Hospital, where many Britishers were treated; for this good office she received a letter of thanks from the king of Prussia (Sept. 1856). To her quarters at Scutari, the Turks, too, often resorted for medicine and advice. In her, says an eye-witness, the sickly and needy of all nations found an active friend.[118] “She embraced in her solicitude,” said a French historian of the Crimean War, “the sick of three armies.”[119]

Miss Nightingale's initiative was further useful in extracting needed articles which were contained in the Government store, but yet had not been forthcoming, either because nobody else had asked for them, or because somebody had not been lucky enough to hit upon the right moment for asking. The system in force was most ingeniously contrived to bring about such a state of things. Articles were only supplied to the hospitals by the Purveyor on the requisition of a medical officer. The medical officers were overburdened with work, and perhaps omitted to send in a[205] requisition. Or they sent in a requisition, and the form was returned, marked “None in store.” The articles may subsequently have been obtained or have arrived from England, but no note was kept in the Purveying Department of unfulfilled requisitions, and unless the medical officers requisitioned again, the articles were not supplied. The Commissioners found that from this cause patients were sometimes left without beds, though there were bedsteads in store at the time. Happily Miss Nightingale had laid in a good many at Marseilles.

There was another sphere in which Miss Nightingale came to the rescue of the sick and wounded from the blunders of official administration. She clothed them, 50,000 shirts in all having been issued from her store. The history of this private clothing department is curious. The regulations of the War Office assumed that every soldier brought with him into hospital an adequate kit, and it was no part of the Purveyor's duty to supply such a thing as a shirt. But three of the four generals of division in the Crimea had decided not to disembark the men's knapsacks. Sebastopol, it was confidently expected, would fall in a few days' time, and the men were to march light. In most cases they never saw their knapsacks again.[120] Hence the sick and wounded who arrived at Scutari immediately after the Battle of the Alma were destitute of all clothing except what was on their persons, and that was in many cases fit only for the furnace. No regulation existed whereby, if the soldier had for military reasons been deprived of his kit, the deficiency could be made good. The supply of a change of linen for the sick and wounded while in hospital, and of clean shirts to wear when invalided home or returned to the front, was perhaps a better allocation of benevolent funds than a supply of altar-cloths for a new church at Pera. At any rate Miss Nightingale thought so; and thus she and her coadjutors were in some measure the clothiers as well as the purveyors of the wounded soldiers.

[206]

Miss Nightingale assumed responsibility on one occasion as a builder, and this was at the time the usurpation which was most condemned in some quarters and the most commended in others. Some wards in the Barrack Hospital were in so dilapidated a condition as to be unfit for the reception of patients. The Commander-in-Chief had warned the hospital authorities that additional sick and wounded might shortly be upon their hands. The uninhabited wards might by prompt expenditure be made capable of accommodating 800 cases. The expenditure, however, would be considerable, and no one seemed willing to incur it without superior authority. Miss Nightingale stepped into the breach. With the concurrence of Dr. McGrigor, a senior medical officer of the hospital, she represented the urgency of the case to Lady Stratford de Redcliffe. The Ambassador had been empowered, as we have seen, to incur expenditure; and his wife, as she had given Miss Nightingale to understand, was the authorized intermediary between the Ambassador and the authorities of the hospitals. Lady Stratford saw the urgent necessity of the work, and Mr. Gordon, the chief of the engineering staff, was instructed to put it immediately in hand. The workmen, 125 in number, presently struck, whereupon Miss Nightingale, on her own authority, succeeded in engaging 200 other workmen, and the work was rapidly completed. Lord Stratford subsequently disclaimed any responsibility,[121] and Miss Nightingale paid the bill out of her own private resources. The War Department, when the affair came to their knowledge, approved her action, and reimbursed her. This instance of “the Nightingale power” made a great impression, and she herself regarded it as the most beneficent thing she did in the East. The fame of the affair was noised abroad, and reached the British camp at Balaclava, where our unfailing friend, Colonel Sterling, heard of it with hot indignation. Miss Nightingale, he wrote, “coolly draws a cheque. Is[207] this the way to manage the finances of a great nation? Vox populi? A divine afflatus. Priestess, Miss N. Magnetic impetus drawing cash out of my pocket!” In normal times it would certainly not be the way to manage the finances of a great nation. And even in times of emergency the way which would of course have occurred to any well-regulated slave of routine was that Miss Nightingale should have spoken to some officer on the spot, that he should have represented the case to the Director-General of the Army Medical Department in London, that the Director-General should have moved the Horse Guards, and the Horse Guards the Ordnance, that the Ordnance should then have approached the Treasury, and that after process of minuting and countersigning, the work should in due course have been officially ordered. But meanwhile Lord Raglan's wounded would have arrived at the hospital, and there would have been no wards ready to receive them. As it was, “the wards were ready,” as Miss Nightingale reported to Mr. Herbert (Dec. 21), “to receive 500 men on the 19th from the ships Ripon and Golden Fleece. They were received in the wards by Dr. McGrigor and myself, and were generally in the last stage of exhaustion. I supplied all the utensils, including knives and forks, spoons, cans, towels, etc., clearing our quarters of these.”

In all these things Miss Nightingale may be warmly commended, but the officials need not be too hotly condemned. They were but doing their duty, as they had learnt it; and for the rest, it was the system, or want of system, that was at fault. Just as in London there was no co-ordination among the Departments, so at Scutari there was no unity of action, and no clear personal responsibility. “It is a current joke here,” wrote Miss Nightingale from Scutari, “to offer a prize for the discovery of any one willing to take responsibility.” It was never awarded, for Miss Nightingale herself was, I suppose, “barred.” In writing to Mr. Herbert, she called many of the officials at Scutari by very hard names, but in other letters she admitted that[208] the ultimate fault lay elsewhere. “The grand administrative evil,” she said (Dec. 10), “emanates from home—in the existence of a number of departments here, each with its centrifugal and independent action, uncounteracted by any centripetal attraction, viz. a central authority capable of supervising and compelling combined effort for each object at each particular time.” Mr. Herbert might write, but the officials would not act. The force of custom was too strong. Miss Nightingale showed the Purveyor a letter from the Minister. “This is the first time,” he said, “I have had it in writing that I was not to spare expense. I never knew that I might not be thrown overboard.” “Your name,” she had told Mr. Herbert (Nov. 25), “is continually used as a bug-bear. They make a deity of cheapness, and the Secretary at War stands as synonymous here with Jupiter Tonans, whose shafts end only in a brutum fulmen. The cheese-paring system, which sounds unmusical in British ears, is here identified with you by the officers who carry it out. It is in vain to tell the Purveyors that they will get no kudos by this at home.”

It should not be supposed, however, that Miss Nightingale was a spurner of rules, and a despiser of discipline, routine, and subordination. The very reverse is the case. Her whole career makes it probable, the character of her mind suggests it, and the administration of the funds placed at her disposal, with which the present chapter has mainly been concerned, proves it. If she shocked and staggered some official minds by her daring innovations, it was her strictness and insistence upon rules and regulations that was most criticized in unofficial quarters. She explained the matter very clearly in her final Statement to Subscribers. She had been placed by the Government in two positions of trust, each independent of the other. She had been appointed superintendent of the nursing establishment; and she further had received authority, as almoner of the “Free Gifts” (as the Royal Bounty was called), to apply them, and any other gifts derived from private sources, in the War Hospitals. In the second of these capacities, she could, if she had chosen, have administered her stores solely at her personal discretion, and have delegated a like discretion to[209] other superintendents, sisters, or nurses appointed by her. But, except in a few special cases, which it were superfluous to enumerate, she rejected the liberty of personal discretion, and administered her funds only upon the requisition of medical officers. (She lays repeated stress on this fact, but I daresay that she herself was often the originating source of the requisitions. We have seen that in Harley Street she had learnt the art of managing overworked doctors.) Her statement of the reasons which governed her action is characteristic of her good sense. The exercise of personal discretion alone would have been the easier course; but the objections to it were “the abrogation of ordinary rule; the impossibility of preventing irregular issues, or at least of disproving the charge, and the unfitness of a large proportion of the women, who efficiently discharge the duty of the Nurses, to be the judges of the wants of soldiers and distribution of supplies to them; and, farther, the abuse which some would undoubtedly make of the power. To those to whom the charge of dishonesty would not apply, religious partiality either would, or, what in matters of this kind is only less mischievous, would be believed to, apply.” Next, there was the danger of patients being given other food than what the medical officers ordered. “It is needless to state to any sensible person, even without hospital experience, the manifold dangers of issuing to Nurses, whether ‘Ladies, Sisters, or Nurses,’ stores or facilities for procuring stores, to be distributed at their own discretion through the Wards. It is to be remembered that the employment of women in Army Hospitals is recent, that many experienced and able Surgeons are opposed to it, that, among these, some are honestly, and some are unscrupulously prone to find objections to it, and to exaggerate mischiefs arising from it; that the Surgeon can, to a considerable extent, allow the Nurse to be useful, or force her to be comparatively useless, in his Wards; that the War Hospitals are a bad field for investing the Nurse with powers and offices which she never exercises in Civil Hospitals. On these grounds, as strict an adherence to existing rules as was possible appeared to be the only course.… Miss Nightingale exacted and she rendered adherence to rules to a large extent, and she strictly reverted[210] to them when any emergency, during which, at the instance of authorities, she had departed from them, had ceased. A position such as hers necessarily exposes the holder to attacks from different quarters upon opposite grounds. While previously existing authorities are disposed to complain of all novel expenditure as lavish, and tending to the relaxation of discipline by over-indulgence, others, who feel themselves checked or restrained by regulations in the distribution of comforts according to their ideas of benevolence, will naturally object to the obstruction, in their view unnecessarily, interposed to the current of public liberality. While the experience of all who have conducted the operations of any extensive charity proves that the application of the ordinary axioms of business is the only road to success, it also sufficiently shows that such application is surely attended by no small measure of unpopularity.”[122]

She saw the value of rules, and respected them, sometimes even when they were ridiculous. On a cold night in January 1856, she was by the bedside of a dying patient; whose feet she found to be stone cold. She requested an orderly to fetch a hot-water bottle immediately. He refused, on the ground that his instructions were to do nothing for a patient without directions from a medical officer. Miss Nightingale stood corrected, and trudged off to find a doctor and make requisition for the bottle in due form. On a night in the following month, there was an unusually cold east wind, with a heavy snowfall. The patients in the ward attended by a civilian doctor were exposed to the wind and complained bitterly of the cold, but the regulation supply of fuel had given out. As the Government store was closed, Miss Nightingale waived the rule about applying first to the Purveyor, and gave the doctor fuel from her private stores. Next day the civilian doctor requisitioned in due form for an extra supply of fuel. He was refused. He carried his case to the Inspector-General. That official pleaded that he could not depart from the regulations which allowed only a certain[211] quantity of wood for each stove. But, urged the civilian, exceptional cold calls for an extra allowance. Possibly, replied the Inspector-General with exemplary gravity, but “a Board must first sit” upon the question. The civilian smiled good-humouredly, and begged the great man to supply the wood first, and let the Board sit upon it when the weather was milder. The Inspector-General consented. These little incidents[123] throw a flood of light upon the difficulties through which Miss Nightingale had to thread her way. She was a firm believer in rules; but she was one of those able administrators who have the sense to know, and the courage to act upon the knowledge, that rules sometimes exist only to be broken.

