II
In 1860, at the time when Miss Nightingale put her Suggestions for Thought into type, she was half-inclined to publish the work. She consulted some of her intimate friends on the point. She also submitted the manuscript to two famous men, than whom none were better qualified to give a just opinion—John Stuart Mill and Benjamin Jowett. With Mr. Mill she was not personally acquainted, and she sought an introduction through her friend Mr. Chadwick. By way of breaking the ground, he sent to Mill a copy of Notes on Nursing. Mill promised to read the book immediately, though (he added) “I do not need it to enable me to share the admiration which is felt towards Miss Nightingale more universally I should imagine than towards any other living person.” This expression must have pleased her, for she was a diligent reader and (with some differences of opinion) a warm admirer of Mill's books. Being thus assured of his good will, and being further informed through Mr. Chadwick that no formal introduction was necessary if Miss Nightingale conceived that Mr. Mill could be of any service to her, she sent him a copy of the Suggestions, or rather, of a portion of them. He read it, and was greatly interested; so much so that, in addition to sending her a letter of general criticism, he was at the pains to annotate it in the margin. He hoped that he might be allowed to see the remainder. A perusal of this increased his high opinion. “I have seldom felt less inclined to criticize,” he said, “than in reading this book.” But one or two criticisms he did offer—“for your consideration,” he said, “and not as pretending to lay down the law on the subject to any one, much less to you”;[350] and he invited further correspondence. Miss Nightingale's essays remained in his mind, for in a famous book, published nine years later, he introduced an allusion to them.[351]
To Mr. Jowett, Miss Nightingale was introduced by Mr. Clough, who had asked him to read some of the Suggestions. “It seemed to me,” he said to Mr. Clough, after reading it, “as if I had received the impress of a new mind.”[352] His interest in such philanthropic efforts as those connected with the name of Florence Nightingale is reflected in a passage in the famous “Essay on Interpretation,”[353] and he must have been the more interested in the Suggestions when Mr. Clough told him that she was the author, and asked him to write to her about them. Her name for the book in familiar letters was the “Stuff,” by which name also it is spoken of in her Will. “I write to thank you,” said Mr. Jowett in one of the earlier letters of a long series (April 6, 1861), “for the ‘Stuff,’ to which I shall venture to add the epithet ‘precious.’” He thought as highly of the book as did Mr. Mill, though in a different way. And he, too, in addition to long letters of general discussion suggested by the book, annotated it in detail. His annotations are most voluminous and careful. They are admirable in criticism, and from them alone a reader, not otherwise acquainted with Mr. Jowett's work, might form a tolerably accurate idea of his character and modes of thought. The proof copy of “The Stuff,” with Mr. Jowett's annotations, was one of Miss Nightingale's most cherished possessions. I shall refer to some of the detailed criticisms later. “I have ventured,” he said, “to put down the criticisms which occur to me quite baldly; they must not be supposed to be inconsistent with the greatest respect for the mind and genius of the writer.” The criticisms were many, and often far-reaching; but no less frequent are expressions such as “Very good,” “Very fine and noble.”
On the immediate question, To publish or not to publish? Mr. Mill and Mr. Jowett gave what might at first sight appear to be very different advice. Mr. Mill, after reading the first instalment of the book, said: “If any part of your object in sending it was to know my opinion as to the desirableness of its being published, I have no difficulty in giving it strongly in the affirmative”; and in his next letter he said: “If when I had only read the first volume I was very desirous that it should be published, I am much more so after reading the second.” Mr. Jowett, on the other hand, was against publication. It is presumptuous, I fear, to pose as a Court of Appeal between two such judges, but I will hazard the opinion that Mr. Jowett's was the better advice. And this is not quite so presumptuous as it may seem, for the fact is that, though Mr. Mill wanted to see the book published, he would also have been glad to see it recast. And, similarly, Mr. Jowett, though he urged that the book must be recast, was very anxious that it should ultimately be published. “I should be very sorry,” he wrote at the end, “if the greater part of this book did not in some form see the light. I have been greatly struck by reading it, and I am sure it would similarly affect others. Many sparks will blaze up in people's minds from it.” “In point of arrangement, indeed,” wrote Mr. Mill, “of condensation, and of giving, as it were, a keen edge to the argument, it would have much benefited by the recasting which you have been prevented from giving it by a cause on all other accounts so much to be lamented. This, however, applies more to the general mode of laying out the argument than to the details.” Mr. Mill put admirably in these two sentences points which Mr. Jowett over and over again explained and illustrated, with the utmost care, in his detailed annotations, and they are points which must strike every reader of Miss Nightingale's book. The repetitions are tiresome, nay almost intolerable, to any one who reads a considerable portion of it consecutively, and Miss Nightingale, in a later letter to Madame Mohl, says that she could not read the book herself. The argument in isolated passages, and sometimes in particular chapters, is closely knit, but in the book taken as a whole it often loses itself in digressions, and there is a lack of any consistent ordo concatenatioque rerum. The book is as remarkable for literary felicities in detail as it is deficient in the art of literary arrangement.
