II
From the worldly circumstances of her parents Florence came to draw conclusions little sympathetic, in some respects, with existing usages and conventions. She accepted, indeed, the position of worldly wealth into which she was born without any fundamental questioning. In later years a young friend, on being urged to visit the villagers around one of Miss Nightingale's country homes, explained that she did not like the relation, she could not bring herself to go from a big comfortable house to instruct poor people how to live. Miss Nightingale laughed, and said, “You surely don't call Lea Hurst a big house.” It had only about fifteen bedrooms. She took for granted the position into which she was born. But she thought that wealth should only be used as a means of work. The easy, comfortable, not very strenuous conditions of her home life as a girl fixed the nature of her earlier years, but her soul did not become rooted in them. They sowed seeds which grew, as the years passed, not into acquiescence, but into revolt. Mr. Nightingale had inherited his great-uncle's property when nine years old. It accumulated for him, and a lead mine added greatly to its value. By the time of his marriage he was blessed (or, as his younger daughter came to think, afflicted) by the possession of a considerable fortune. Whether it were indeed a blessing or an affliction, it involved him in much uncertainty of mind. He and his wife returned from the Continent with their infant daughters in 1821, and the question became urgent, Where to live? The landed property which he inherited from his great-uncle was a comparatively small estate at and around Lea Hall in Derbyshire. To this property he added largely. The Hall, the old residence of his great-uncle, was discarded (it is now used as a farm-house), and Mr. Nightingale built a new house, called Lea Hurst. The charm of its situation and prospect is described in a letter by Mrs. Gaskell:—
“High as Lea Hurst is, one seems on a pinnacle, with the clouds careering round one. Down below is a garden with stone terraces and flights of steps—the planes of these terraces being perfectly gorgeous with masses of hollyhocks, dahlias, nasturtiums, geraniums, etc. Then a sloping meadow losing itself in a steep wooded descent (such tints over the wood!) to the river Derwent, the rocks on the other side of which form the first distance, and are of a red colour streaked with misty purple. Beyond this, interlacing hills, forming three ranges of distance; the first, deep brown with decaying heather; the next, in some purple shadow, and the last catching some pale, watery sunlight.” “I am left alone,” continued Mrs. Gaskell, “established high up, in two rooms, opening one out of the other—the old nurseries.” (The inner one, in which Mrs. Gaskell slept, was, when Parthenope grew up, her bedroom.) “It is curious how simple it is. The old carpet doesn't cover the floor. No easy chair, no sofa, a little curtainless bed, a small glass. In the outer room—the former day nursery—Miss Florence's room when she is at home, everything is equally simple; now, of course, the bed is reconverted into a sofa; two small tables, a few bookshelves, a drab carpet only partially covering the clean boards, and stone-coloured walls—as cold in colouring as need be, but with one low window on one side, trellised over with Virginian creeper as gorgeous as can be; and the opposite one, by which I am writing, looking over such country!”[6]
The sound of the Derwent was often in Florence's ears. When she was in the Hospital at Scutari any fretting in the Straits recalled it to her. “How I like,” she said on a stormy night, “to hear that ceaseless roar; it puts me in mind of the dear Derwent; how often I have listened to it from the nursery window.”
Lea Hurst became one of Florence Nightingale's earliest homes in England, but it was not the earliest of all. The house was not built when the family returned from the Continent, and Mr. Nightingale took Kynsham Court, Presteigne, in Herefordshire. The place, it seems, was “more picturesque than habitable,” and negotiations for the purchase of it, with a view to improvements, fell through. Mr. Nightingale liked Derbyshire, and was fond of his new house; but the rich, as well as the poor, have their perplexities. “The difficulty is,” wrote Mr. Nightingale to his wife, “where is the county that is habitable for twelve successive months?” And, again, “How would you like Leicestershire? For my part, I think that, provided I could get about 2000 acres and a house in some neighbouring county where sporting and scenery were in tolerable abundance, and the visit to Lea Hurst were annually confined to July, August, September, and October, then all would be well.” While Mrs. Nightingale stayed at Kynsham, or took the children for change of air to the seaside or Tunbridge Wells, Mr. Nightingale divided his time between the management of his property in Derbyshire and the search for a second home elsewhere. Ultimately he found what he wanted at Embley Park in the parish of Wellow, near Romsey. This estate was bought in 1825, and Kynsham was given up. Embley is on the edge of the New Forest, and the rich growth of its woods and gardens is much favoured by sun and moisture. Old oaks and beeches, thickets of flowering laurel and rhododendron, and a profusion of flowers and scents, contrast with the bare breezy hills of Derbyshire. Its new owners had here the variety they wished for, and a full scope for their taste. The most praised of its beauties is a long road almost shut in by masses of rhododendron. One of the occasional pleasures of Miss Nightingale's later life in London was a drive in the Park, in rhododendron-time, “to remind her of Embley.”
III
From her fifth year onwards Florence Nightingale had, then, for her homes Lea Hurst in the summer months and Embley during the rest of the year. The family usually spent a portion of the season in London. The sisters led, it will thus be seen, a life mainly in the country, and Florence as a child became fond of flowers, birds, and beasts. A neatly printed manuscript-book is preserved, in which she made a catalogue of her collection of flowers, describing each with analytical accuracy, and noting the particular spot at which it was picked. Her childish letters contain many references to animal companions. She made particular friends with the nuthatch. She had a pet pig, a pet donkey, a pet pony. She was fond of riding, and fond of dogs. “A small pet animal,” she said many years afterwards, “is often an excellent companion for the sick, for long chronic cases especially.” “The more I see of men,” wrote a cynic, “the more I love dogs.” Florence Nightingale, in the same piece from which I have just quoted, drew a like moral from her experience of some nurses. “An invalid,” she said, “in giving an account of his nursing by a nurse and a dog, infinitely preferred that of the dog. ‘Above all,’ he said, ‘it did not talk.’”[7] There were no babies in the Nightingale family after the arrival of Florence herself, but most of her mother's many brothers and sisters married and had families; and as Mr. and Mrs. Nightingale's houses were often visited by these relations, there was seldom wanting a succession of babies, and in them and their christenings, and teethings, and illnesses, and lessons, Florence took that interest which is often strong in little girls.
Sometimes a baby died, and her letters show that Florence was as much interested in a death as in a birth. She rejoiced in “the little angels in heaven.” One of her favourite poems at this period was The Better Land of Mrs. Hemans, which she copied out for a cousin as “so very beautiful.” The earliest letter which I have seen, written when she was ten, strikes mingled notes. She is staying with Uncle Octavius Smith at “Thames Bank” (a house which then adjoined his distillery at Millbank), and writes to her sister, who is on a visit with the maid to another set of cousins:—
Give my love to Clémence, and tell her, if you please, that I am not in the room where she established me, but in a very small one; instead of the beautiful view of the Thames, a most dismal one of the black distillery, and, whenever I open my window, the nasty smell rushes in like a torrent. But I like it pretty well notwithstanding. There is a hole through the wall[11] close to my door, which communicates with the bath-room, which is next the room where Freddy[8] sleeps, and he talks to me by there. Tell her also, if you please, that I have washed myself all over and feet in warm water since I came every night. I went up into the distillery to the very tip-top by ladders with Uncle Oc and Fred Saturday night. We walked along a great pipe. We have had a good deal of boating which I like very much. We see three steam-boats pass every day, the Diana, the Fly, and the Endeavour. My love to all of them except Miss W——. Give my love particularly to Hilary. Your affect and only sister. Dear Pop, I think of you, pray let us love one another more than we have done. Mama wishes it particularly, it is the will of God, and it will comfort us in our trials through life. Good-bye.
Was Miss W—— an unsympathetic governess? Whoever she was, the exception in her disfavour shows an unregenerate impulse which contrasts naïvely with the following good resolve towards her sister. To a year earlier belongs a little note-book, entitled “Journal of Flo, Embley.” It begins with the reminder, “The Lord is with thee wherever thou art.” And then an entry records, “Sunday, I obliged to sit still by Miss Christie till I had the spirit of obedience.” As a child, and throughout all the earlier part of her life, Florence was much given to dreaming, and in some introspective speculations written in 1851 she recalled the pleasures of naughtiness. “When I was a child and was naughty, it always put an end to my dreaming for the time. I never could tell why. Was it because naughtiness was a more interesting state than the little motives which make man's peaceful civilized state, and occupied imagination for the time?” To Miss Christie, her first governess, Florence became greatly attached, and the death of the lady a few years later threw her into deep grief. She was a sensitive, and a somewhat morbid child; and though she presently developed a lively sense of humour, to which she had the capacity of giving trenchant expression, it was the humour of intellect rather than the outcome of a joyous disposition. Her early letters contain little note of childish fun. They are for the most part grave and introspective. She was self-absorbed, and had the shyness which attends upon that habit. “My greatest ambition,” she wrote in some private reminiscences of her early life, “was not to be remarked. I was always in mortal fear of doing something unlike other people, and I said, ‘If I were sure that nobody would remark me I should be quite happy.’ I had a morbid terror of not using my knives and forks like other people when I should come out. I was afraid of speaking to children because I was sure I should not please them.” Meanwhile, she was perhaps at times, even as a child, a little “difficult” at home. “Ask Flo,” wrote her father to his wife in 1832, “if she has lost her intellect. If not, why does she grumble at troubles which she cannot remedy by grumbling?”
