Volume II Part 28 (1/2)
”Though I write positively,” she once said, ”I do not think positively”
She weighed every consideration; she sought much competent advice; but when once her decision was taken, she was resolute and htly turned from her course, impatient of delay, not very tolerant of opposition
So of this spirit appears in her view of friendshi+p and in the conduct of her affections Men and woht, to work for the betterment of the human race, and their work should be the supreale that she was the only woman he had ever knoho put public duty before private Whosoever did the will of the Father, the sa wanted in England,”
she wrote to Madame Mohl (April 30, 1868), ”to raise women (and to raise men too) is: these friendshi+ps without love between men and women And if between married men and married women all the better I think a woman who cares for a man because of his convictions, and who ceases to care for hihest reverence The novels--all novels, the best--which represent women as in love with hest occupations for love--are to ler's trick--or Table-turning--or Spiritual rapping, when the spirit says Aw! and that is so subli to Rome when M de Chateaubriand wason the eve of a battle” The occasion of this letter was soreat lady whose friendshi+p with a politician was supposed to have cooled owing to soreatest reverence for----; and I think hers was one of the best friendshi+ps that ever was--and for the oddest reason--what do you think?--Because she has broken it” What she said about Chateaubriand reflected, fro that Mr Jowett had written to her in the previous year ”I a about Lord Herbert That was one of the best friendshi+ps which there ever was upon earth Shall I tell you why I say this? Because you illing to have gone to India in 1857”
Devotion to a common purpose in active life and equal zeal in the co-operative prosecution of it: these were the conditions which Miss Nightingale required in friendshi+p They were realized the most fully in the case of five years of her friendshi+p with Sidney Herbert--a period of which she used to speak, accordingly, as her ”heaven upon earth” It was the ith hih he had both and though she was susceptible to both), that was the essence of her pleasure She had as little taste for conversation as for knowledge that led nowhither ”There is nothing so fatiguing,” she said, ”as a companion who is always _effleurant_ the deepest subjects--never going below the surface; as a person who is always inquiring and never co to any solution or decision I don't knohether Hamlet was mad But certainly he would have driven me mad”
The same positive and purposeful spirit, attuned rather to the intellectual and active sides of huale's preferences in literature--as in this letter to Madame Mohl (May 20, 1868): ”'What does it pruv?' said the old Scotchwo it I say the saonistes_ pruvs a great deal Tennyson never pruvs anything Browning's _Paracelsus_ pruvs so Shakespeare, in whatever he writes--in the deepest, highest tragedies, like 'King Lear' or 'Ha and does most explain the ordinary life of every one of us” She was a great reader, but she preferred the literature of fact to that of i, and leaves the same sensation behind it, and should never be allowed except when people are very much exhausted”
There followed fros with her friends; a certain inability to show tolerance or understanding for other points of view than her own There was a lady, once a felloorker, who accused Miss Nightingale roundly of having ”no idea of friendshi+p” The accusation was not true, but one can see what the lady , and to drive her friends rather hard Also she did not relish independence or opposition ”I like being under obedience to you,” wrote one of her nursing friends, always very dear to her Not indeed that Miss Nightingale had any weakness for gush--no one had less; but if a friend was otherwise adood sense and zeal, and so forth, the fact of the ”obedience” was not other than an additional recommendation She was inclined to resent any diversion on the part of her friends to other interests as desertion
All this will, I think, sometimes be felt to be true by those who read the present Memoir Yet it is only part of the truth; and because the final truth resides in the whole it is in a sense not true at all The greatness of Miss Nightingale's character, and the secret of her life's work, consist in the union of qualities not often found in the same man or woman She was not a sentimentalist; yet she was possessed by an infinite compassion Pity for the sick and sorrowful,--a passionate desire to serve them,--devotion to her ”children,” the common soldiers--sy motives of her life She scorned those ere ”only enthusiasts”; but there was no height of devotion to which a considered enthusiasm would not lead her She had in equal ent wit, but also a loving heart The sharpness often prominent in her letters was not always the expression of her real reen”; but Colonel Lefroy applied to her no less the later words: ”they that overween, No anger find in thee, but pity and truth” She coth and tenderness Masterful in action, she was huht She was at once Positive and Mystic All this also will, as I hope, be found proven in the Meer, question is raised by soale's aihts, and character She was intensely spiritual; she sought continually for the Kingdodoht was a kingdohter barracks, cleaner ho question which Aga Khan put to her, as he listened to the tale of sanitary i the fifty years of her active life ”But are your people better?” Are there , who have attained to the kingdom of heaven in their souls? And unless you can show reat influence and powers, devoted your life to this service of tables?