Some consideration of this point will serve to illustrate an aspect of Miss Nightingale's character. The defect which Mr. Mill and Mr. Jowett saw in her Suggestions for Thought might seem to be among the last to be expected in her. Her mind was singularly methodical and orderly; this was one of the essential characteristics of her work as an administrator and a reformer. In this very book the characteristic appears, though in a somewhat superficial form. Each volume is prefaced by an elaborate “Digest,” with many divisions and subdivisions. Yet the fact remains that the appearance of close method does not correspond with any similarly close arrangement of the material. It may be said that the subject-matter is less tractable by methodic heads and sub-heads than the organization of a department or the arrangement of a hospital. And that is true; but it is worth noting that something of the same criticism that was made by Mr. Mill and Mr. Jowett upon Miss Nightingale's Suggestions for Thought was made by another able man upon her Notes on the Army. “I consider them deficient,” wrote Sir John McNeill (Nov. 18, 1858), “in a certain form of artistical skill or art, and chargeable with frequent repetitions, but I confess that these deficiencies constitute to my mind some of their greatest charms. They give to the whole the most unmistakable stamp of earnestness and truth—such as no reader of ordinary perception can doubt. They must, I think, in every class of mind produce the conviction that you were exclusively occupied with the good you might do, and not at all with your reputation as an artist.” This apology is perfectly valid in relation to the particular work in question, and Sir John might have added another. The Notes on the Army were a series of reports, of which indeed the whole should have been read consecutively by the Secretary of State, but each of which referred to a different branch of the War Department. But the case is different when we pass to a philosophic treatise which is addressed to thinkers. Some of the lack of sustained coherence in Miss Nightingale's Suggestions for Thought, and many of its repetitions, may be referred to the method of composition. Different chapters were written at different times. But when she thought of publishing it, she did not care to correct those defects. Why was this? The explanation is to be found, I think, partly in a view which she had come to hold of the literary art, and partly in a certain impetuosity of temper. She had put literary pursuits away from her as a vain temptation. She cared for writing only as a means to action, and she could not see that literary form is of the essence of the matter if writing is to influence current thought on difficult subjects. Infinitely laborious, again, when action was in sight, and capable of infinite patience when she saw the need, she was content to throw out her thoughts careless of the form. There is a complete and consistent scheme underlying her Suggestions; it was ever present in her own mind; and she could not be troubled to pare and prune, to revise and recast, in the interests of what she despised as mere artistry. Non omnia possumus. Those who are capable of completion in one field are often impatient of it in another. Ruskin, so careful of finish in his literary craftsmanship, was asked why he so seldom finished his drawings “to the edges.” “Oh,” he replied, “I can't be bothered to do the tailoring.” Mr. Jowett urged Miss Nightingale in one of his letters (Nov. 17, 1861) to devote time and trouble to improving the form of her Suggestions: “No one can get the form in which it is necessary to put forth new ideas without great labour and thought and tact. It takes years after ideas are clear in your own mind to mould them into a shape intelligible to others.” Miss Nightingale's answer to Mr. Jowett is not in existence; but I imagine that it was to the effect that she had no time for the tailoring.
III
The difference in the advice given by Mr. Mill and Mr. Jowett respectively went deeper, however, than to the question of form. And here again a consideration of the point will throw light on Miss Nightingale's character. The book was ostensibly one of Reconstruction; it was in fact very largely one of Revolt. The First and the Third Volumes are a philosophical exposition of her creed—“Law, as the basis of a New Theology.” The Second, devoted to “Practical Deductions,” is a criticism of the religion and social life of her day. The criticism, under both heads, is scathing and full of touches of her characteristically caustic humour. This second volume includes a full discussion of the position of women, and a plea for their emancipation from many of the restrictions of the time. It is easy to see how much of this appealed strongly to Mr. Mill, and why he deemed its publication desirable. And it is equally easy to understand that much of it offended Mr. Jowett, and why he deemed revision essential. I shall not presume on this point to decide between her counsellors. As her biographer, I content myself with recording that the plea for moderation, for conciliation, for suavity which Mr. Jowett urged in scores of marginalia and in dozens of letters seems to have prevailed. The essence of the plea was that the new should as far as possible be grafted upon the old; it was a plea for accommodation. Miss Nightingale had ideas which were of real value, but they would not avail to modify and purify religious