And this was precisely the kind of initiative that the state of things in the hospitals at Scutari demanded. Miss Nightingale's adherence to rules may have brought unpopularity upon her from some of her subordinates or subscribers; but her departure from rules, on due cause of emergency, and her cutting of knots—perhaps even her breaking open of consignments—brought from her official superior, Mr. Sidney Herbert, nothing but commendation and support. One sees this sometimes in his letters to herself, sometimes in those which he addressed to others, and which reflect the impression made upon him by her vigour and resource. “Pray recollect,” he wrote to the senior medical officer (Dec. 1, 1854), “in your demands upon us here, whether for more men, more comforts, or more necessaries, that there is no question of pounds, shillings and pence in such matters, but that whatever can be got must be got.” And to the Purveyor-General he wrote: “This is not a moment for sticking at forms, but for facilitating the rapid and easy transaction of business. There is much mischief done to the public service by the stickling for precedence and dignity between departments.” Thus he wrote to many others also; but he confessed to Mr. Bracebridge that he had “small hopes of these men. I have been writing in this sense before, and in vain; but I trust there is some improvement. They are so saturated with the cheese-paring economy of forty years' peace, that there is no getting[212] them to act up to a great occasion.”[124] Miss Nightingale's initiative alone saved the situation.

I have in this chapter separated various illustrations of that initiative from others which, in the preceding chapter, were attributed to “the woman's insight.” But perhaps the separation, though convenient, is imaginary, and all the cases of Miss Nightingale's administrative energy are ascribable to the same cause. Such was Mr. Kinglake's opinion; yet I have always suspected that the exceeding prominence given by him to the woman's touch in Miss Nightingale's work may in part have been caused by a desire to heighten the contrasts, and to barb with deadlier point his brilliant satire upon incompetence in official places. Let those who believe that it is possible to make a sharp delimitation between the “masculine” and the “feminine mind” settle this matter as they may. It seems to me that as there are old women of both sexes, so in both sexes there are men of business. My object in this chapter has been to show that Miss Nightingale brought to bear upon the task which confronted her at Scutari those high powers of the administrative mind, be they masculine or feminine, which, in moments of emergency, are capable of resource, initiative, decision.

[213]

“When one reads such twaddling nonsense,” wrote Dr. Hall in November 1855 from the Crimea to Dr. Andrew Smith in London, “as that uttered by Mr. Bracebridge, and which was so much lauded in the Times because the garrulous old gentleman talked about Miss Nightingale putting hospitals, containing three or four thousand patients, in order in a couple of days by means of the Times funds, one cannot suppress a feeling of contempt for the man who indulges in such exaggerations, and pity for the ignorant multitude who are deluded by these fairy tales.”[125] The contempt and pity of the Inspector-General of the hospitals in the East were not unmixed, I think we may surmise, with a good deal of anger, which, we may also surmise, was shared by his friend, the Director-General of the Medical Department in London. Such feelings were in the course of human nature, and the exaggeration in the statements cited by Dr. Hall is palpable. Miss Nightingale was not a magician. It would be an idle fairy tale to represent that by her exertions, either in a couple of days, or a couple of months, she effected a complete transformation scene. And it would be unfair to attribute solely to Miss Nightingale the gradual improvements which, though largely due to her initiative and resource (as described[214] in preceding chapters), were in fact the result of the exertions of many persons both at home and in the East. “I have an unbounded admiration of Miss Nightingale's qualifications,” said a deputy medical inspector, “and of the manner she applies them, but I see dozens of things placed to her credit which I happen to know she had nothing to do with.”[126] Such was doubtless the case. Yet though in one sense Dr. Hall was perfectly right, in another he was profoundly wrong. Neither he, however, nor any of the other medical men who shared his views, need be blamed for their misapprehension. The facts of the case can only be fully understood now that access is obtainable to the private correspondence of Miss Nightingale and other actors in the drama.

She did many things herself, but she was also the inspirer and instigator of more things which were done by others. She was able of her own initiative to institute considerable reforms; but she was a reformer on a larger scale through the influence which she exercised. Though she was in truth no magician, there were men on the spot who, not being able to understand the secret and sources of her power, seemed to find something uncanny in it. Our good friend, Colonel Sterling, who hated the intrusion of petticoats into a campaign, was very much puzzled. The thing seemed to him “ludicrous,” as we have heard, but he had to admit that “Miss Nightingale queens it with absolute power”; and elsewhere he speaks of “the Nightingale power” as something mysterious and “fabulous.” The secret, however, is simple. “The Nightingale power” was due to causes of which some were inherent in herself and others were adventitious. The inherent strength of her influence lay in the masterful will and practical good sense which gave her dominion over the minds of men. The adventitious sources of her power were that she had both the ear and the confidence of Ministers, and the interest and sympathy of the Court. I have called this accession of influence “adventitious,” but it also accrued to her, in a secondary degree, from the inherent force of her character.

The influence of the Court in strengthening, in speeding[215] up, and sometimes in chiding Ministers, especially in military matters, was, during the reign of Victoria, very great, as all readers of memoirs of the time are aware.[127] And from an early period of Miss Nightingale's mission the Court had expressed a lively interest in it, and had intimated a wish that full consideration should be paid to her experiences and impressions. “Would you tell Mrs. Herbert,” wrote the Queen to Mr. Sidney Herbert (Dec. 6, 1854), “that I beg she would let me see frequently the accounts she receives from Miss Nightingale or Mrs. Bracebridge, as I hear no details of the wounded, though I see so many from officers, etc., about the battlefield, and naturally the former must interest me more than any one. Let Mrs. Herbert also know that I wish Miss Nightingale and the ladies would tell these poor, noble wounded and sick men that no one takes a warmer interest or feels more for their sufferings or admires their courage and heroism more than their Queen. Day and night she thinks of her beloved troops. So does the Prince. Beg Mrs. Herbert to communicate these my words to those ladies, as I know that our sympathy is much valued by these noble fellows.” Upon the receipt of the Queen's message, the chaplain went through the wards reading it to the men, and copies of it were also posted on the walls of the several hospitals. “The men were touched,” Miss Nightingale reported to Mr. Herbert (Dec. 25). “‘It is a very feeling letter,’ they said. ‘She thinks of us’ (said with tears). ‘Each man of us ought to have a copy which we will keep till our dying day.’ ‘To think of her thinking of us,’ said another; ‘I only wish I could go and fight for her again.’” The Queen's message was followed by more substantial proof of Her Majesty's interest, and here again Miss Nightingale was made the intermediary between the throne and the soldiers. Through Mr. Sidney Herbert, the Queen had ascertained from Miss Nightingale the kind of comforts which would be useful[216] to the wounded, and the following letter was sent to her by the Keeper of the Queen's Purse:—

The Queen sent presents of warm scarves and the like to Miss Nightingale's nurses. The position of Almoner of the Free Gifts and the confidence thus shown by the Sovereign greatly extended the prestige of Miss Nightingale, who was already known to command influence with the Government, to have the favour of the Press, and to be the darling of popular opinion. Officials might feel sore, and old fogeys might grumble, but the fact became palpable that “the Nightingale power” had to be reckoned with.

It was, however, behind the scenes that Miss Nightingale's activity as a reformer was most powerfully exercised. In accordance with Her Majesty's command, reports from Miss Nightingale were forwarded to the Queen, and by her were sent on to the Duke of Newcastle. The Duke, writing to the Queen on December 22, 1854, assured Her Majesty that the condition of the Hospitals at Scutari, and the entire want of[217] all method and arrangement in everything which concerns the comfort of the army, were subjects of constant and most painful anxiety to him. “Nothing can be more just,” he added, “than all your Majesty's comments upon the state of facts exhibited by these letters, and the Duke of Newcastle has repeatedly, during the last two months, written in the strongest terms respecting them—but hitherto without avail, and with little other result than a denial of charges, the truth of which must now be considered to be substantiated.”[128] It remained for Ministers to do what was possible to remedy the evils.

