The character and the life described in this book had many sides; and though the essential truth consists in the blending of them all, it is necessary in the medium of recital in prose to depict first one side and then another. The artist on canvas exhibits the blended tints at one time. That is why the portrait by a great painter sometimes tells us more of a character at a glance than is gathered from volumes of written biography. But no artist painted a portrait of Miss Nightingale in her prime, and I must do as best I may with my blotching prose in an endeavour to collect into some general impression what has been told in these volumes. I begin with recalling some of the stronger traits; they will presently be softened when I turn to other sides of the character which has been illustrated in this Memoir.

Florence Nightingale was by no means a Plaster Saint. She was a woman of strong passions—not over-given to praise, not quick to forgive; somewhat prone to be censorious, not apt to forget. She was not only a gentle angel of compassion; she was more of a logician than a sentimentalist; she knew that to do good work requires a hard head as well as a soft heart. It was said by Miss Nightingale of a certain great lady that “with the utmost kindness and benevolent intentions she is in consequence of want of practical habits of business nothing but good and bustling, a time-waster and an impediment.” Miss Nightingale knew hardly any fault which seemed worse to her in a man than to be unbusiness-like; in a woman, than to be “only enthusiastic.” She found no use for “angels without hands.” She was essentially a “man of facts” and a “man of action.” She had an equal contempt for those who act without knowledge, and for those whose knowledge leads to no useful action. She was herself laborious of detail and scrupulously careful of her premises. “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 masterful—not lightly turned from her course, impatient of delay, not very tolerant of opposition.

Something of this spirit appears in her view of friendship and in the conduct of her affections. Men and women are placed in the world in order, she thought, to work for the betterment of the human race, and their work should be the supreme consideration. Mr.Jowett said of Miss Nightingale that she was the only woman he had ever known who put public duty before private. Whosoever did the will of the Father, the same was her brother, and sister, and mother. “The thing wanted in England,” she wrote to Madame Mohl (April 30, 1868), “to raise women (and to raise men too) is: these friendships 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 him if he alters those convictions, is worthy of the highest reverence. The novels—all novels, the best—which represent women as in love with men without any reason at all, and ready to leave their highest occupations for love—are to me utterly wearisome—as wearisome as a juggler's trick—or Table-turning—or Spiritual rapping, when the spirit says Aw! and that is so sublime that all the women are subjugated. Madame RÉcamier's going to Rome when M. de Chateaubriand was made Minister is exactly to me as a soldier deserting on the eve of a battle.” The occasion of this letter was some gossip of the day about a great lady whose friendship with a politician was supposed to have cooled owing to some intellectual or political disagreement. “I have the greatest reverence for——; and I think hers was one of the best friendships that ever was—and for the oddest reason—what do you think?—Because she has broken it.” What she said about Chateaubriand reflected, from a different point of view, something that Mr.Jowett had written to her in the previous year. “I am not at all tired,” he had said (Sept. 1867), “of hearing about Lord Herbert. That was one of the best friendships which there ever was upon earth. Shall I tell you why I say this? Because you were willing 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 friendship. They were realized the most fully in the case of five years of her friendship with Sidney Herbert—a period of which she used to speak, accordingly, as her “heaven upon earth.” It was the work with him, more than the charm of his conversation and manner (though 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 coming to any solution or decision. I don't know whether 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 human nature than to the emotional, coloured Miss Nightingale's preferences in literature—as in this letter to Madame Mohl (May 20, 1868): “‘What does it pruv?’ said the old Scotchwoman of Paradise Lost, and was abused for saying it. I say the same thing. Paradise Lost pruvs nothing. Samson Agonistes pruvs a great deal. Tennyson never pruvs anything. Browning's Paracelsus pruvs something. Shakespeare, in whatever he writes—in the deepest, highest tragedies, like ‘King Lear’ or ‘Hamlet’—pruvs everything 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 imagination. “Wondering,” she said, “is like yawning, and leaves the same sensation behind it, and should never be allowed except when people are very much exhausted.”