thought if they were presented in too combative and revolutionary a form. One passage, though not among those to which Mr. Jowett more particularly objected, will serve to illustrate his point of view. I select it because it is characteristic of the writer's humour. It is from a section entitled “John Bull and his Church”:—“John Bull will have plenty for his money. He will have his services long, till he is quite tired, that he may have his money's worth; like his concerts, plenty in them; no cheating; till he goes home yawning. So he has his confession, lumping all his sins together, and then his absolution, and then his praise, and then his Litany, asking for every imaginable thing, and ending with asking God for ‘mercy on all men,’ lest he should have left out anything, till there does not remain to God the smallest choice or judgment; and then his sermon—a long one—three services in one,—that he may not have put on his best clothes nor paid all his tithes for nothing.” No person blessed with any sense of humour is likely to find this passage offensive; but Mr. Jowett objected to it because it is not historically true. “J. B. had a Church and Liturgy made for him by Henry VIII. and Queen Elizabeth, and human nature in Churches is conservative.” And generally Mr. Jowett asked Miss Nightingale “not to find fault with the times or with anybody, but to endeavour out of the elements that exist to reconstruct religion.” Theology is a progressive science. Each age adds something to the idea of God. Let Miss Nightingale seek to win converts by leading them gently by the hand, not, as it were, by knocking them upon the head. She had peculiar advantages for doing this. Let her be very careful not to throw them away. So did Mr. Jowett reason with her. The point is put in innumerable forms; but this paragraph from a letter already mentioned (Nov. 17, 1861) will serve as a type: “I should not much care if only a comparatively small part of your work is finished. Its greatest value will be that it comes from you who worked in the Crimea. Shall I say one odd and perhaps rather impertinent thing? You have a great advantage in writing on these subjects as a Woman. Do not throw it away, but use the advantage to the utmost. In writing against the World (‘Athanasia contra mundum’), every feeling, every sympathy should be made an ally, so that with the clearest statement of the meaning there is the least friction and drawback possible.” Whether it was Mr. Jowett's criticism that alone or mainly caused Miss Nightingale to abandon the idea of publishing her Suggestions for Thought, I do not know.[354] But two things may be said. Only once, so far as I have traced, did she take the world at all into her confidence on the subject of her religious beliefs. It was twelve years later, in some articles in Fraser's Magazine, to which we shall come in due course. In those articles the fundamental doctrines of the Suggestions for Thought are contained, but they are stated in a manner and a temper which show that she had given heed to the “mild wisdom” of Mr. Jowett. The other thing that may be said is that for Mr. Jowett personally Miss Nightingale felt from the first a high regard. At the time with which we are now concerned, they knew each other by correspondence only, though, of course, Mr. Clough would have had much to tell her of his friend. “I do so like Mr. Jowett,” she wrote at this time to a friend. And at the same time Mr. Jowett wrote to her: “I reckon you (if I may do so) among unseen friends.” Presently they met; the friendship ripened, and remained firm to the end.
IV
Miss Nightingale, then, in addition to her other activities, is to be reckoned among the strenuous Seekers after Truth in religion and philosophy. The Suggestions had their immediate origin, as I have explained already,[355] in a desire to meet by some positive reconstruction the negative “free-thinking” among the working-classes, and the first volume was addressed, on the title-page and by a dedication, to “The Artizans of England.” Mr. Jowett criticized this restricted appeal. “A book cannot be written,” he said, “for the Artizans separated from the Educated classes; it must embrace them both. There is one intellectual world with common ideas, and the more permanent part of that is the world of the higher classes. Therefore I would urge you not to write for the Artizans, but to write for everybody.” And Mr. Mill had written: “There is much in the work which is calculated to do great good to many persons besides the artizans to whom it is more especially addressed.” There was some force too (especially in regard to the more abstract argument of the first and third volumes) in what M. Mohl said, “that she had set out to give the working classes a religion, and that she gave them a philosophy instead.” The address of the book to Artizans became palpably untenable when Miss Nightingale passed in the second, and longest, volume to “Practical Deductions,” and to a criticism of life as lived among “the upper ten.” Her sense of humour perceived the incongruity, and the second and third volumes were addressed generally “To Searchers after Religious Truth.” The address “to Artizans” is only significant as illustrating a phase of Miss Nightingale's interests. The essential significance of the book in the story of her life is the revelation which it gives of her own mind in its search after truth, and of the conclusions in which she ultimately found support.
