II
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 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 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.
III
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 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 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]
IV
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” 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:—
(To Madame Mohl.) July 26 [1848]. In London there have been the usual amount of Charity Balls, Charity Concerts, Charity Bazaars, whereby people bamboozle their consciences and shut their eyes. Nevertheless there does not seem the slightest prospect of a revolution here. Why, would be hard to say, as England is surely the country where luxury has reached its height and poverty its depth. Perhaps it is our Poor Law, perhaps the strength of our Middle Class, perhaps a greater degree of sympathy between the rich and poor, which is the conservative principle. Lord Ashley had a Chartist deputation with him the other day, who stayed to tea and talked with him for five hours. “That a man should ride in a carriage and have twenty thousand a year is contrary to the laws of Nature,” said their leader, and slapped his leg. “I could show you, if you would go with me to-night,” said Lord Ashley, “people who would say to you,[81] that a man should go in broadcloth and wear a shirt-pin (pointing to the Chartist's shirt) is contrary to the laws of Nature.” The Chartist was silent. “And it was the only thing I said,” says Lord Ashley, “after arguing with them for five hours which made the least impression.”
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?”
V
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 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 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.
CHAPTER VI
FOREIGN TRAVEL: EGYPT AND GREECE
(1849–1850)
When o'er the world we range
'Tis but our climate, not our mind, we change.
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. “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:—
Abu-Simbel, January 17 [1850].… I passed through other halls, till at last I found myself in a chamber in the rock, where sat, in the silence of an eternal night, four figures against the further end. I could see nothing more; yet I did not feel afraid as I did at Karnak, though I was quite alone in these subterranean halls; for the sublime expression of that judge of the dead had looked down on me, the incarnation of the goodness of the deity, as Osiris is; and I thought how beautiful the idea which placed him in the foremost hall, and then led the worshipper gradually on to the more awful attributes of the deity; for here, as I could dimly see through the darkness, sat the creative power of the mind—Neph, “the intellect”; Amun, “the concealed god”; Phthah, “the creator of the visible world”; and Ra, “the sustainer,” Ra, “the sun” to whom the temple is dedicated.… I turned to go out, and saw at the further end the golden sand glittering in the sunshine outside the top of the door; and the long sand-hill, sloping down from it to the feet of the innermost Osirides, which are left quite free, all but their pedestals, looked like the waves of time, gradually flowing in and covering up these imperishable genii, who have seen three thousand years pass over their heads and heed them not. In the holiest place, there where no sound ever reaches, it is as if you felt the sensible progress of time, not by the tick of a clock, as we measure time, but by some spiritual pulse which marks to you its onward march, not by[86] its second, nor its minute, nor its hour-hand, but by its century hand. I thought of the worshippers of three thousand years ago; how they by this time have reached the goal of spiritual ambition, have brought all their thoughts to serve God or the ideal of goodness; how we stand there with the same goal before us, only as distant as the star, which, a little later, I saw rising exactly over that same sand-hill in the centre of the top of the doorway, but as sure and fixed; how to them all other thoughts are now as nothing, and the ideal we all pursue of happiness is won; not because they have not probably sufferings, like ours, but because they no longer suggest any other thought but of doing God's will, which is happiness. I thought, too, three thousand years hence, we might perhaps have attained—and others would stand here, and still those old gods would be sitting in the eternal twilight.…
Thebes, February 10 [1850].… The Valley of the Kings seems, though within a mile of Thebes, as if one had arrived at the mountains of Kaf, beyond which are only “creatures unknown to any but God,”—so deep are the ravines, so high and blue the sky, so absolutely solitary and unearthly, so utterly uninhabitable the place. One look at that valley would give you more idea of the supernatural, the gate of Hades, than all the descriptions, sacred or profane. What a moment it is, the entering that valley, where in those rocky caverns, the vastness and the gloomy darkness of which are equally awful, the kings of the earth lie, each in his huge sarcophagus, with the bodies of his chiefs, each in their chamber, about him; and where, about this time, they are to return, to find their bodies and resume their abode on earth,—if purified by their three thousand years of probation, in a higher and better state; if degraded, in a lower. I thought I met them at every turn in those long subterraneous galleries,—saw their shades rising from their shattered sarcophagi, and advancing once more towards the light of day, which shone like a star, so distant and so faint, at the end of that opening; the dead were stirred up, the chief ones of the earth.… Well, these Pharaohs are perhaps now here, again in the body, their three thousand years having just elapsed to some of them,—that is, if they have philosophized sincerely, or, together with philosophy, have “loved beautiful forms.” … And if I were a Pharaoh now, I would choose the Arab form, and come back to help these poor people; and I am going to-morrow to a tomb of Rameses, B.C. 1150, to meet him and tell him so.…
It was no wonder that Miss Nightingale pitied the poor 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.”