Mr. Sidney Herbert, who (as already stated) had relieved the Duke of Newcastle of hospital matters, needed no compulsion to zeal, and Miss Nightingale's letters to him showed in what directions his zeal could most usefully be employed. The Government of Lord Aberdeen, defeated on the motion appointing the Roebuck Committee, resigned in January 1855, and Lord Palmerston became Prime Minister. The offices of Secretary for War and Secretary at War were amalgamated, and Lord Panmure became Secretary of State in place of the Duke of Newcastle. Mr. Herbert became for a short time Secretary of State for the Colonies, and then resigned. But Mr. Herbert begged Miss Nightingale to continue writing to him, promising to forward her representations to the proper quarters. Lord Palmerston knew her personally, and Lord Panmure paid deference to her wishes and opinions, so that the change of Government did not weaken her position. I have before me copies of a long series of letters addressed by Miss Nightingale to Mr. Herbert between November 1854 and May 1855. He had given her private instructions that she was to act as eye and ear for him in the East. Of her letters a few were printed by Lord Stanmore in his Memoir of Sidney Herbert, where also a series of Mr. Herbert's letters, both to her and to various officials concerned, is given. A comparison of the one set with the other shows very clearly how much of the improvements which the Government of Lord Aberdeen and its successor were able to effect was due to the suggestions, the remonstrances, the entreaties of Miss[218] Nightingale. Her letters are written with complete freedom and often in great haste. It would be possible to make isolated extracts from them which would suggest that the writer was a censorious and uncharitable scold. But such a selection would convey a misleading impression. Miss Nightingale wrote unreservedly about individuals, because she saw, as Mr. Herbert himself saw also, that the personnel was at fault, and that the most admirable instructions from home would be useless unless there were men of some initiative and vigour to carry them out on the spot. She wrote in anger, because she saw, what Mr. Herbert soon came to know, that such men were not forthcoming. “I write all this savagery,” she said (March 5, 1855), “because of the non-success of your unwearied efforts for the good of these poor Hospitals.” And then something must be allowed to the caustic humour which, when Miss Nightingale had a pen in her hand, could not be denied. “I shall make no further remark about him,” she writes of a certain individual, “than that he is a fossil of the pure Old Red Sandstone.” “Some newspaper has said of me,” she writes on another occasion, “that I am the fourth woman (query, Old Woman) that has had to do with the war. Who are the other three?” And she goes on for Mr. Herbert's amusement to nominate three of his principal subordinates for the distinction. It would argue a lack of humour to take such epistolary diversions with no grain of salt. But I do not propose to follow the example of a previous writer, who has had access to these letters, in recording Miss Nightingale's remarks on individuals. I desire rather to illustrate from the letters, and from other sources, first, the practical contributions to reform which Miss Nightingale made in some matters of detail, and then her firm grasp of the large principles of sound administration.

Miss Nightingale performed the duties, as we have seen, of a Purveyor to the sick and wounded portion of the British army. The duty was assumed by her only because the home authorities had been deficient in foresight, or the authorities on the spot were inefficient and hampered by official restrictions.[219] Hence her earlier letters to Mr. Herbert were largely filled with urgent suggestions for the sending of Government stores. She begs for “hair mattresses, or even flock, as cheaper.” The French hospitals were furnished throughout with hair mattresses; the British soldier was suffering terribly from bed-sores. She pleads for knives and forks: “the men have to tear their meat like wild beasts.” She suggests mops, plates, dishes, towelling, disinfectants, and so forth,—obvious requirements, no doubt, but, as Mr. Herbert said, the responsible authorities seem to have shrunk sometimes from making requisitions lest they should thereby confess the inadequacy of their preparations. It was Miss Nightingale, again, who suggested the need of carpenters to do odd jobs in the vast and imperfectly equipped Turkish buildings which served for the British hospitals. She expressed herself most gratefully for an “invaluable reinforcement” of them which Mr. Herbert had sent out; but their arrival necessitated a depletion in one department of her private stores. “These men,” she wrote (Feb. 19, 1855), “I had to find with knives, forks, and spoons, in default of the Purveyor, who besides would not provide them with rations unless the Officer of Engineers wrote ‘urgent’ and asked it ‘as a favour.’”

Some building operations, Miss Nightingale, as we have seen, took it upon herself to carry out; and some sanitary reforms she was able, by her personal influence with the orderlies, to effect.[129] “The instruction of the Orderlies in their business was,” she said,[130] “one of the main uses of us in the War Hospitals.” Other sanitary engineering works, on a larger scale, were ultimately carried out, thanks in part to her urgent and detailed representations to the authorities at home. She had pointed out repeatedly to them that the mere issuing of orders was insufficient; it was essential that executive powers should be placed in the hands of officials directly responsible for immediate action. When the Government was reconstituted after the fall of Lord Aberdeen, with Lord Panmure as Secretary for War, this lesson was taken faithfully to heart, and a Commission[220] of Three—Dr. John Sutherland, Dr. Hector Gavin, and Mr. Robert Rawlinson, C.E.—was sent out to the East with full executive powers. They received their instructions on February 19, 1855, and within three days they sailed. “The tone of the instructions,” says Kinglake, “is peculiar, and such as to make one believe that they owed much to feminine impulsion. The diction of the orders is such that, in housekeeper's language, it may be said to have ‘bustled the servants.’” The credit for the bustling at home belongs, however, to Lord Shaftesbury, who had pressed the appointment of the Commissioners upon Lord Panmure, and who was employed to draft their instructions.[131] The duties of these Sanitary Commissioners were laid down with a minuteness of detail which Miss Nightingale herself could not have excelled; and they were then told that “the utmost expedition must be used in the execution of all that is necessary at the place of your destination. It is important that you be deeply impressed with the necessity of not resting content with an order, but that you see instantly, by yourselves or your agents, to the commencement of the work and to its superintendence day by day until it is finished.”[132] It is from the Report of the Sanitary Commissioners that I drew many of the statements about the condition of the hospitals given in an earlier chapter. They set about the work of sanitary engineering with great dispatch, and the death-rate in the hospitals fell, as the result of their reforms, with remarkable rapidity.[133] “The sanitary conditions of the hospitals of Scutari,” Miss Nightingale told the Royal Commission of 1857, “were inferior in point of crowding, ventilation, drainage, and cleanliness, up to the middle of March 1855, to any civil hospital, or to the poorest homes of the worst parts of the civil population of any large town that I have ever seen. After the sanitary works undertaken at that date were executed (June), I know no buildings in the world which I could compare with them in these points, the original defects of construction of course excepted.” It was this Commission, as Miss Nightingale said afterwards[221] to Lord Shaftesbury, that “saved the British Army.” In Dr. Sutherland, the head of the Sanitary Commission, Miss Nightingale found a warm admirer and a stout supporter. During his stay at Scutari he acted as her physician. On her return to England she was on terms of intimate friendship with him and his wife; and Dr. Sutherland was, as we shall hear, one of her close allies in the battle for reform in army hygiene. With Mr. (afterwards Sir Robert) Rawlinson she also formed a friendship which lasted to the end of his life. Dr. Gavin died in the Crimea during the work of the Commission.

In the matter of stores, whatever suggestions or requisitions Miss Nightingale sent home were complied with by Government. But it was one thing to send stores out, and quite another to secure that they should arrive when and where they were wanted. “Sidney,” wrote Mrs. Herbert to Mrs. Bracebridge (Nov. 17, '54), “has sent heaps of armchairs, etnas, and other comforts, but is in terrible fear that they may have been carried on with the troops to Balaclava from some blunder.” Miss Nightingale's unerring eye for detail and perception of the point saw where the evil lay. First, there was no co-ordination among the departments at home in packing the things. The Prince (the wreck of which in the famous hurricane of November 14 was disastrous to the welfare of the soldiers) “had on board,” she wrote, “a quantity of medical comforts for us, which were so packed under shot and shell as that it was found impossible to disembark them here, and they went to Balaclava and were lost.” But there was a second obstacle. The army had encamped at Scutari as early as May 1854, but it had occurred to nobody to establish either there or at Constantinople an office for the reception and delivery of goods. Packages, intended for the army or the hospitals, if they arrived in merchant vessels, were detained in the Turkish Custom House, from which they were never extracted without much delay, difficulty, and confusion; many were partially or entirely destroyed; and many abstracted and totally lost. “The Custom House,” said Miss Nightingale, “was a bottomless pit, whence nothing ever issued of all that was thrown in.” In the case of ships chartered by the Government, great masses of goods were necessarily landed[222] together and stowed away promiscuously for want of time and space for sorting, and were often delayed by an unnecessary trip to Balaclava and back again. There were occasions in which vessels containing hospital stores, as well as munitions of war, made three voyages to and fro before the former were landed at Scutari. Sometimes when Miss Nightingale happened to hear of an incoming vessel betimes, she was able, by special petition to the military authorities, to intercept hospital stores; but she saw (what no one else seems to have done) that the whole system was at fault. “It is absolutely necessary,” she wrote, “that there should be a Government Store House, in the shape of a hulk, where stores for the British, from whatever ships, could be received at once from them, and be delivered on the ship-store-keeper's receipt. There are no store-houses to be had by the water's-edge, and porterage is very expensive and slow.” In March 1855 Miss Nightingale's solution was adopted.[134]

As Purveyor, Miss Nightingale was directly concerned only with the sick and wounded; but the condition in which the men arrived at Scutari enabled her to learn the state of things at the front, and she urged upon Mr. Herbert the necessity of sending out warm clothing to the army in the Crimea. “The state of the troops who return here, particularly those 500 who were admitted on the 19th, is frost-bitten, demi-nude, starved, ragged. If the troops who work in the trenches are not supplied with warm clothing, Napoleon's Russian campaign will be repeated here.” The terrible experiences of the British army before Sebastopol during the winter of 1854–55 were some fulfilment of her prediction. When opportunity offered she similarly sent suggestions to Lord Panmure; then, in reply to a letter of kind inquiries from him about her health (Aug. 1855), she called attention to the disproportionate number of patients which came from the Artillery, and threw out hints for economizing the men's labour.[135] On a matter of the soldiers' pay, she was the means of remedying a hardship which had struck her at Scutari. She pressed[223] earnestly upon Mr. Herbert that hospital stoppages against the daily pay of the sick soldier (9d.) should be made equal to the hospital stoppage against the wounded soldier (4½.), provided that the sickness be incurred while on duty before the enemy. She made this representation in December 1854, not only to Mr. Herbert, but to the Queen. On February 1, 1855, she heard with great satisfaction that her suggestion had been adopted, and that the soldiers' accounts were to be rectified in that sense as from the Battle of the Alma.