There followed from all this a certain severity in Miss Nightingale's dealings 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 fellow-worker, who accused Miss Nightingale roundly of having “no idea of friendship.” The accusation was not true, but one can see what the lady meant. Miss Nightingale was apt to be a little over-exacting, 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 admirable to her—by good 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—sympathy with the voiceless peasants of India: these were ruling motives of her life. She scorned those who were “only enthusiasts”; but there was no height of devotion to which a considered enthusiasm would not lead her. She had in equal measure cleverness and charm. She had a pungent wit, but also a loving heart. The sharpness often prominent in her letters was not always the expression of her real mind or manner. She shunned “the broad way and the green”; but Colonel Lefroy applied to her no less the later words: “they that overween, No anger find in thee, but pity and truth.” She combined in a rare degree strength and tenderness. Masterful in action, she was humble, even to the verge of morbid abasement, in thought. She was at once Positive and Mystic. All this also will, as I hope, be found proven in the Memoir.

A curious, and a larger, question is raised by some of the apparent contradictions in Miss Nightingale's aim, thoughts, and character. She was intensely spiritual; she sought continually for the Kingdom of Heaven, and she conceived of it as a kingdom of the soul. Yet her aim may seem material; what she sought was a kingdom of more airy hospitals, more scientific nursing, brighter barracks, cleaner homes, better laid drains. It was after all a searching question which Aga Khan put to her, as he listened to the tale of sanitary improvement during the fifty years of her active life. “But are your people better?” Are there more of them, we may conceive him as saying, who have attained to the kingdom of heaven in their souls? And unless you can show me that such has been the case, why have you, with your great 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 mind may be gathered from the course of her life, the nature of her speculations, and the bent of her character. At recurrent intervals she had formed thoughts 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 some sure foundation an organized creed and church—as the longing of her life. She had to abandon it, but never, in the most prosaic or material of her undertakings did she forget 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 it might be the first thing needful, was not the end, but a means. “We must beware,” she wrote, “both of thinking that we can maintain the ‘Kingdom of Heaven within’ under all circumstances,—because there are circumstances under which the human being cannot be good,—and also of thinking that the Kingdom of Heaven without will produce the Kingdom of Heaven within.”[255]

Miss Nightingale's own peculiar genius was for administration and order; and she had to employ her genius within the fields of opportunity which her sex and her circumstances offered. She was fond of quoting a passage which she found in one of Sir Samuel Baker's books of travel. “I, being unfortunately dependent on their movements, am more like a donkey than an explorer—that is, saddled and ridden away at a moment's notice.” “I never did anything,” she once said to a young friend, “except when I was asked.” It will be agreed by all who have read this Memoir that Miss Nightingale interpreted her mandates in a spacious sense admitting of much initiative. Yet it is true in large measure that her work was the creation of circumstances, and was, in some fields, dependent on what she and Mr.Jowett used to call “temples of friendship” with political administrators.

Miss Nightingale'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 human life (few have seen more), together with the extraordinary power which God has put into the hands of quite ordinary people (if they would but use it) for raising mankind out of this misery and worthlessness, which has given me this intense and ever present feeling of 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 admitted of tilling 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 Him out in everything, 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 seems nothing, almost if not quite nothing, or if He is anything, He is only the God of Sundays, and only the God of Sundays as far as going to what we 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 enormous item in these days—our Foreign 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 committing blunders for want of knowledge; good intentions are supposed enough; yet blunders—organized blunders—do more mischief than crimes.… To study how to do good work, as a matter of life or death; to ‘agonise’ so as to obtain practical wisdom to do it, there is little or no public opinion enforcing this—condemning 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 when we have such a public opinion, we shall not be far from having a Kingdom of Heaven externally, even here.”[256] “I never despair,” she had written some years before, “that, in God's good time, every one of us will reap the common benefit of obeying all the laws which 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]