What reply she made to the Prince I do not know The answer in her athered from the course of her life, the nature of her speculations, and the bent of her character At recurrent intervals she had forhts for the main purposes of her life other than those which in fact she fulfilled We have heard of her desire ”to find a new religion for the artizans,” and there are letters to Mr Jowett in which she speaks of this desire--of the hope to establish on soing of her life
She had to abandon it, but never, in the et her spiritual ideals She held, as her ideal of nursing shows, that ”it takes a soul to raise a body even to a cleaner sty” She held also that the cleaner sty, though itneedful, was not the end, but athat we can dom of Heaven within' under all circumstances,--because there are circuood,--and also of thinking that the Kingdodoht_, vol ii p 205
Miss Nightingale's own peculiar genius was for adenius within the fields of opportunity which her sex and her circue which she found in one of Sir Sa unfortunately dependent on their movements, am more like a donkey than an explorer--that is, saddled and ridden away at a ,” she once said to a young friend, ”except when I was asked” It will be agreed by all who have read this Meale interpreted herof e measure that her as the creation of circumstances, and was, in some fields, dependent on what she and Mr Jowett used to call ”temples of friendshi+p” with political adale's scope of action was thus limited; but the limits did not prevent the application of her fundamental ideas ”Perhaps,” she wrote in one of her meditations (1868), ”it is what I have seen of the misery and worthlessness of huether with the extraordinary pohich God has put into the hands of quite ordinary people (if they would but use it) for raising ivenof an Eternal Life leading to perfection for each and for every one of us, by God's laws” Miss Nightingale did not suppose that human perfectibility, that the final union of man with God, was to be attained only by better sanitation But she saw that this was the field open to her, and that it ad by methods, which if applied to all departments of life would, as she conceived, lead to the one far-off Divine event ”Christianity,” she wrote, ”is to see God in everything, to find Hi, in the order or laws as of His moral or spiritual, so of His political or social, and so of His physical worlds To Christ God was everything--to us He see, He is only the God of Sundays, and only the God of Sundays as far as going to e call our prayers, not the God of our week-days, our business, and our play, our politics and our science, our home life and our social life; our House of Commons, our Government, our post-office and correspondence--such an enorn Office, and our Indian Office The Kingdom of Heaven is within, but we must also make it so without There is no public opinion yet, it has to be created, as to not coood intentions are supposed enough; yet blunders--organized blunders--do ood work, as a onise' so as to obtain practical wisdo this--conde the want of it Until you can create such a public opinion little good will be done, except by accident or by accidental individuals But e have such a public opinion, we shall not be far frodom of Heaven externally, even here”[256] ”I never despair,” she had written soood ti all the lahich He has given us for our well-being” And towards that end, it was the duty of each and all, according to their several opportunities, to ”work, work, work”[257]
[256] _The Mythe of Life: Four Sermons on the Social Mission of the Church_ By C W Stubbs, 1880, pp 86, 98 Mr Stubbs (afterwards Bishop of Truro) quoted these passages froale to her sister
[257] Letter to Sir Bartle Frere, June 27, 1868
Having found her appointed corner in the vineyard, Miss Nightingale devoted her life to it; in equal measure, with careful adjustment of means to ends, and with intense devotion ”To make an art of _Life_!”