The Queen had asked Miss Nightingale to make suggestions as to what Her Majesty could do “to testify her sense of the courage and endurance so abundantly shown by her sick soldiers.” One of the suggestions submitted was the rectification just mentioned. Another suggestion was that a Firman should be immediately asked of the Sultan granting the military cemetery at Scutari to the British, and that Her Majesty should have it enclosed by a stone wall. “There are already, alas!” wrote Miss Nightingale, “about a thousand lying in this cemetery. Nine hundred were reported last week. We have buried one hundred in the last two days only. The spot is beautiful, overlooking the Sea of Marmora, and occupies the space between the General Hospital wall and the edge of the sea-cliff.” The suggestion must have gone straight to the Queen's heart, for Miss Nightingale was informed that Her Majesty had written on the subject both to Lord Clarendon, the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, and to the British Ambassador to the Porte. The Firman was obtained in due course, and the well-kept British enclosure attracts the attention of travellers to this day by contrast with the Oriental burial-places. It was again at Miss Nightingale's suggestion that a memorial obelisk, far seen in lonely splendour, was erected “by Queen Victoria and her people.”[136]

But I must not linger further over points of detail. Miss Nightingale's eye for detail did not prevent her from taking[224] comprehensive views, and from time to time she sent to Mr. Herbert schemes of reorganization. In the following letter, of January 8, 1855, she exposed the extent and nature of the evil in the hospitals, and the kind of reform which was needed to remedy them:—

This further scheme may, however, be given more shortly from a later letter (Jan. 28):—

On September 20, 1855, a Royal Warrant was issued, reorganizing the Medical Staff Corps, “for the better care of the sick and wounded,” revising the duties of the several officers, and improving their pay. Any one who cares to refer to this Warrant, and to compare it with Miss Nightingale's letters just given, will see that in large measure her suggestions were adopted by the War Department.

Miss Nightingale was careful, as we have seen, not to interfere with the doctors, and, though she thought that as administrators some of them were ineffective, she bore willing testimony to their skill and devotion (with some few exceptions) in their proper work. But she could not abstain from deploring one great omission, and she offered to subscribe largely towards repairing it:—

This suggestion also was in part adopted. An excellent dissecting-room was built, provided with numerous instruments, microscopes and other apparatus.[138]

And so this woman of ideas went on, week by week, month by month, pouring in requisitions, hints, plans, to the Government at home; sometimes getting things done as she wanted, at others making suggestions which, had they been adopted, would still more have conduced to efficiency. Something of that calm and clear sagacity, which impressed Queen Victoria and Prince Albert when they made her personal acquaintance,[139] was reflected in her appearance and demeanour as observed by eye-witnesses at Scutari. “In appearance,” wrote Mr. Osborne, “Miss Nightingale is just what you would expect in any other well-bred woman, who may have seen perhaps rather more than thirty years of life; her manner and countenance are prepossessing, and this without the possession of positive beauty; it is a face not easily forgotten, pleasing in its smile, with an eye betokening great self-possession, and giving, when she wishes, a quiet look of firm determination to every feature. Her general demeanour is quiet and rather reserved; still, I am much mistaken if she is not gifted with a very lively sense of the ridiculous. In conversation, she speaks on matters of business with a grave earnestness one would not expect from her appearance. She has evidently a mind disciplined to restrain under the principles of the action of the moment every feeling which would interfere with it. She has trained herself to command, and learned the value of conciliation towards others and constraint over herself. I can conceive her to be a strict disciplinarian; she throws herself into a work as its head. As such she knows well how much[231] success must depend upon literal obedience to her every order.”[140]

It was soon perceived at Scutari that Miss Nightingale was a power. She mentioned incidentally at a later period a curious fact, which shows the way in which officers appealed to her as a kind of emergency-man. In 1862 she was pressing the War Office to separate the function of Banker from that of Purveyor, and she illustrated the confusion caused by the amalgamation from her own experience. Among the instances was this: “I had at Scutari thousands of sovereigns at a time in my bedroom, entrusted to me by officers who preferred making me their banker because of the perpetual discord. ‘Offend the Commissary or Purveyor, and you won't be able to get your money.’”[141] It was soon perceived also that Miss Nightingale was the person who, if any one, could get things done, and any official who had an idea took it to her. In the letters to Sidney Herbert she sometimes bids him know that what she says does not merely come from “poor me,” but represents the views “of all the best men here.” But she, I think, was the best man of them all.[142] Such was the opinion, at any rate, of a man among men, the redoubtable Sydney Godolphin Osborne. “Every day,” he wrote in describing his experience at Scutari, “brought some new complication of misery to be somehow unravelled. Every day had its peculiar trial to one who had taken such a load of responsibility, in an untried field, and with a staff of her own sex, all new to it. Hers was a post requiring the courage of a Cardigan, the tact and diplomacy of a Palmerston, the endurance of a Howard, the cheerful philanthropy of a Mrs. Fry. Miss Nightingale fills that post; and, in my opinion, is the one individual who in this whole unhappy war has shown more than any other what real energy guided by good sense can do to meet the calls of sudden emergency.”[143] And hence it was, too, that any official who felt the urgency of some[232] particular need in his own department carried his case to the Lady-in-Chief. Did a surgeon want some point represented with special urgency to the authorities at home? He went to Miss Nightingale. Did a purveyor want some special authority from the military to facilitate his task? He went to Miss Nightingale. The centre of initiative at Scutari was in the Sisters' Tower; and going to Miss Nightingale had something of the magic that in earlier days was found in “going to Mr. Pitt.”[144]

[233]

Matthew Arnold.

In the preceding chapters we have seen at work the impelling power of a brain and a will; but, with these, Florence Nightingale brought to her mission the tenderness of a woman's heart. She was the matron of a hospital no less than the mistress of a barrack. She was a resolute administrator; but also, as was said at the time in a hundred speeches, letters, articles:

Upon those behind the scenes, upon ministers and officials, it was the former side of her activity that made the profounder impression. Some of them applauded what she did, recognizing that only the advent of a new force could have driven a way through the quagmire; others complained that in her methods there was something too imperious and masterful; all alike perceived her power and strength of will. But to the sick and wounded among whom she lived and moved, and to the great public at home which heard of her work, it was the softer side of her character that made the[234] more instant appeal. By them she was known and honoured not as the rigid disciplinarian or creative organizer, but as the compassionate and tender nurse. Those who had no means of knowing what other work she had to do supposed that ministration to the sick, in the narrower sense, comprised it all. But, in fact, as she wrote to Mr. Herbert (Jan. 14, 1855), nursing was “the least important of the functions into which she had been forced”; and those on the spot, who watched the arduousness of these other duties, wished that she could be persuaded to spare herself more of one kind of work or of the other. The marvel is that in unstinted measure she combined them both.

Her devotion and her power of work were prodigious. “I work in the wards all day,” she said, “and write all night”; and this was hardly exaggeration. A letter from Miss Stanley (Dec. 21, 1854) gives an interesting glimpse of Florence Nightingale at work in the Barrack Hospital:—

The occasion described by Miss Stanley was post-day. Still busier were the awful days on which fresh consignments of sick and wounded arrived from the Crimea. Miss Nightingale has been known, said General Bentinck, to pass eight hours on her knees dressing wounds and administering comfort. There were times when she stood for twenty hours at a stretch, apportioning quarters, distributing stores, directing the labours of her staff, or assisting at the painful operations where her presence might soothe or support. She had, said Mr. Osborne, “an utter disregard of contagion. I have known her spend hours over men dying of cholera or fever. The more awful to every sense, any particular case, especially if it was that of a dying man, the more certainly might her slight form be seen bending over him, administering to his ease by every means in her power, and seldom quitting his side till death released him.”[148] “We cannot,” wrote Mr. Bracebridge to her uncle, Mr. Smith (Dec. 18, 1854), “prevent her self-sacrifice for the dying. She cannot delegate as we could wish; but the cases are so interesting and painful; who could leave them when once taken up?—boys and brave men dying who can be saved by nursing and proper diet.” It is recorded that on one occasion she saw five soldiers set aside as hopeless cases. The first duty of the overworked surgeons was with those whom there seemed to be more hope of saving. She asked to be given the care of the five men, and the surgeons consented. Assisted by one of her nurses, she tended the cases throughout the night, administering nourishment from her stores, and in the morning they were found to be in a fit condition for surgical treatment.[149] “Miss Nightingale,” said a Chelsea pensioner, in recalling his experiences at Scutari, “was always coming in and out. She used to attend to all the worst cases herself. Some of the new men were a bit shy at first, but many a time I've[236] heard her say, ‘Never be ashamed of your wounds, my friend.’”[150] “I believe,” wrote a Civilian doctor who saw her at work, “that there was never a severe case of any kind that escaped her notice, and sometimes it was wonderful to see her at the bedside of a patient who had been admitted perhaps but an hour before, and of whose arrival one would hardly have supposed it possible she could be already cognisant.”[151]

Sometimes when exhausted nature could not be denied repose, she would depute the last sad office to another lady. “Selina [Mrs. Bracebridge] is sitting up with a dying man. Florence at last asleep, 1 A.M.” Her days were always long; for she deemed it well not to allow any of her nurses to be in the wards after eight at night. And often, when all else was quiet, and she had been sitting up to finish her heavy correspondence, she would make a final tour of the wards. A lady volunteer, who two days after her arrival was sent for to accompany Miss Nightingale on such a tour, recalled the scene. “We went round the whole of the second story, into many of the wards and into one of the upper corridors. It seemed an endless walk, and it was one not easily forgotten. As we slowly passed along, the silence was profound; very seldom did a moan or cry from those deeply suffering ones fall on our ears. A dim light burned here and there. Miss Nightingale carried her lantern, which she would set down before she bent over any of the patients. I much admired her manner to the men—it was so tender and kind.”[152] The description of these midnight vigils, given by Mr. Macdonald, the commissioner of the Times Fund, became famous, by adaptation, throughout the world:—

Famous, too, became the words which one poor fellow sent home. “What a comfort it was to see her pass even. She would speak to one and nod and smile to as many more; but she could not do it to all, you know. We lay there by hundreds; but we could kiss her shadow as it fell, and lay our heads on the pillow again, content.” “Before she came,” said another soldier's letter, “there was cussin' and swearin', but after that it was holy as a church.” Mr. Sidney Herbert read out these letters at a public meeting in November 1855.[154] Lord Ellesmere used Mr. Macdonald's description in the House of Lords in May 1856.[155] And Longfellow, in the following year, made a poem of it all, one of the most widely known poems, I suppose, that have ever been written:—

The men idolized her. They kissed her shadow, and they saluted her as she passed down their wounded ranks. “If the Queen came for to die,” said a soldier who lost a leg at the Alma, “they ought to make her queen, and I think they would.” Her lively sense of humour, which Mr. Osborne had discerned in talks with her in the hospital, was appreciated also by the patients. “She was wonderful,” said one, “at cheering up any one who was a bit low,” “She was all full of life and fun,” said another, “when she talked to us, especially if a man was a bit down-hearted.”[156] Who can tell what comfort was brought by the sound of a woman's gentle voice, the touch of a woman's gentle hand, to many[238] a poor fellow racked by fever, or smarting from sores? And who can say how often her presence may have been as “a cup of strength in some great agony”? “The magic of her power over men was felt,” as Kinglake has described, “in the room—the dreaded, the blood-stained room—where operations took place. There perhaps the maimed soldier, if not yet resigned to his fate, might at first be craving death rather than meet the knife of the surgeon; but, when such a one looked and saw that the honoured Lady-in-Chief was patiently standing beside him, and—with lips closely set and hands folded—decreeing herself to go through the pain of witnessing pain, he used to fall into the mood for obeying her silent command, and—finding strange support in her presence—bring himself to submit and endure.”[157] And when the hour of death came, how often must the passing have been soothed by a presence which, with words of womanly comfort, may have carried the soldier's last thoughts back to home and wife, or child? A member of Parliament, well known in London Society, Mr. Augustus Stafford, went out during the recess of 1854 to Scutari, and made himself very useful to Miss Nightingale. “He says,” wrote Monckton Milnes (Jan. 1855), “that Florence in the Hospital makes intelligible to him the Saints of the Middle Ages. If the soldiers were told that the roof had opened, and she had gone up palpably to Heaven, they would not be the least surprised. They quite believe she is in several places at once.”[158] They were impressed by her power, no less than they were touched by her tenderness, and ascribed to the Lady-in-Chief the gifts of leadership in the field. “If she were at their head, they would be in Sebastopol in a week;” was a saying often heard in the hospital wards.

Of all the documents that have passed under my eyes in writing this memoir, none have touched me more than a bundle of letters to and from friends and relatives of Crimean soldiers. Miss Nightingale was careful to take note of any[239] dying man's last wishes or messages, and the letters in which she forwarded these, to wife or mother, must, by their touch of womanly sympathy, have brought balm to many a stricken heart. “My dear Miss,” writes one mother, “I feel the loss of my poor son's death very keenly, but if anything could help my grief it is the thought that he was looked to and cared for by kind friends when so many miles away from his native land.” “I beg,” writes a sister, “to return you my grateful thanks for all your kindness to my poor dear brother and for writing to tell me of his death. It is great consolation to know that both his soul and body were so kindly cared for.” “I can assure you,” writes another, “that you are beloved by every poor soldier I have seen.” Correspondence of this kind continued in the same manner when Miss Nightingale passed on from Scutari to the Crimea. One letter to a bereaved mother may be given as a representative of many:—

There is another bundle, hardly less touching, which contains letters of anxious inquiry addressed to Miss Nightingale from all parts of the United Kingdom, begging her to send, if she can, particulars of the whereabouts or of the illness or of the last hours of husband, brother, father, or son. “In order that you may know him,” writes one fond mother, “he is a straight, nice, clean-looking, light-complexioned youth.” “Died in hospital, in good frame of mind,” was Miss Nightingale's docket for the reply. Every letter was[240] carefully answered, and every message was, I doubt not, given whenever it was in her power to do so. Many are the blessings invoked on Miss Nightingale's head. Often the writer begins by explaining that the newspapers have told of her great kindness and so she will forgive the intrusion. Others show that they take all that for granted by beginning, “Dear Friend,” or ending, “Yours affectionately.” Many wives beg her to let the soldier know that the children are well and happy. And one letter sends a message to a wounded Lancer from the girl he left behind him, “If alive, please mention my name to him.”

The strain upon Miss Nightingale's physical and mental powers was incessant. Her health, as it proved in the end, was seriously impaired; but during all her work at Scutari, she was never absent from her post. “You had the best opportunities,” she was asked by the Royal Commission of 1857, “for observing the condition of the soldier when he entered the hospitals, while he resided in them, when he died and was sent to the cemeteries, when he was sent home as an invalid, and when he rejoined the army?” “Yes,” she answered; “I was never out of the hospitals.” During the worst time of cholera and typhus, three of her nurses died, and seven of the army doctors. Miss Nightingale tended two of the doctors in their last moments, and the thinning, for a while, of the medical ranks increased her labours. The amount of clerical work which devolved on her was, it may be well imagined, enormous. Lady Alicia Blackwood records that when she was starting a school in the women's and children's quarters at Scutari, Miss Nightingale said laughingly, “Oh, are you really going to do that unkind thing—to teach children to write? I am so tired of writing, I sometimes wish I could not write!” The laugh must have had a certain grimness in it, I fear. The extent of the correspondence which Miss Nightingale kept up with Ministers at home, with military and medical officers at the seat of war and at Scutari, may be gathered from the foregoing chapters. Her superintendence of the nurses entailed[241] in account-keeping and in letters to complainants among them, and to their relatives, another mass of correspondence. Then I find next, amongst her papers, piles of store-keeping accounts (mostly in her own handwriting), and other bundles of correspondence referring to offers of help in money or in kind. That Miss Nightingale ultimately broke down under the strain was natural; the marvel is that she bore up against it so long. She could not have coped with the mass of detail involved in her multifarious labours without a good deal of help. To Mr. Macdonald's assistance I have already referred; and like assistance was rendered for a time by the Rev. and Hon. Sydney Godolphin Osborne, the famous S.G.O. of letters to the Times. Mr. Kinglake devotes a charming page to “the enthusiastic young fellow who, abandoning his life of ease, pleasure, and luxury, went out, as he probably phrased it, to 'fag' for the Lady-in-Chief.” The reference is probably to Mr. Percy, mentioned in a previous chapter, or possibly to Mr. William Shore, a distant relative of Miss Nightingale's father; he was put in charge of a soldiers' library. But it was Miss Nightingale's old friends, Mr. and Mrs. Bracebridge, who rendered the longest and the most helpful aid. Mrs. Bracebridge shared alike her room and her labours, and with Mr. Bracebridge cared, as we have heard, for the soldiers' wives. But Mr. Bracebridge did much else. His knowledge of the East, and his persevering good humour, determined to help everybody about everything, were invaluable. Faithful, cheery, and indefatigable, no less now among the arduous labours of Scutari than in former days of sight-seeing at Rome and in Egypt, he fetched and carried for Miss Nightingale, wrote letters or orders for her, and kept minutes of her interviews; and, at times of less strain, relieved her of visitors or callers by taking them for excursions in the Straits or to Constantinople.

Miss Nightingale's thoughtfulness devised many practical ways of helping the men who were not too ill to think of their worldly affairs. In order to encourage them as[242] much as possible to occupy themselves and to keep up a communication with home, she supplied stationery and postage stamps to those in hospital. If a soldier was illiterate or too ill to write, she or one of her nurses, or some other volunteer, would write at the sick man's dictation. Mr. Augustus Stafford, as mentioned above, spent some portion of the autumn recess (Nov.–Dec. 1854) at Scutari, and he gave his experiences to the Roebuck Committee. He described the pitiable condition of the wounded on their arrival, “their thigh and shoulder bones perfectly red from rubbing against the deck” of the vessel which had brought them from the Crimea; but then Miss Nightingale's nurses came round, “and with a precision and rapidity which you would scarcely believe, would bring the soldiers arrowroot mixed with port wine, which was the greatest comfort; the men expressed themselves very thankfully, and said that they felt themselves in heaven.” But it was in writing letters for the soldiers that this “cherished, yet unspoilt, favourite of English society”[159] spent most of his time at Scutari. Of Miss Nightingale's reading-rooms some account will be found in another chapter (XI.).

She was much touched by the men's appreciation of these attentions, and she was no less impressed by the conduct of the orderlies in the hospitals. In describing to the Secretary of State certain sanitary reforms which she carried out in the hospitals of Scutari, she wrote: “I must pay my tribute to the instinctive delicacy, the ready attention of orderlies and patients during all that dreadful period; for my sake they performed offices of this kind (which they neither would for the sake of discipline, nor for that of the importance to their own health, which they did not know), and never was there one word nor one look which a gentleman would not have used; and while paying this humble tribute to humble courtesy, the tears come into my eyes as I think how, amidst scenes of loathsome disease and death, there rose above it all the innate dignity, gentleness, and chivalry of the men (for never, surely, was chivalry so strikingly exemplified), shining in the midst of what must be considered as the lowest sinks of human misery, and[243] preventing instinctively the use of one expression which could distress a gentlewoman.”[160]

Even in the lowest sinks of human misery there are chords which will respond to a sympathetic touch. It was the innate dignity of her bearing that struck every one who saw Florence Nightingale; and, amidst those scenes of loathsome disease and death, she was herself “the sweet presence of a good diffused.”

[244]

Every generation has its own “religious difficulty,” by which phrase is meant, not the difficulty which the individual soul or the collective soul of a nation may find in its religious beliefs themselves, but a difficulty which intrudes itself into allied or alien matters from the sphere of religious disputation. In the present day, the religious difficulty with which we are most familiar concerns questions of education. In the days of Miss Nightingale's mission to the East there was a religious difficulty in questions of nursing.

It was not enough that such a mission as hers was conceived in the very spirit of the Founder of Christianity: “I was sick, and ye visited me.” The question was eagerly and angrily canvassed under which of the rival Christian banners the visitation of the sick soldiers should be, and was being, carried on. The country had at the time hardly recovered its mental equilibrium after the shock administered to it by the Tractarian movement, and echoes of the “No Popery” cry of 1850 were still resonant in many quarters. The religious difficulty appeared at the very start of Miss Nightingale's Crimean work, and dogged her footsteps to the end of it. I have dealt already with the difficulties which her experiment encountered from social ideas, military prejudices, official routine; but I am not sure that of all her difficulties the religious one was not the most wearing[245] and worrying, as it was also assuredly the most unnecessary and the least excusable. It enveloped a noble undertaking in a fog of envy, strife, and futile railing.

Mr. Sidney Herbert, who was supposed to be of the High Church persuasion, had scented the difficulty from the first, as we have heard, and Miss Nightingale was keenly alive to it. They had desired to make the first party of nurses representative of all the leading sects; but owing to the abstention of a Protestant institution, the Roman Catholics and the High Church party were in a considerable majority among the thirty-eight nurses. This fact gave the alarm, and a sectarian hue-and-cry was immediately raised. It began, as I am sorry to have to say, in the Daily News; it was taken up, as goes without saying, in the so-called “religious press.” On October 28, 1854, when Miss Nightingale was on her way to Scutari, an attack upon her was given great prominence in the first-named paper. It was signed “Anti-Puseyite,” and it included the text of Mr. Herbert's letter which had somehow or other been obtained.[161] “Miss Nightingale recruited her staff of nurses from Miss Sellon's house [a High Church one] and from a Romanist establishment.” This awful fact explained “the party spirit which actuated the choice of Miss Nightingale for this important and responsible office, and which set aside Lady Maria Forester”—a lady, it seems, of Evangelical principles. It was not yet too late to remedy the offence “if the feeling of the nation be at once aroused and expressed.” “A Reader of the Bible” and other correspondents followed, and the controversy raged furiously. Mrs. Sidney Herbert's intervention, with an assurance that Miss Nightingale was somewhat Low Church, did not stop it. S. G. O. referred to it in his book. “I have heard and read,” he wrote, “with indignation the remarks hazarded upon her religious character. Her works ought to answer for her faith. If there is blame in looking for a Roman Catholic priest to attend a dying Romanist, let me share it with her—I did it again and again.”[162] An admirable avowal, but not calculated, I fear, to allay the anger of “No Popery” fanatics. The publication of Queen Victoria's letter of[246] December 6 (p. 215), showing the confidence which Her Majesty placed in Miss Nightingale, did something to stem the tide, but for many months the feud flowed on in the press.

Miss Nightingale's comment, when echoes of the storm reached her on the Bosphorus, was characteristic. “They tell me,” she wrote to Mr. Herbert (Jan. 28, 1855), “that there is a religious war about poor me in the Times, and that Mrs. Herbert has generously defended me. I do not know what I have done to be so dragged before the Public. But I am so glad that my God is not the God of the High Church or of the Low, that He is not a Romanist or an Anglican—or a Unitarian. I don't believe He is even a Russian, though His events go strangely against us. (N.B.—A Greek once said to me at Salamis, ‘I do believe God Almighty is an Englishman.’)” Excellent, too, was the answer given by an Irish clergyman when asked to what sect Miss Nightingale belonged. “She belongs to a sect which, unfortunately, is a very rare one—the sect of the Good Samaritan.” Miss Nightingale was by descent a Unitarian, by practice a communicant of the Church of England; but she was addicted neither to High Church nor to Low. Her God was the God of Moral Law, a God of infinite pity and benevolence, but also One who worked out His purpose by the free will of human instruments. Her service of God was the service of Man, and her service of Man mingled efficiency with tenderness. She applied only one kind of test to a nurse: Was she a good woman, and did she know her business? To be a good woman, a religious woman, a noble woman was not in itself sufficient. “Excellent, gentle, self-devoted women,” Miss Nightingale said in a note upon some of her staff, “fit more for Heaven than for a Hospital, they flit about like angels without hands among the patients, and soothe their souls, while they leave their bodies dirty and neglected. They never complain, they are eager for self-mortification. But I came not to mortify the nurses, but to nurse the wounded.” Therefore if a nurse was a good woman and knew her business, it was nothing that she was Romanist,[247] Anglican, High Church, Low Church, or Unitarian. If she was not a good nurse, the fact that she belonged, or did not belong, to this or that persuasion was no recommendation. Miss Nightingale was, it is true, desirous from the first to include Roman Catholics in her staff, and she did so, in spite of many difficulties, to the end. But her reasons therein were practical, not sectarian. In the first place, many of the soldiers were Roman Catholics; and, secondly, her apprenticeship in nursing had shown her the excellent qualities, as nurses, of many Catholic Sisters. But here efficiency was the test, and a Protestant Deaconess from Kaiserswerth was all one to her with a Sister from “a Romanist establishment.” And one practical advantage of vowed Sisters was that she did not lose them from marriage. One morning six nurses came in to Miss Nightingale, declaring that they one and all wished to be married. They were followed by six soldiers—sergeants and corporals—declaring their desire to claim the nurses as brides. This matrimonial deluge carried off six of her best nurses.[163]

Such, then, was Miss Nightingale's position; and one can understand the amused contempt with which she heard of the picture drawn of her in certain quarters as a conspirator in a Tractarian or Romanist plot. But she was a practical person, and, though herself broad-minded, took stock of a narrower world as she found it. She was intensely desirous of making her experiment of woman nurses a success, and she felt acutely the danger of wrecking it by even the suspicion of sectarian prejudice. This fact supplies a further explanation of the alarm with which she received the coming of the second party of nurses under Miss Stanley.[164] It included a batch of fifteen nuns. “The proportion of R. Catholics,” she wrote to Mr. Herbert, “which is already making an outcry, you have increased to 25 in 84. Mr. Menzies [the Principal Medical Officer] has declared that he will have two only at the General Hospital, and I cannot place them here [in the Barrack Hospital] in a greater[248] proportion than I have done, without exciting the suspicion of the Medical Men and others.” The difficulty was ultimately adjusted, but only at the cost of infinite trouble and worry to Miss Nightingale. Her letters to Mr. Herbert are full of references to the subject, some of them very amusing, and perhaps it was her lively sense of humour that helped to carry her through this religious difficulty. “Such a tempest,” she wrote (Dec. 25, 1854), “has been brewed in this little pint pot as you could have no idea of. But I, like the Ass, have put on the Lion's skin, and when once I have done that (poor me, who never affronted any one before), I can bray so loud that I shall be heard, I am afraid, as far as England. However, this is no place for lions; and as for asses, we have enough.” One proposition made to her was that, as the doctors did not want many more woman nurses, “ten of the Protestants should be appropriated as clerical females by the chaplains, and ten of the nuns by the priests, not as nurses, but as female ecclesiastics. With this of course I have nothing to do. It being directly at variance with my instructions, I cannot of course appropriate the Government money to such a purpose.” Miss Nightingale's own proposition was to allocate the party in various proportions to various hospitals; but the Superior of the new set of nuns objected that “it would be uncanonical” for any of her party to be separated from her. Then Miss Nightingale proposed sending some of the nuns, either of the first or of the second batch, back to England; but Father Cuffe said that to send them away would be “like the driving of the Blessed Virgin through the desert by Herod.” “I believe it may be proved as a logical proposition,” wrote Miss Nightingale in the midst of her religious difficulty, “that it is impossible for me to ride through all this; my caique is upset, but I am sticking on the bottom still.” Three days later she still despaired. “The fifteen New Nuns are leading me the devil of a life, trying to get in vi et armis, and will upset the coach; there is little doubt of that.” However, she held her ground. She had started with a Protestant howl at her; she was now prepared to face “a Roman Catholic storm.” Happily the Reverend Mother of the first party of nuns was on her side, and strove to[249] compose the canonical difficulty. To another Reverend Mother, who was less peaceably minded, Miss Nightingale often referred in her letters as “the Reverend Brickbat.” In any case, Miss Nightingale was resolved, as she wrote, “not to let our little Society become a hot-bed of Roman Catholic Intriguettes.” Ultimately it was arranged that five of the second party of nuns should go to the General Hospital, and ten to the newly opened hospital at Koulali. Miss Nightingale suspected some of the second party of a desire to proselytize; and presently she had to inform Mr. Herbert (Feb. 15, 1855) of “a charge of converting and rebaptizing before death, reported to me by the Senior Chaplain, by him to the Commandant, by him to the Commander-in-Chief.” She promptly exchanged the suspected nun.

The ingenuity of theological rancour was infinite. Having caught wind of the fact that there was some difference of view among the Roman Catholic Sisters, an Evangelical writer sought to fan the flame by denouncing the absurdity of “Catholic Nuns transferring their allegiance from the Pope of Rome to a Protestant Lady.” One of the Sisters, on hearing of this diatribe, playfully addressed Miss Nightingale as “Your Holiness,” who in turn dubbed the Sister “her Cardinal.”[165] I hereby give notice, in case Crimean letters from Miss Nightingale should chance to be printed (such as I have seen) in which she says, “I do so want my Cardinal,” that the expression signifies no dark and secret adhesion to any Prince of the Roman Church, but only a desire for the services of a particularly efficient nursing Sister. If a nurse was efficient, Miss Nightingale was on the friendliest terms with her, equally whether the nurse were Catholic or Protestant. Miss Nightingale herself was accused successively, and with equal absurdity in each case, of being prejudiced for, or against, Catholics and Protestants, and of being inimical to religious ministrations altogether.[166] The Protestant charges of proselytizing by Catholic nurses were of course met by counter-charges of attempts by Protestant nurses to convert Roman Catholic[250] patients; and finally a chaplain solemnly appealed to the War Department in London to remove one of Miss Nightingale's staff on the ground that the nurse had been heard to avow herself a Socinian. Miss Nightingale protested successfully against any such disciplinary measure, urging that the lady, whether Socinian or not, was an excellent nurse. Much of all this perverse disputing was born of sheer ignorance and intolerance. One of Miss Stanley's ladies was accused by a certain chaplain of “circulating improper books in the wards.” Particulars were asked, and it was found that the offending book was Keble's Christian Year.[167]

No sooner was any one phase of the religious difficulty adjusted than another appeared. There were Anglicans and Roman Catholics among the Nightingale nurses, and there were others selected from English hospitals, who, so far as their religious views were concerned, might be anything or nothing. But why, it was asked, were there no Presbyterians? Representations were made to the War Office. “I object,” wrote Miss Nightingale (Feb. 19, 1855), “to the principle of sending out any one, qua sectarian, not qua nurse. But this having already been done in the case of the R.C.'s, etc., I do not see how the Presbyterians can be refused. And therefore let six trained nurses be sent out, if you think fit, of whom let two-thirds be Presbyterians. But I must bar these fat drunken old dames. Above 14 stone we will not have; the provision of bedsteads is not strong enough. Three were nearly swamped in a caique, whom Mr. Bracebridge was conducting to the ship, and, had he not walked with the fear of the police before his eyes, he might easily have swamped them whole.” The stout old dames were not Presbyterians; but, sad to relate, two of the Presbyterian party did turn out to be over-fond of drink, and Miss Nightingale had to return them to England.[251] I regret to say that there were similar cases, not amongst the Presbyterians.

The charges and counter-charges of proselytism were referred by the chaplains to the Secretary of State. Lord Panmure, in reply (April 27, 1855), had “to say in the first place, that he has perused the correspondence with great regret, and that he deeply laments to find that religious differences have arisen to such an extent as to mar the united energies and labours of those who are devoting themselves with such disinterestedness and heroic courage and success to the relief of the sick and wounded.” The Minister then proceeded to promulgate instructions designed to prevent any proselytism by the nurses and Sisters. Unfortunately, his dispatch was so worded as to make things, from Miss Nightingale's point of view, no better, but rather worse. “The instructions,” she wrote to Lady Canning (Sept. 9, 1855), “have been so completely misunderstood that they have been my principal difficulty. The R.C.'s who before were quite amenable have chosen to construe the rule that they ‘are not to enter upon the discussion of religious subjects with any patients other than those of their own faith,’ to mean therefore with all of their own faith, and the second party of nuns who came out now wander over the whole Hospital out of nursing hours, not confining themselves to their own wards, nor even to patients, but ‘instructing’ (it is their own word) groups of Orderlies and Convalescents in the corridors, doing the work each of ten chaplains, and bringing ridicule upon the whole thing, while they quote the words of the War Office.” Lady Canning, who was at this time acting as Miss Nightingale's agent for the enlistment of nurses, had proposed to embody Lord Panmure's instructions in the printed Rules and Regulations. Miss Nightingale begged her to do no such thing. I doubt not that Miss Nightingale's own verbal instructions were less ambiguous. She was one who never failed to say exactly what she meant.

[252]

A great obstacle with which Miss Nightingale's work in the East had to contend throughout was the scarcity at the time of properly trained nurses. She had long ago formed a resolve to remedy this defect; the seriousness of it was still further enforced upon her mind by painful experience in the Crimean War; and her resolve was the more strengthened. The religious difficulty—demanding that nurses should be selected, to some extent, not qua nurses, but qua sectarians—accentuated the obstacle of inadequate training, which, however, would in any case have existed. The case is excellently put, in terms which doubtless reflect Miss Nightingale's own views, in a letter from Lady Verney to Mrs. Gaskell (May 17, 1855):—

It is the fact, though it is not popularly known, that Miss Nightingale was at this time strongly opposed to “lady” nurses. She objected to them, not because they were ladies, but because they were unlikely to be well trained. Pious and benevolent ladies were more given, she said, to “spiritual flirtations with the patients,” than apt[253] at the proper business of surgical nursing. It was the trained hospital nurses that she preferred. There were among the 125 women who passed through her hands in the East more efficient and less, and in so large a flock there were some black sheep. But amongst the band, in all classes and of all denominations, there were devoted and competent women, whose services deserve to be held in grateful remembrance beside those of their Lady-in-Chief. And as I have had to record Miss Nightingale's criticism upon some of the Roman Catholics among her flock, it should be added that of others she wrote to Mr. Herbert: “They are the truest Christians I ever met with—invaluable in their work—devoted, heart and head, to serve God and mankind—not to intrigue for their Church.” To the Reverend Superior, who came out from Bermondsey with the first party of nuns, Miss Nightingale was particularly attached. “She writes,” said Cardinal Wiseman, “that great part of her success is due to Rev. Mother of Bermondsey, without whom it would have been a failure.”[168]

The aspect of Miss Nightingale's work, touched upon in this chapter, adds another to the accumulation of difficulties with which she had to deal. It was the one which troubled her most. “In this sink of misery, in this tussle of life or death,” she felt the bitter futility of personal grievances and religious differences. It is worry, more than work, that kills; and the religious difficulty was perhaps the last straw which caused the Lady-in-Chief to break down, as we shall hear in the next chapter, under her heavy load of responsibility and care.

[254]

In the spring of 1855 Miss Nightingale decided to leave Scutari for a while in order to visit the hospitals in the Crimea. The conditions at Scutari were now greatly improved. Sanitary works had been executed. The hospitals were better supplied. The pressure in the wards, caused by the terrible winter before Sebastopol, was relieved. There were only 1100 cases in the Barrack Hospital, and of those only 100 were in bed. The rate of mortality had fallen from 42 per cent to 22 per thousand of the cases treated. The siege was likely soon to be accompanied by assaults, and the pressure might rather be in the hospitals at Balaclava, where the sick and wounded were if possible to remain, in order to avoid the sufferings of the sea passage to Scutari.

In the Crimea, besides the regimental hospitals, there were four general hospitals. There was the General Hospital at Balaclava, established after the British occupation in September 1854. There was the Castle Hospital, consisting of huts on the “Genoese heights” above Balaclava, opened in April 1855. There was the Hospital of St. George's Monastery, also consisting of huts, intended for convalescent and ophthalmic cases; and, lastly, there were the Hospitals of the Land Transport Corps, again consisting of huts, near Karani. All these hospitals had a complement of female nurses, though the Monastery Hospital not until December 1855,[255] and the Land Transport Hospitals not until 1856. In the spring of 1855, then, there were already female nurses at the General Hospital and the Castle Hospital, under their own superintendents, but all ultimately responsible to Miss Nightingale—as she apprehended, and as the War Office intended. She was now anxious to inspect these hospitals; to increase the efficiency of the female nursing establishments; and, in particular, to introduce those washing and cooking arrangements which had been productive of so much benefit at Scutari. Her visit of inspection was approved by the War Office; and, by instructions dated April 27, she was invested with full authority as Almoner of the Free Gifts in all the British Hospitals in the Crimea. But in other respects her position was somewhat ambiguous. The original instructions, issued by Mr. Herbert, had named her as Superintendent of the female nurses in all the British military hospitals in Turkey; and these words gave a standing-ground to her opponents in the Crimea. The intention of the War Office was to give her general superintendence, but to relieve her of direct responsibility for the nurses in the Crimea so long as she was at Scutari. The matter was not, however, cleared up till a later date,[169] and the indefiniteness of her position in the Crimea exposed her to infinite worry and intrigues.

On May 2, Miss Nightingale set forth from Scutari, where Mrs. Bracebridge was left in charge:—

Miss Nightingale was accompanied to the Crimea by the faithful Mr. Bracebridge, willing as ever to serve her. Among the nurses was Mrs. Roberts, whose exceptional efficiency and personal devotion to the Lady-in-Chief were soon to be called in need. Of the cooks, the chief was Soyer the Great, from whose cheerfully gossiping and pleasantly egotistical pages[170] some details are drawn in this chapter. The “boy” mentioned in Miss Nightingale's letter was Thomas, a drummer, who, though only twelve years of age, used to call himself “Miss Nightingale's Man.” He was a regular enfant de troupe, says M. Soyer, full of activity, wit, intelligence, and glee. He would draw himself up to his full height, and explain that he had “forsaken his instruments in order to devote his civil and military career to Miss Nightingale.” She was attended also by a soldier invalided from the 68th Light Infantry, whom Mr. Bracebridge had picked out to serve as messenger. In 1860 he wrote a manuscript account of his experiences in the Crimea,[171] and this is another first-hand source from which particulars are drawn in the present chapter. The party arrived at Balaclava on May 5, and the decks of vessels in the harbour were crowded with spectators anxious to catch a glimpse of the famous Lady-in-Chief. There was no accommodation for her ashore; so her headquarters were on board the Robert Lowe, and when that vessel left, on the sailing transport London.

Miss Nightingale set to work immediately, and with characteristic energy. One of her first duties was a visit of ceremony to Lord Raglan. She was a good horsewoman,[257] and as a girl had been fond of riding. She was now mounted “upon a very pretty mare, which, by its gambols and caracoling, seemed proud to carry its noble charge, and our cavalcade produced an extraordinary effect upon the motley crowd of all nations assembled at Balaclava, who were astonished at seeing a lady so well escorted.” Was not the great Soyer himself among the escort? The Commander of the Forces was away, but Miss Nightingale was taken to the Three Mortar Battery, and the soldiers, as she passed, gave her three times three. This visit to the front made a profound and indelible impression upon her.[172] It is first recorded in a letter of May 10, which was forwarded to Windsor Castle.[173] “Fancy,” she wrote, “working five nights out of seven in the trenches! Fancy being 36 hours in them at a stretch, as they were all December, lying down, or half lying down, often 48 hours with no food but raw salt pork, sprinkled with sugar, rum, and biscuit; nothing hot, because the exhausted soldier could not collect his own fuel, as he was expected to do, to cook his own ration; and fancy through all this the army preserving their courage and patience as they have done, and being now eager (the old ones more than the young ones) to be led even into the trenches. There was something sublime in the spectacle.” “When I see the camp,” she wrote to Lady Canning (May 10), “I wonder not that the army suffered so much, but that there is any army left at all; but now all is looking up. Sir John M'Neill has done wonders.” With Sir John M'Neill, a doctor who afterwards entered the Political Service in the East, Miss Nightingale formed a great friendship. He, with Colonel Tulloch, had been sent out to the Crimea by Lord Palmerston's Government to report upon the Commissariat system.