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 moral nature I ever knew. Yet she never did any good to herself or to any one else. Because she never could make Life an Art. I used sometimes to say to her:—Do you mean to go 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 came. I am obliged (by my ill-health) to make Life an Art—to be always thinking of 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 might 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 framed a regimen which shut her off from many of the common enjoyments of life, which to some degree impaired the flow of her domestic affections, but which enabled her, through 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 meet them, led to some other traits of character which, again, 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 came in contact with her whether in the region of public affairs or in that of nursing. She had a consistent and a perfectly sincere shrinking from every form of popular glare and glory. There are passages, however, in letters to her intimate friends which leave, on a first reading, a somewhat different impression. She craved for a full and understanding sympathy with her mission and her work. She was fully conscious, it would seem, of her great 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 with which in the face of many obstacles she clung to her sense of a vocation enabled her to fulfil it. The sphere of women's work and opportunities has been so much widened in the present day, that readers of a generation later than Florence Nightingale's may require, perhaps, to make some effort of sympathetic imagination 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 administration or other organizing business. She knew all this by hard experience, and it emphasized her sense of special destiny. The manner of her life threw her at the same time, at each stage, though in different ways, in upon herself. During the thwarted years of her youth, she found little outlet except, as she said, in “dreaming”; in dreaming, that is, of the things she might do, in imagining herself in this position of influence or in that. When the opportunity came to her of doing great things, not dreaming them, her youth and early womanhood were already past. Miss Nightingale 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 confirmed by her mystical view of the duty of living an inner life of conscious self-realization. Returning from the East in a state of nervous exhaustion, she was absorbed in work which could not wait. She was haunted for many years by threats of early death. There were such things to be, such things to do. But she did them for the most part in loneliness and without any habitual companionship.Except during 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.

There was, however, a more constant note. The nobility of Miss Nightingale's character and the worth of her life as an example are to be found, not least in the fundamental humility of temper and sanity of self-judgment which caused her to aim with consistent purpose, not only at great deeds, but at the doing of them from the highest motives. She never felt that she had done anything which might not have been done better; and, though she must have been conscious that she had done great things, she was for ever examining her motives and finding them fall short of her highest ideals. There is a story told of a famous artist, that a friend entering his studio found him in tears. “I have produced a work,” he said, “with which 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 elemental vigour 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 with which she sought to chasten her character. But however this may be, her constant striving after something which she deemed better, and the unceasing conflict which she waged, now with opposition of outward circumstance and now with undisciplined impulses from within, add savour and poignancy to her life.

No man knew her so well for so many years as Mr. Jowett, and the thought of her life never ceased to excite his admiration. “Most persons are engaged,” he wrote at Christmas-time 1886, “in feasting and holiday-making amid their friends and relatives. You are alone in your room devising plans for the good of the natives of India or of the English soldiers as you have been for the last thirty years, and always deploring your failures as you have been doing for the last thirty years, though you have had a far greater and more real success in life than any other lady of your time.” And again: “There are those who respect and love you, not for the halo of glory which surrounded your name in the Crimea, but for the patient toil which you have endured since on behalf of every one who is suffering or wretched.” To us who are able to enter even more fully than Mr.Jowett into the inner life of Miss Nightingale, the respect and admiration may well be yet more enhanced, as we picture the conditions in which the patient toil was done, and remember the struggles of a beautifully sensitive soul in ascending the path towards perfection.

Such is the picture of Miss Nightingale which this Book has endeavoured to draw. As I wrote it I often thought with Mr.Jowett, that the life of the secluded worker in the solitary bedroom in South Street was more impressive even than the better known episodes of Santa Filomena in the fever-haunted wards of Scutari, or of the Lady-in-Chief giving her orders as she trudged through the snow from hut to hut on the heights of Balaclava. But it is Miss Nightingale herself who, unconsciously, has said the last words on her Life and Character. In praising one of her fellow-workers, and, next, in giving counsel to some fellow-seekers after good, she used phrases which may well be applied to herself:—

“One whose life makes a great difference for all: all are better off than if he had not lived; and this betterness is for always, it does not die with him—that is the true estimate of a great Life.”

“Live your life while you have it. Life is a splendid gift. There is nothing small in it. For the greatest things grow by God's law out of the smallest. But to live your life, you must discipline it. You must not fritter it away in ‘fair purpose, erring act, inconstant will’; but must make your thought, your words, your acts all work to the same end, and that end not self but God. This is what we call Character.”

Footnotes: