II

With such thoughts in her mind, the routine of home life became more than ever empty and distasteful. Here are two typical extracts from her diary of 1846:—

Lea Hurst, July 7. What is my business in this world and what have I done this last fortnight? I have read the Daughter at Home[64] [37] to Father and two chapters of Mackintosh; a volume of Sybil to Mama. Learnt seven tunes by heart. Written various letters. Ridden with Papa. Paid eight visits. Done company. And that is all.

Embley, Oct. 7. What have I done the last three months? O happy, happy six weeks at the Hurst, where (from July 15 to Sept. 1) I had found my business in this world. My heart was filled. My soul was at home. I wanted no other heaven. May God be thanked as He never yet has been thanked for that glimpse of what it is to live. Now for the last five weeks my business has been much harder. They don't know how weary this way of life is to me—this table d'hôte of people.… When I want Erfrischung I read a little of the Jahresberichte über die Diakonissen-Anstalt in Kaiserswerth. There is my home; there are my brothers and sisters all at work. There my heart is, and there I trust one day will be my body; whether in this state or in the next, in Germany or in England, I do not care.

The “happy six weeks at Lea Hurst” were a time, as appears from the letter to Miss Nicholson already given (p. [53]), when she found opportunity to do much sick-visiting. “One's days 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.

III

The year 1847 was one of much social movement in Miss Nightingale's life. In the spring she was in London “doing the exhibitions and hearing Jenny Lind; but it really requires a new language to define her.” Then she went with her parents to the meeting of the British 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:—

Here we are in the midst of loveliness and learning; for never anything so beautiful as this place is looking now, my dearest, have I seen abroad or at home, with its flowering acacias in the midst of its streets of palaces. I saunter about the churchyards and gardens by myself before breakfast, and wish I were a College man. I wish you could see the Astronomical Section—Leverrier and Adams sitting on either side of the President, like a pair of turtle-doves cooing at their joint star and holding it between them.… We work hard. Chapel at 8, to that glorious service at New College; such an anthem yesterday morning! and that quiet cloister where no one goes. I brought home a white rose to-day to dry in remembrance. Sections from 11 to 3. Then Colleges or Blenheim till dinner time. Then lecture at 8 in the Radcliffe Library. And philosophical tea and muffins at somebody's afterwards. The Fowlers, Hamilton Grays, Barlows and selves are the muffins; Wheatstone, Hallam, Chevalier, Monckton Milnes and some of the great guns occasionally are the philosophy.…

and so forth, and so forth; with particulars of “church every two hours” on Sunday, and of a luncheon with Buckland and his famous menagerie at Christ Church, when Florence petted a little bear, and her father drew her away, but Mr. Milnes mesmerised it. “And one thing more,” she adds; “Mr. Hallam's discovery that Gladstone is the Beast 666 (in the Revelations) came to him one day by inspiration in the 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 Clarke married her old admirer, M. Mohl. Florence's letter of congratulation was not without significance upon the state of her own feelings, as will be seen in a later chapter:—

Embley, October 13 [1847]. Dearest Friend—To think that you are now a two months' wife, and I have never written to tell you that your piece of news gave me more joy than I ever felt in all my life, except once, no, not even excepting that once, because that was a game of Blind-man's-Buff,—and in your case you knew even as you were known. I had the news on a Sunday from dear Ju, and it was indeed a Sunday joy and I kept it holy, though not like the city, which was to be in cotton to be looked at only on Sundays. As has often been said, we must all take Sappho's leap, one way or other, before we attain to her repose—though some take it to death, and some to marriage, and some again to a new life even in this world.

Which of them to the better part, God only knows. Popular prejudice gives it in favour of marriage. Should we not look upon marriage, less as an absolute blessing, than as a remove into another and higher class of this great school-room—a promotion—for it is a promotion, which creates new duties, before which the coward sometimes shrinks, and gives new lessons, of more advanced knowledge, with more advanced powers to meet them, and a much clearer power of vision to read them. In your new development of life, I take, dearest friend, a right fervent interest, and bless you with a right heartfelt and earnest love.

We are only just returned to Embley, after having passed through London, on our way from Derbyshire. News have I none, excepting financial, for no one could talk of anything in London excepting the horrid quantity of failures in the City, by which all England has suffered more or less. Why didn't I write before? Because I thought you would rather be let alone at first and that you were on your travels.

And now for my confessions. I utterly abjure, I entirely renounce and abhor, all that I may have said about M. Robert Mohl, not because he is now your brother-in-law, but because I was so moved and touched by the letters which he wrote after your marriage to Mama; so anxious they were to know more about you, so absorbed in the subject, so eager to prove to us that his brother was such a man, he was quite sure to make you happy.

And I have not said half enough either upon that score, not anything that I feel; how “to marry” is no impersonal[67] verb, upon which I am to congratulate you, but depends entirely upon the Accusative Case which it governs, upon which I do wish you heartfelt and trusting joy. In single life the stage of the Present and the Outward World is so filled with phantoms, the phantoms, not unreal tho' intangible, of Vague Remorse, Tears, dwelling on the threshold of every thing we undertake alone, Dissatisfaction with what is, and Restless Yearnings for what is not, cravings after a world of wonders (which is, but is like the chariot and horses of fire, which Elisha's frightened servant could not see, till his eyes were opened)—the stage of actual life gets so filled with these that we are almost pushed off the boards and are conscious of only just holding on to the foot lights by our chins, yet even in that very inconvenient position love still precedes joy, as in St. Paul's list, for love laying to sleep these phantoms (by assuring us of a love so great that we may lay aside all care for our own happiness, not because it is of no consequence to us, whether we are happy or not, as Carlyle says, but because it is of so much consequence to another) gives that leisure frame to our mind, which opens it at once to joy.

But how impertinently I ramble on—“You see a penitent before you,” don't say “I see an impudent scoundrel before me”—But when thou seest, and what's more, when thou readest, forgive.—You will not let another year pass without our seeing you. M. Mohl gives us hopes, in his letter to Ju, that you won't, that you will come to England next year for many months, then, dearest friend, we will have a long talk out. If not, we really must come to Paris—and then I shall see you, and see the Deaconesses too, whom you so kindly wrote to me about, but of whom I have never heard half enough.…

The Bracebridges are at home—she rejoiced as much as we did over your event—Parthe is going at the end of November to do Officiating Verger to a friend of ours on a like event.—Her prospects are likewise so satisfactory, that I can rejoice and sympathize under any form she may choose to marry in. Otherwise I think that the day will come, when it will surprise us as much, to see people dressing up for a marriage, as it would to see them put on a fine coat for the Sacrament. Why should the Sacrament or Oath of Marriage be less sacred than any other?

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.

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.

CHAPTER V
A WINTER IN ROME; AND AFTER
(1847–1849)

Six months of Rome and happiness.—Florence Nightingale (1848).

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:—

Embley, October [1847]. It is a very great pleasure to think of her with such a companion, one who, she says, lives always with the best part of her; one who has all the sense and discretion and the warm-hearted sympathy and the quick enjoyment and the taste and the affection which will most give her happiness; who will value her and take care of her, and do[70] her all the good mentally and bodily one can fancy. Yes, dear, God is very good to provide such a pleasant time, and it will rest her mind, I think, entirely from wearing thoughts that all men have at home when their duties weigh much on their consciences, while she will feel she is wasting nothing; for Mrs. Bracebridge has not been at all well and Flo will feel herself a comfort and a help to her, I hope, for I know she is a great one.… Though it is but for so short a time, yet it seems to me a great event, the solemn first launching her into life, and my heart is very full of many feelings, but yet the joy is greatest by an incalculable deal, for one does not see how harm can come to her. Yet when one loves a great deal, one cannot but be a little anxious.… It is so pretty to see Papa wandering over the big map of Rome remembering every corner, and Mama over Piranesi, and both over all the fair things that dwell there as tho' they had just left them.

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 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:—

(To her Sister.) December 17 [1847]. Oh, my dearest, I have had such a day—my red Dominical, my Golden Letter, the 15th of December is its name, and of all my days in Rome this has been the most happy and glorious. Think of a day alone in the Sistine Chapel with Σ [Selina, Mrs. Bracebridge], quite alone, without custode, without visitors, looking up into that heaven of angels and prophets.… I did not think that I was looking at pictures, but straight into Heaven itself, and that the faults of the representation and the blackening of the colours were the dimness of my own earthly vision, which would only allow me to see obscurely, indistinctly, what was there in all its glory to be known even as I was known, if mortal eyes and understandings were cleared from the mists which we have wilfully thrown around them. There is Daniel, opening his windows and praying to the God of his Fathers three times a day in defiance of fear. You see that young and noble head like an eagle's, disdaining danger, those glorious eyes undazzled by all the honours of Babylon. Then comes Isaiah, but he is so divine that there is nothing but his own 53rd chapter will describe him. He is the Isaiah, the “grosse Unbekannte” of the Comfort ye, Comfort ye my people. I was rather startled at first by finding him so young, which was not my idea of him at all, while the others are old. But M. Angelo knew him better; it is the perpetual youth of inspiration, the vigour and freshness, ever new, ever living, of that eternal spring of thought which is typed under that youthful face. Genius has no age, while mind (Zechariah) has no youth. Next to Isaiah comes the Delphic Sibyl, the most beautiful, the most inspired of all the Sibyls here; but the distinction which M. Angelo has drawn even between her and the Prophets is so interesting. There is a security of inspiration about Isaiah; he is listening and he is speaking; “that which we hear we declare unto you.” There is an anxiety, an effort to hear even, about the Delphian; she is not quite sure; there is an uncertainty, a wistfulness in her eyes; she expects to be rewarded rather in another stage than this for her struggle to gain the prize of her high calling, to reach[72] to the Unknown that Isaiah knows already. There is no uncertainty as to her feeling of being called to hear the voice, but she fears that her earthly ears are heavy and gross, and corrupt the meaning of the heavenly words. I cannot tell you how affecting this anxious look of her far-reaching eyes is to the poor mortals standing on the pavement below, while the Prophets ride secure on the storm of Inspiration.… I feel these things to be part of the word of God, of the ladder to Heaven. The word of God is all by which He reveals His thought, all by which He makes a manifestation of Himself to men. It is not to be narrowed and confined to one book, or one nation; and no one can have seen the Sistine without feeling that he has been very near to God, that he will understand some of His words better for ever after; and that Michael Angelo, one of the greatest of the sons of men, when one looks at the dome of St. Peter's on the one hand and the prophets and martyrs on the other, has received as much of the breath of God, and has done as much to communicate it to men, as any Seer of old. He has performed that wonderful miracle of giving form to the breath of God, wonderful whether it is done by words, colours, or hard stones.…

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 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:—

“We spent an exquisite half-hour,” she wrote, “mooning, or rather sunning about; the whole Campagna and city lying at our feet, the sea on one side like a golden laver below the declining sun, the windings of the Tiber and the hills of Lucretilis on the other, with Frascati, Tivoli, Tusculum on their cypress sides, for in that clear atmosphere you could see the very cypresses of Maecenas' villa at Tivoli; with long stripes of violet and pomegranate coloured light sweeping over the plain like waves; one stone pine upon the edge of our Mellini hill; and Rome, the fallen Babylon, like a dead city beneath, no sound of multitudes ascending, but the only life these great crimson lights and shadows (for here the shadow of a red light is violet) like the carnation-coloured wings of angels, themselves invisible, flapping over the plain and leaving this place behind them. We rushed down as fast as we could for the sun was setting, and we reached St. Peter's just as the doors were going to close. We had the great Church all to ourselves, the tomb of St. Peter wreathed with lights. It felt like the times when a Christian knight watched by his arms before some great enterprise at the Holy Sepulchre; and one shadowy white angel we could see through the windows over the great door; and do you know he quite made us startle as he stood there in the gloaming. Of course it was the marble statue on the facade; and there were workmen still laughing and talking at the extreme end, and their sounds, as they were repeated under the long vaults, were like the gibbering of devils, and their lanthorns, as they wavered along close to the ground, were like corpse-lights. I thought of St. Anthony and holy knights and their temptations. And at last the Sacristan took us out of that vast solemn dome through a tomb! and we glided into the silvery moonlight, and walked home over Ponte St. Angelo, where I made a little[74] invocation to St. Michael to help me to thank; for why the Protestants should shut themselves out, in solitary pride, from the Communion of Saints in heaven and in earth, I never could understand. And so ended this glorious day.”

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.”