I have been much struck in reading the book by the number of illustrations which Miss Nightingale draws from nursing, medicine, and administration. It may be said, I think, that the line of speculation followed in her Suggestions for Thought was the result of reflection upon those data by a mind which was at once intensely spiritual and severely logical. We come very near to the root of the thing in her mind in this passage of tender and yet humorous autobiography:—
When I was young, I could not understand what people meant by “their thoughts wandering in prayer.” I asked for what I really wished, and really wished for what I asked. And my thoughts wandered no more than those of a mother would[479] wander, who was supplicating her Sovereign for her son's reprieve from execution.… I liked the morning service much better than the afternoon, because we asked for more things.… I was always miserable if I was not at church when the Litany was said. How ill-natured it is, if you believe in prayer, not to ask for everybody what they want.… I well remember when an uncle died, the care I took, on behalf of my aunt and cousins, to be always present in spirit at the petition for “the fatherless children and widows”; and when Gonfalonieri was in the Austrian prison of Spielberg, at that for “prisoners and captives.” My conscience pricked me a little whether this should extend to those who were in prison for murder and debt, but I supposed that I might pray for them spiritually. I could not pray for George IV. I thought the people very good who prayed for him, and wondered whether he could have been much worse if he had not been prayed for. William IV. I prayed for a little. But when Victoria came to the throne, I prayed for her in a rapture of feeling and my thoughts never wandered.
To this simple faith of youth, experience succeeded. A patient might pray for sleep, but laudanum was more efficacious. What was the use of praying to be delivered from “plague and pestilence” so long as the common sewers were still allowed to run into the Thames? If God sent a visitation of cholera, which was the more probable reading of His mind—that He sent it in order that men might pray to Him for relief from it, or in order that they should themselves set about removing the predisposing causes? Miss Nightingale's conclusion was that if there be a Plan in the universe, the Plan must be other than what the popular religion of the day, logically interpreted, implies. “God's scheme for us,” she inferred, “was not that He should give us what we asked for, but that mankind should obtain it for mankind.”
This was the germ from which Miss Nightingale's philosophy of religion was developed. She had read much in metaphysics and in theology; she had reasoned long with herself
Of providence, foreknowledge, will, and fate,
Fixed fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute.
She reasoned long, but did not feel herself “in wandering mazes lost.” She began with considering the nature of Belief, and showed that any true explanation of the term throws us back on the nature of the object of belief. The supreme object of belief we call God. But in different ages men have meant very different things by God. There is the Savage idea of God, the Hindoo, the Greek, the Israelite, and so forth; and there is the Christian idea, which again is widely different according to the patristic or theological notions, and according to the popular one. This last required to be exalted and purified. The true idea of God, which is alone reconcilable with the deepest morality and with the widest contemplation of nature and history and the world is the idea, not of an individual swayed by likings and personalities, but of an Universal Being who is Law.
The laws of God were, she held, discoverable by experience, research, and analysis; or, as she sometimes put it, the character of God was ascertainable, though His essence might remain a mystery. The laws of God were the laws of life, and these were ascertainable by careful, and especially by statistical, inquiry. This is what I meant by saying in an earlier chapter that Miss Nightingale regarded the study of statistics with something of religious reverence. Statistics compiled by meteorologists have shown, she says in the Suggestions, that storms can be foreseen. When a ship goes down in an “unforeseen” gale, “Do we say, ‘How could God permit such a dreadful calamity as the loss of all hands on board? The devil must have done it.’ No. We say, ‘Study the signs of approaching gales, and you will not be lost.’ Is it not the same with moral evil, the laws of which are just as calculable?” A copy of Quetelet's book, already mentioned, had been presented to her “with the author's homage, respect, and affection.” She often spoke of the Belgian statistician in similar terms. His book was in her eyes a religious work—a revelation of the Will of God. In her annotated copy she enlarged the title. The book was not merely an Essai de physique sociale. It exhibited “The sense of Infinite power, The assurances of solid Certainty, and The endless vista of Improvement from the Principles of Physique sociale, if only found possible to apply on occasions when it is so much wanted.” A very large “if,” many will say; as in effect her father constantly said in written discussions with her on these subjects. But her reply was always the same. The greater the difficulty, the more the need for serious study. With the concentrated study of mankind upon the problem, the answer would be found. “Truth is so,” said her friend. “Truth is not what one troweth,” said she, and there was no phrase oftener on her lips in serious conversation.
She went on to develop this idea of God as Law in relation to human fate, and to those problems of “free will and necessity,” which Milton thought to be inscrutable mysteries, and around which metaphysicians and logicians have for ages disputed. She found her ultimate solution in a hypothesis which Mr. Mill told her that he had at one time tried but abandoned—the hypothesis of “a Being who, willing only good, leaves evil in the world solely in order to stimulate human faculties by an unremitting struggle against every form of it”; a Perfect Being who created a Perfectible one, and so ordered the world that its course should be a constant struggle towards perfection. Miss Nightingale did not blink the fact that her hypothesis left mysteries unexplained. The finite cannot apprehend the Infinite. “We cannot,” she wrote, “understand the existence of God willing laws. We cannot understand the Perfect Being. All this appears to me exactly what we ought to allow to be a mystery.”[356] But she held with Bossuet that il ne faut pas confondre la question de la nature de Dieu avec celle des rapports de Dieu et du monde. “We ought,” she continued, “with all our mights to learn the perfections, not to understand the Perfect—to study His character and His laws, not His essence, or how He lives willing His laws. It is evident that creation is a mystery, but God's end and object (in creating) need not be a mystery. Everybody tells us that the existence of evil is incomprehensible, whereas I believe it is much more difficult—it is impossible—to conceive the existence of God (or even of a good man) without evil.” Good and evil are relative terms, and neither is intelligible without the other.