she wrote to Madame Mohl (May 20, 1868) ”That is the finest art of all the Fine Arts And few there be that find it It was the 'one thing wanting' to dear---- She had the finest ood to herself or to any one else Because she never could make Life an Art I used soo on in that way for twenty years?--packing everybody's carpet-bag
She always said she didn't But she always did And if she did not go on for twenty years, it was only because Death caed_ (byof it Because otherwise I should do _nothing_ (I have so little life and strength)”
Miss Nightingale had come back from the Crimea full of honour But she returned also seriously injured in health How naturally ht a woman of less resolute character have rested on her laurels, and sunk into a life of gracious repose or valetudinarian indolence! She chose, however, the better and the rougher path She fraimen which shut her off froree impaired the flow of her doh nearly fifty years of recurrent weakness, to follow her highest ideals and to devote herself to work of public beneficence
The circumstances of her life as they were ordered for her, the manner of her life as she framed it to ain, present at first sight a curious contrariety
”She is extremely modest,” said the Prince Consort and Queen Victoria when they met her, and she made the same impression on all who caion of public affairs or in that of nursing She had a consistent and a perfectly sincere shrinking froes, however, in letters to her inti, a somewhat different i sympathy with her mission and her work She was fully conscious, it would seereat powers; she did not always care, in private letters, to hide or to under-rate the extent of her influence upon men and affairs She objected, in one letter to a friend, that Kinglake's chapter was intolerable because it posed her as ”a Tragedy Queen”; but there are other letters in which she dramatizes herself somewhat; there is self-pity in them, and there is other self-consciousness All this, which on a superficial glance may seem to present some difficult inconsistency, admits, I think, of easy explanation when the conditions of her life are remembered She was intensely conscious of a special destiny, and the tenacity hich in the face ofto her sense of a vocation enabled her to fulfil it The sphere of women's work and opportunities has been so eneration later than Florence Nightingale's ination in order to realize how much of a pioneer she was[258] In her earlier years it was a daring novelty for a young woman to put her hand to any solid work in political ad business She knew all this by hard experience, and it emphasized her sense of special destiny The e, though in different ways, in upon herself During the thwarted years of her youth, she found little outlet except, as she said, in ”dreaht do, in i herself in this position of influence or in that When the opportunity ca thehtingale was thirty-four when she went out to the Crimean war In the later years, the conditions in which she lived again encouraged, almost of necessity, a habit of introspection: a habit which was also confir an inner life of conscious self-realization Returning from the East in a state of nervous exhaustion, she was absorbed in hich could not wait She was haunted for s to be, such things to do But she did them for the most part in loneliness and without any habitual co the five years of almost daily converse with Sidney Herbert, she enjoyed none of that influence, at once sobering and fortifying, which comes from the equal clash of mind with mind The result was a strain of morbidness which found occasional expression in notes of excessive self-consciousness
[258] Soes which I have quoted from Lord Derby's _Speeches_ may assist in such an effort See Vol I pp 272, 305
There was, however, a ale's character and the worth of her life as an example are to be found, not least in the fundament which caused her to aireat deeds, but at the doing of thehest ht not have been done better; and, though she s, she was for ever exahest ideals There is a story told of a fa his studio found him in tears ”I have produced a work,” he said, ”hich I am satisfied, and I shall never produce another” The premonition was true No later masterpiece was produced
The inspiration of the ideal was gone That inspiration never forsook Miss Nightingale in her pursuit of the art of life
In life, as in other arts, what is spontaneous, and perhaps even what is unregenerate, have often more of charm than what is acquired or learnt by discipline And in the case of Miss Nightingale, her eleour of mind and force of will, will perhaps to some readers seem more admirable than the philosophy which she applied to her conduct or the acquired graces hich she sought to chasten her character But however thiswhich she deeed, noith opposition of outward circumstance and noith undisciplined inancy to her life