Miss Nightingale, on this and her later visits to the Crimea, saw and heard of many deeds of heroism which she loved to tell. “I remember,” she wrote, “a sergeant, who was on picket, the rest of the picket killed, and himself battered about the head, stumbled back to camp, and on his[258] way picked up a wounded man, and brought him in on his shoulders to the lines, where he fell down insensible. When, after many hours, he recovered his senses, I believe after trepanning, his first words were to ask after his comrade, ‘Is he alive?’ ‘Comrade, indeed! yes, he's alive, it is the General.’ At that moment the General, though badly wounded, appeared at the bedside. ‘Oh, General, it's you, is it, I brought in, I'm so glad. I didn't know your honour, but if I'd known it was you, I'd have saved you all the same.’ This is the true soldier's spirit.”[174]

During the few days immediately after her arrival at Balaclava, Miss Nightingale carried on an active investigation of the hospitals, regimental and general; arranged various affairs in connection with the sisters and nurses; discussed the building of new huts; and, in conjunction with M. Soyer, planned the erection of several kitchens for extra diet. Here, as at Scutari, she was fearless of contagion, and tended patients stricken with fever. On return to her ship one evening she complained of great fatigue; and on the following morning, feeling no better, she sent for Dr. Anderson, Chief Medical Officer at the General Hospital. He called others of the medical staff into consultation, and a joint bulletin was issued to the effect that Miss Nightingale was suffering from Crimean fever. They advised that she should be removed from the ship, and she was carried on a stretcher by relays of soldiers to the Castle Hospital on the Genoese Heights. The hut in which she lay was immediately behind those of the wounded soldiers. The attack of fever was sharp, and she was, as she afterwards admitted to her friends, “very near to death.” There are scraps of manuscript among her papers (for even in illness she could not be kept from the use of her pen) which show a wandering mind.

The news of Miss Nightingale's illness was received with consternation in England, and the anxiety of her friends was intense, though Lord Raglan had thoughtfully arranged[259] that a telegraphic dispatch from him should not reach them till, after two or three days of the fever, the doctors were able to hold out hopes of recovery. “Sitting to-day,” wrote her sister to a friend, from Embley (May 27), “in the little Vicarage woodhouse, waiting for the people to come out from church (for we were not up to the whole service), in order to go in to the Communion which she loves so well, and which we always take with her and God, and which she is taking in spirit or reality to-day if she is alive, and if not is taking in a higher and happier sense—Mama said, 'I thank God she is ready for life or for death'; and in that, dear, we truly strive to rest, though the spirit would quail, I am afraid, if there were not hope at the bottom.” The anxiety in the War Hospitals was scarcely less. “The soldiers turned their faces to the wall,” said one, “and cried.” The crisis passed, and on May 24 Lord Raglan was able to telegraph home that the patient was out of danger, and three days later that she was going on favourably. The bulletins were forwarded to the Queen, and on May 28 Her Majesty, in writing to Lord Panmure, was “truly thankful to learn that excellent and valuable person, Miss Nightingale, is safe.”[175] At this time a horseman rode up to her hut, and the nurse, Mrs. Roberts, who had been enjoined to keep the patient quiet, refused to let him in. He said that he most particularly desired to see Miss Nightingale. “And pray,” said Mrs. Roberts, “who are you?” “Ah, only a soldier,” replied the visitor, “but I have ridden a long way, and your patient knows me very well.” He was admitted, and a month later was himself laid low and died. It was Lord Raglan.

Miss Nightingale, on becoming convalescent, was strongly advised by the doctors to take a voyage to England. She would not listen to such advice. Her work at the front had but just begun, and she was resolved to return to it after the shortest possible delay. The voyage to the Bosphorus was the longest that she could be induced to take. Her[260] good Mrs. Bracebridge had arrived from Scutari just in time to accompany her friend on the return voyage. Lord Ward, whose steam-yacht was in harbour at the time, pressed the use of it upon her, and in it she was taken to Scutari. When the yacht reached Scutari, all the high officials were present to meet it. One of the large barges, used to remove the sick and wounded, was brought alongside, and Miss Nightingale, in a state of extreme weakness and exhaustion, was lowered into it. At the pier soldiers were in readiness, who carried her on a stretcher to the chaplain's house, followed by a large and sympathetic crowd. “I do not remember anything during the campaign,” wrote the good-hearted Soyer, “so gratifying to the feelings as that simple though grand procession.” “Ah,” said a soldier, “there was no sadder sight than to see that dear lady carried up from the pier on a stretcher just like we men, and perhaps by some of the fellows she nursed herself.”[176] It was the same when she was presently moved from Scutari to the shore in order to go to Therapia, where the Ambassador had placed his summer residence at her disposal. She was carried in a litter by four guardsmen, but, though it was only five minutes' walk to the shore, there were two relays, and her baggage was divided among twelve soldiers, though two could easily have carried the whole,[177] so great was the desire of the men to share in the honour of helping the Lady-in-Chief.

Her recovery was gradual, and her weakness great. Mrs. Bracebridge described her as unable to feed herself or speak above a whisper. The extreme exhaustion was more from the previous overstrain on mind and body than from the fever, the doctors said, and they recommended complete change and rest. Mr. Sidney Herbert wrote, imploring her to come home for two months: “We are delighted,” wrote her mother (July 9), “to think of you at Therapia. Oh, my love, how I trust that you will, among the numerous lessons which your life has been spent in learning, be able to perfect that most difficult one of standing and waiting.” She was to be lessoned in that form of service, but not till[261] after many more years of arduous labour, and for the present she would not hear of any return to England. The feeling of the soldiers for her touched her so deeply that she could not bear, she said, to leave them. Gradually she recovered strength. “We have a charming account,” wrote her sister (Aug. 21), “from Lothian Nicholson just ordered out to Crimea, who is quite enthusiastic, dear old boy, about her good looks, which, as all her hair has been cut off, is good testimony—‘her own smile,’ he talks of, and says he can hardly believe she has gone through such a winter. The dear Bracebridges say that her improvement in the last week was delightful and wonderful.” Already, in July, her business letters were resumed. In August she was in the full rush of work again. The doctors and her friends still besought her to take rest. But her indomitable spirit would listen to no counsels of retreat. The end of the war was not yet in sight. Even Sebastopol had not yet fallen. So long as there remained sick and wounded in the Levant to be cared for, she was resolved to remain also. A soldier was told that the Lady-in-Chief would probably be sent home. “But how will they pairt with her,” he said, “what'll they do without her? they set all their hopes on she.” There were nurses, too, naturally anxious to rejoin their families or friends at home, who said that, if she went, they would go. The presence of Miss Nightingale, with her lofty ideals and inspiring self-devotion, was the attraction which kept many of these women at their posts. Some had already died. Mrs. Elizabeth Drake, one of the nurses whom Miss Nightingale had taken with her to the Crimea, died on August 9 of low fever at Balaclava. “I cannot tell you,” wrote Miss Nightingale to the Master of St. John's House (Aug. 16, 1855), “what I felt when I heard of her death, unexpected alike by all. Her two physicians thought her going on well, and I expected her in every convoy that came down from Balaclava, as she was coming to me to recruit. I have lost in her the best of all the women here. Once I proposed to her to go home, but she scouted the idea entirely and said her health was better here than in England. I feel like a criminal in having robbed you of one so truly to be loved and honoured. It seemed[262] as if it pleased God to remove from the work those who have been most useful to it. His will be done!” Nurse Drake's body was brought to Scutari, and Miss Nightingale erected a small marble cross over it in the cemetery. It was no time, when members of the rank-and-file were falling at the post of duty, for the chief to listen to counsels of medical prudence. Nor, indeed, at any time did Miss Nightingale harbour even a passing thought of what would have seemed to her an act of military desertion. She remained till the end of the war came, and till the last transport had sailed; working indefatigably as ever, and in some respects in new spheres of usefulness, both in the Crimea and at Scutari; to what good effect we shall hear in later chapters, but at great cost to her own comfort and bodily strength. She had been appointed, as she used to say, to a subsidiary post in the Queen's Army[178]; the humblest post, it might be, but still a post of duty. The men had dared and suffered; and Florence Nightingale was resolved to show that a woman too had strength to suffer and endure.

During the weeks of convalescence at Scutari, Miss Nightingale used sometimes to walk at evening on the shore, in full sight of that view which, when she had first come there, they told her was the finest in the world, but which, in the crush of work, she had no time to enjoy.[179] She sent a letter to her people at home describing one such evening walk, and it was read out in the family circle. Lady Byron, who was staying with them at the time, heard it read, and said that it was “like a hymn—simple and deep-toned.” She described how, on the opposite side, the city of Constantinople was defined against the burning sky of the setting sun, but the outline was changed by the fall of some mounds in an earthquake. Near her were the graves of the heroic dead, the thousands with whom, she said, she felt identified. “It went into my heart,” wrote Lady Byron, “as the poetry of fact—for she has made poetry fact.” The letter went on to speak of the British burying-ground[263] at Scutari, and Miss Nightingale added these lines:—

[264]

The news of Miss Nightingale's illness spread sympathetic anxiety throughout Great Britain. Even more than when her mission of mercy was first announced, she became the popular heroine; and more than ever men and women of all classes sought means of showing their sympathy.

Lady Verney, whose depth of feeling is not concealed by the play of humour which sparkles pleasantly upon the surface, described, successively, the penalties and the pleasures of being the sister of a heroine:—

But Miss Nightingale's popularity was not limited to such circles as those in which her family moved. Letters from soldiers in the Crimea had made her known in thousands of humble homes, and she became the heroine of the cottage, the workshop, and the alleys. Old soldiers dropped into poetry about her, and rhymed broadsheets, with rough woodcuts of the Lady with the Lamp, issued from printers in Seven Dials and Soho. One of these songs, entitled “The Nightingale in the East,” and intended to go to the tune of “The Cottage and Water Mill,” was especially popular with its refrain:—