Without supposing, then, that she had solved the ultimate riddle of the universe, Miss Nightingale had hold of an hypothesis which solved for her many of the mediate riddles. It seemed to her to contain a lofty conception of God; to justify His ways to men; to explain the supposed war between Free Will and Necessity. Her views on some of these high matters will perhaps be made clearer by the letter of explanation which she wrote to her father in sending him a copy of some of her “Stuff”:—
I need not enter into the fundamental difficulty which Mr. Mill found in this last assumption, nor into the difficulties which Mr. Jowett pointed out, in a series of letters, in Miss Nightingale's reconciliation of Free Will and Necessity. Our concern here is with what she thought, and the hypothesis satisfied her judgment.
It had the further result of giving her a rational basis for belief in a Future Life. The chapter in which she discussed this subject seemed to Mr. Jowett “the most responsible and serious in the whole book.” He made some critical objections to details in the argument, but her general line was in accordance with what we know to have been his own conviction on the subject, namely, that the evidence for a future life must be found in moral ideas.[357] And in a letter to Miss Nightingale he says: “I shall never give up the faith in immortality, though I cannot determine or conceive the manner of another state of being. That Christ became a mass of clay again seems to me of all incredible things the most incredible.” To Miss Nightingale the belief followed logically from her general hypothesis. The theory of Perfectibility required a future state of infinite progress for each and all; the theory of a good God required it. The purpose of God, as she conceived it, is that in the end “each and all shall in accordance with law desire and obtain to will right, all sin and sorrow being but one of the processes through which mankind is learning and teaching. Hence it is that belief in a future in connexion with human existence is essential to the belief that we are under righteous government.” “How plain,” wrote Mr. Nightingale to his daughter, after reading the chapter, “are the steps of your argument! The senses, the reason, the feelings appreciate the laws of goodness, benevolence, and righteousness in the Thought of God; but Circumstances indicate a want of benevolence unless there is reason to believe in a future development. Therefore a continued existence is according to law.” Mr. Jowett in his marginalia suggested that she might have made more of the opposite alternative: “If there is no future state, then what of God, what of human nature? Not only would there be an awful deception, but a deception of all the best feelings and of those in which we most trust. Work out the supposition, and look it full in the face, and (whether right or wrong) it is hardly possible to suppress the temper of a demon towards the Supreme being.” So Miss Nightingale intensely thought; and, therefore, the idea of God as Universal Law, willing human perfection, gave her even greater security than is put forward in the lines from Clough which I have placed at the head of this chapter. She quoted them herself, but added, “Yes; but Truth is so that ‘I’ shall not perish.”
Her speculations gave her a basis, further, for understanding what is meant by a philosophy of history:—
(Miss Nightingale to her Father.) Hampstead, Oct. 24 [1861]. (Seven years this very day since I began “the fight” for the Army.) I think Dicey's Cavour and Monckton Milnes's Tocqueville in the Quarterly, the two most masterly sketches of a true Statesman I have read for some time.[358] Cavour's death was heroic—in the prime of his glory and success—working to the last. But I am not sure that there is not something more heroic and more pathetic in Tocqueville's, broken-hearted, but not in despair, faithful to the end of the “good fight”—lost, although fought so well. People call him narrow—i.e. people who are so wide that they can do nothing themselves. The unheroic tone of the teachers of the present day is bad; as when excellent Jowett says that in these days, only “exceptional” cases can fight the good fight. Is not this the reason why these cases are exceptional? And was there ever an age in so much need of heroism?
Most just is the praise to Tocqueville of imitating God in his statesmanship—in reconciling Man's Free Will and God's Law—the only mode in which God or statesman can govern. But he is unfair to himself when he says he will not “play the part of Providence.” He did, as far as he could. He is untrue to himself in saying how little we can ever find out of the Laws of History. Undoubtedly we have as yet found out hardly anything. (I suppose Buckle has some of the crudest generalizations extant.) But, did we study history as much as physical science, would this be so? Is it not like the children who say, I'm too little (when told to do a difficult sum), to attribute this to the “inability of our reason.” Surely God says just the contrary. Tocqueville tells us not to call events “mysterious.” He calls upon governments to comprehend the mysterious influences—“mysterious” only to our ignorance. And I would drop the word altogether. Perhaps Tocqueville was the first statesman who united an acknowledgment of the fact that, according to the laws of God, all human history could not have been other than it has been, with the conviction that this, instead of stimulating us to do nothing, stimulates us to do everything.
Above all, her religious belief satisfied her as giving high motive to human conduct. It linked, in logical connection, the service of man to the service of God. It inspired with religious enthusiasm her conviction that each individual—woman as well as man—should be given the freedom to make the best of himself. The doing of God's will—that is, according to her philosophy, the discovery of causes and effects, the rectification of errors, the education of men to profit by their mistakes—was the way to communion with God. The reader may remember from previous chapters that Florence Nightingale was conscious of “a call from God to be a saviour,” and that the tribute which she paid to her “dear Master,” Sidney Herbert, was to call him “a saver.” There are passages in the Suggestions for Thought which show with what significance she used those terms. “God's plan is that we should make mistakes, that the consequences should be definite and invariable; then comes some Saviour, Christ or another, not one Saviour, but many an one, who learns for all the world by the consequences of those errors, and ‘saves’ us from them.… There must be saviours from social, from moral, error. Most people have not learnt any lesson from life at all—suffer as they may, they learn nothing, they would alter nothing.… We sometimes hear of men ‘having given a colour to their age.’ Now, if the colour is a right colour, those men are saviours.” Miss Nightingale's own work in the world—at Scutari, for the health of the British soldier at home, for Hospitals, for Nursing, and presently for India—received from her philosophy a religious sanction.[359]
V
How, if at all, it may be asked, did she adjust her innermost beliefs to the current creeds of the day? I shall not attempt to define what she did not define; but a few remarks may be made. Was she Unitarian or Trinitarian? I think that we may answer as we will. She was “very sure of God,” but very chary, as we have seen, of attempting to define His essence. Sometimes she seemed to think of God in a Unitarian sense; but there is a passage in the Suggestions in which she philosophizes the Trinity. “The Perfect exists in three relations to other existence: (1) As the Creator of all other existence, of its purpose, and of the means of fulfilling its purpose. This is the Father. (2) As partaken in these other modes of existence. This is the Son. (3) As manifested to these other modes of existence. This is the Holy Ghost.” Then, again, was she “Protestant” or “Catholic”? She used language at different times which might be interpreted in either direction; but she used it at all times with some inner meaning of her own. Here is a letter which philosophizes an “evangelical” doctrine:—
(Miss Nightingale to her Father.) Hampstead, Sept. 26 [1863]. Dear Papa—I am sure that if any one finds nourishment in Renan or in any book I should be very sorry to “depreciate” it. There is not so much solid food in books nowadays, especially in religious books, that we can afford to do so. I always think of Mad. Mohl's, “I don't want any book-writer to chew my food for me.” Now nearly all books are chewed food—especially religious books.… What I dislike in Renan is not that it is fine writing, but that it is all fine writing. His Christ is the hero of a novel; he himself, a successful novel-writer. I am revolted by such expressions as charmant, délicieux, religion du pur sentiment, in such a subject.… As for the “religion of sentiment,” I really don't know what he means. It is an expression of Balzac's. If he means the “religion of love,” I agree and do not agree. We must love something loveable. And a religion of love must certainly include the explaining of God's character to be something loveable—of God's “providence,” which is the self-same thing as God's Laws, as something loving and loveable. On the other hand I go along with Christ, not with Renan's Christ, far more than most Christians do. I do think that “Christ on the Cross” is the highest expression hitherto of God—not in the vulgar meaning of the Atonement—but God does hang on the Cross every day in every one of us; the whole meaning of God's “providence,” i.e. His laws, is the Cross. When Christ preaches the Cross, when all mystical theology preaches the Cross, I go along with them entirely. It is the self-same thing as what I mean when I say that God educates the world by His laws, i.e. by sin—that man must create mankind—that all this evil, i.e. the Cross, is the proof of God's goodness, is the only way by which[487] God could work out man's salvation without a contradiction. You say, but there is too much evil. I say, there is just enough (not a millionth part of a grain more than is necessary) to teach man by his own mistakes,—by his sins, if you will—to show man the way to perfection in eternity—to perfection which is the only happiness.…
There were many points, on the other hand, at which Roman Catholicism strongly appealed to her. So marked is this attitude in the Suggestions—in passages sometimes ironical, sometimes serious—that at one of the latter places Mr. Jowett's note in the margin is: “The enemy will say, This book is written by an Infidel who has been a Papist. But I wish that there were more of these sort of reflections showing the true relation of superstitious ideas to moral and spiritual religion.” I can well believe that her friend Cardinal Manning, for whom she entertained a high respect (though she waged a battle-royal against him on occasion[360]), may sometimes have regarded her as a likely convert; but towards acceptance of Roman doctrines, I find no ground for thinking that she was at any time inclined. Yet the spirit of Catholic saintliness—and especially that of the saints whose contemplative piety was joined to active benevolence—appealed strongly to her. She read books of Catholic devotion constantly, and made innumerable annotations in them and from them. She was greatly attracted by the writings of the Port Royalists, on which subject there is a long correspondence with her father. She admired intensely the aid which Catholic piety had given, and was to many of her own friends giving—to the Bermondsey Nuns, especially, and to the Mother and Sisters of the Trinità de' Monti—towards purity of heart and the doing of everything from a right motive. Then, again, to be “business-like” was with Miss Nightingale almost the highest commendation; and in this character also the Roman Church appealed to her. Its acceptance of doctrines in all their logical conclusions seemed to her business-like; its organization was business-like; its recognition of women-workers was business-like.
So, then, Miss Nightingale was broad-minded in her attitude towards creeds and churches. For her own part she believed that religious truth was positive, and could be discovered; but in her outlook upon the beliefs of others, she judged them by their fruits. She asked not so much what was a man's or a woman's religious formula, but whether it renewed a right spirit within them. With religiosity, if it was centred on self, she had no sympathy. “Is there anything higher,” she asked, “in thinking of one's own salvation than in thinking of one's own dinner? I have always felt that the soldier who gives his life for something which is certainly not himself or his shilling a day—whether he call it his Queen or his Country or his Colours—is higher in the scale than the Saints or the Faquirs or the Evangelicals who (some of them don't) believe that the end of religion is to secure one's own salvation.” Within the limits indicated by these remarks, she would have agreed a good deal with what Mrs. Carlyle said to John Sterling: “I confess that I care almost nothing about what a man believes in comparison with how he believes. If his belief be correct, it is much the better for himself; but its intensity, its efficacy, is the ground on which I love and trust him.”[361]
VI
There is a school of philosophy, much current in our day, which carries this point of view further. The meaning of a conception, it tells us, expresses itself in practical consequences, if the conception be true; religious truth is relative to the individual; the way to test a religion is to live it. If the philosophy of the pragmatists be right, then few forms of religious creed can claim better witness to their truth than that wherein Florence Nightingale lived and moved and had her being. She had “remodelled her whole religious belief from beginning to end,” and had “learnt to know God” in the years immediately preceding her active work in the world. Her belief helped to sustain her natural courage amidst the horrors of Scutari, and the fever and the cold of Balaclava. It inspired the life of arduous labour to which she devoted herself on returning from the East. It informed her unceasing efforts for the health of the Army and the people, for the reformation of hospitals, for the creation of an art of nursing. Does some one, echoing the words of M. Mohl which I have quoted above, doubt whether any vital force can have proceeded from a belief in Law as the Thought of God, and suggest that to herself as to others she was offering a stone instead of bread? It was not so. To her the religion which she found was as the body and blood of the Most High. It is impossible to doubt the spiritual intensity, the religious fervour, of passages such as these from the pages in Suggestions for Thought in which she describes “Communion with God”:—
If it is said “we cannot love a law,”—the mode in which God reveals Himself—the answer is, we can love the spirit which originates, which is manifested in, the law. It is not the material presence only that we love in our fellow-creatures. It is the spirit, which bespeaks the material presence, that we love. Shall we then not love the spirit of all that is loveable, which all material presence bespeaks to us?… How penetrated must those have been who first, genuinely, had the conception, who felt, who thought, whose imaginations helped them to conceive, that the Divine Verity manifests itself in the human, partakes itself, becomes one with the human, descends into the hell of sin and suffering with the human, by being “verily and indeed taken and received” by the human!… We will seek continually (and stimulate mankind to seek with us) to prepare the eye and the ear of the great human existence that seeing it shall perceive, and hearing it shall understand.… “Whether we eat or drink, or whatsoever ye do, do all to the glory of God.” To do it “to the glory of God” must be to fulfil the Lord's purpose. That purpose is man's increase in truth, increase in right being. The history of mankind should be, will be one day, the history of man's endeavour after increase of truth, and after a right nature.… What does ignorant finite man want? How great, how suffering, yet how sublime are his wants! Think of his wounded aching heart, as compared with the bird and beast! his longing eye, his speaking countenance, compared with these! they show something of such difference, but nothing, nothing compared with what is within, where no eye can read. What then, poor sufferer, dost thou want? I want a wise and loving counsellor, whose love and wisdom should come home to the whole of my nature. I would work, oh! how gladly, but I want direction how to work. I would suffer, oh! how willingly, but for a purpose.… God always speaks plain in His laws—His everlasting voice.… My poor child, He says, dost thou complain that I do not prematurely give thee food which thou couldst not digest? My son, I am always one with thee, though thou art not always one with me. That spirit racked or blighted by sin, my child, it is thy Father's spirit. Whence comes it, why does it suffer, or why is it blighted, but that it is incipient love, and truth, and wisdom, tortured or suppressed? But Law (that is, the will of the Perfect) is now, was without beginning, and ever shall be, as the inducement and the means by which that blight or suffering which is God within man, shall become man one with God.
First find the Infinite, said a wise man, then name Him as thou wilt. “It is not hard to know God,” said Joubert, “provided one will not force oneself to define Him.” And another, of old time, said:—
Lead Thou me, God, Law, Reason, Duty, Life!
All names for Thee alike are vain and hollow.[362]
There is a section of Miss Nightingale's Suggestions for Thought called “Cassandra.” It is the story of a girl's imprisoned life; it is in part autobiographical, and I have quoted from it several times in the course of this work. It ends with the death of the heroine. “Let neither name nor date be placed on her grave, still less the expression of regret or of admiration; but simply the words, I believe in God.”
CHAPTER VI
MISS NIGHTINGALE AT HOME
(1858–1861)
Few women, and not many men, have lived a fuller and busier life than was Miss Nightingale's during the five years which followed her return from the Crimean War. They were years of public work, but of work done in quiet. And what is more remarkable, they were years to her of constant physical weakness.
At the turn of the year 1857–8 she was thought like to die. There were many times during the year 1859 when she and her friends expected her death at any moment. “Thank you,” wrote George Eliot to Miss Hennell in February, “for sending me that authentic word about Miss Nightingale. I wonder if she would rather rest from her blessed labours, or live to go on working. Sometimes when I read of the death of some great sensitive human being, I have a triumph in the sense that they are at rest; and yet, along with that, deep sadness at the thought that the rare nature is gone for ever into the darkness.”[363] In the same year Miss Nightingale gave Mr. Clough full instructions for her funeral. To her friend, Colonel Lefroy, she had written as if the end were very near. “What a crown yours will be,” he answered (March 20), “when you rest from your labours and your works follow you!” A year later she wrote to Mr. Manning (Feb. 25): “Dear Sir, or dear Friend (whichever I may call you), I am in the land of the living still, as you see, contrary to everybody's expectation, but so much weaker than when you were so kind as to come here, that I do not sit up at all now.” “Nunc dimittis,” she added, “is the only prayer I can make now as far as regards myself.” Yet during all the time she was full of energy and fire, and lived laborious days in writing and in talking. If the reader will turn to the Bibliography (1858–1861), he will see at a glance how numerous were her printed works, and preceding chapters have enabled him to estimate the amount of toil and thought that lay behind them. Her unprinted Memoranda are on a like scale, and her correspondence was enormous. Then, too, hardly a day passed upon which she did not transact business personally with one or other, or with several, of her “Cabinet.”
Among persons whom Miss Nightingale declined, on the ground of failing health, to receive (and the number included old friends and colleagues as well as strangers), there were some who would not believe that she was as ill as she said; they thought that she was cloaking hardness of heart or perversity of temper. But they were wrong. Among occasional visitors, again, whom she did receive, there were those to whom the evidence of their senses, derived from her animated and vigorous conversation, seemed to negative the idea that she was a serious invalid. But they did not understand. Sir John Lawrence, for instance, was received in March 1861, to discuss Indian questions. “He found her much better than he expected,” so her cousin Hilary reported, “and said so to Dr. Sutherland as he went downstairs. Dr. Sutherland replied, ‘You cannot know; but when I go back I shall find her quite abattue, and shall not speak another word to her.’” And so it was. Dr. Sutherland found her “trembling all over,” and had to administer medical aid. For any interview with a stranger, and for many interviews with her familiar colleagues, she had to save up strength very carefully in advance, and the transaction of any critical business, or the strain of any excitement in conversation, left her prostrate and palpitating afterwards. The doctors now told her that her heart was seriously affected. Mr. Chadwick doubted this. Her father, writing to his wife from London, and describing an evening spent with Florence, said (1861): “Chadwick and Sutherland at dinner; the former persisting that Flo's voice alone is sufficient to show that her (so called) heart complaint is doubtful. In truth she still seems to work like a Hercules in spite of all weakness.” She worked without pause, but there were times when for weeks she did not leave her sofa or her bed, and for months did not go out of doors. It may be, as Mr. Chadwick thought, that the diagnosis of the physicians was wrong, or at any rate that it exaggerated the seriousness of the case. As she lived to be ninety, the truth must be, I suppose, that none of her vital organs or functions were at this time diseased. The history of her case points, I am told, to dilatation of the heart and neurasthenia. The former of these states, though often distressing in its symptoms, yields, I understand, to drugs and rest; and for the atonic condition of the nervous system, which is called neurasthenia, and which is often the product of excessive stress upon the functions of the mind, complete rest is also often a remedy. If upon her return to England Miss Nightingale had taken a long period of rest, it is probable that she would have regained normal health of body; but, as we have seen, she allowed herself no rest at all. She taxed exhausted powers of body to the uttermost. Even now complete rest would probably have cured her; but as she could not or would not put work aside, she was only able to carry it on by careful husbandry of her strength.