IV
The appeal to his daughter's intellect was characteristic of Mr. Nightingale. He was himself a well-informed man, educated at Edinburgh, and Trinity, Cambridge; and, like some others of the Unitarian circle, he held views much in advance of the average opinion of his time about the intellectual education of women. The home education of his daughters was largely supervised by himself; it included a range of subjects far outside the curriculum current in “young ladies' seminaries”; and perhaps, like Hannah More's father, he was sometimes “frightened at his own success.” Letters and note-books show, it is true, that his daughters were duly instructed in the accomplishments deemed appropriate to young ladies. We hear of them learning the use of the globes, writing books of elegant extracts, working footstools, and doing fancy work. They studied music, grammar, composition, modern languages. “We used to read Tasso and Ariosto and Alfieri with my father,” Florence said; “he was a good and always interested Italian scholar, never pedantic, never a tiresome grammarian, but he spoke Italian like an Italian and I took care of the verbs.” Mr. Nightingale added constitutional history, Latin, Greek, and mathematics. By the time Florence was sixteen, he was reading Homer with his daughters. Miss Nightingale used to say that at Greek her sister was the quicker scholar. Their father set them appointed tasks to prepare. Parthenope would trust largely to improvisation or lucky shots. Florence was more laborious; and sometimes would get up at four in the morning to prepare the lesson. Her knowledge of Latin was of some practical use in later years. In conversations with abbots and monks whom she met during her travels she sometimes found in Latin their only common tongue. Among Florence's papers were preserved many sheets in her father's handwriting, containing the heads of admirable outlines of the political history of England and of some foreign states. Her own note-books show that in her teens she had mastered the elements of Latin and Greek. She analysed the Tusculan Disputations. She translated portions of the Phaedo, the Crito and the Apology. She had studied Roman, German, Italian, and Turkish history. She had analysed Dugald Stewart's Philosophy of the Human Mind. Her father was in the habit, too, of suggesting themes on which his daughters were to write compositions. It was the system of the College Essay. “Florence has now taken to mathematics,” wrote her sister in 1840, “and, like everything she undertakes, she is deep in them and working very hard.” The direction in which Florence Nightingale was to exercise the faculties thus trained was as yet hidden in the future; but to her father's guidance she was indebted for the mental grasp and power of intellectual concentration which were to distinguish her work in life.
It is a natural temptation of biographers to give a formal unity to their subject by representing the child as in all things the father of the man; to date the vocation of their hero or heroine very early in life; to magnify some childish incident as prophetic of what is to come thereafter. Material is available for such treatment in the case of Florence Nightingale. It has been recorded that she used to nurse and bandage the dolls which her elder sister damaged. Every book about the heroine of the Crimea contains, too, a tale of “first aid to the wounded” which Florence administered to Cap, the shepherd's collie, whom she found with a broken leg on the downs near Embley. “I wonder,” wrote her “old Pastor”[9] to her in 1858, “whether you remember how, twenty-two years ago, you and I together averted the intended hanging of poor old Shepherd Smithers's dog, Cap. How many times I have told the story since! I well recollect the pleasure which the saving of the life of a poor dog then gave to your young mind. I was delighted to witness it; it was to me not indeed an omen of what you were about to do and be (for of that I never dreamed), but it was an index of that kind and benevolent disposition, of that I Cor. xiii. Charity, which has been at the root of it.” And it is certainly interesting and curious, if nothing more, that the very earliest piece in the handwriting of Florence Nightingale which has been preserved should be a medical prescription. It is contained in a tiny book, about the size of a postage-stamp, which the little girl stitched together and in which the instruction is written, in very childish letters, “16 grains for an old woman, 11 for a young woman, and 7 for a child.” But these things are after all but trifles. Florence Nightingale is not the only little girl who has been fond of nursing sick dolls or mending them when broken. Other children have tended wounded animals and had their pill-boxes and simples. Much, too, has been written about Florence's kindness as a child to her poorer neighbours. Her mother, both at Lea Hurst and at Embley, sometimes occupied herself in good works. She and her husband were particularly interested in a “cheap school” which they supported at their Derbyshire home. “Large sums of money have been paid,” wrote Mr. Nightingale to his wife in 1832, “to your schoolmistress for many praiseworthy purposes, who works con amore in looking after the whole population, young and old.” Florence took her place, beside her mother, in visiting poor neighbours, in arranging school-treats, in giving village entertainments. But thousands of other squires' daughters, before and after her, have done the like. And Florence herself, as many entries in her diaries show, was not conscious of doing much, but reproachful of herself for doing little. The constant burden of her self-examination, both at this time and for many years to come, was that she was for ever “dreaming” and never “doing.” She was dreaming because for a long time she did not clearly feel or see what her work in life was to be; and then for yet another period of time because, when she knew what she was called to do, she could not compass the means to do it. Her faculties were not brought outwards, but were left, by the conditions of her life, to devour themselves inwardly.
The discovery of her true vocation belongs, then, to a later period of our story; and it was not the result of childish fancy, or the accomplishment of early incident; it was the fruit of long and earnest study. What did come to Florence Nightingale early in life—perhaps, as one entry in her autobiographical notes suggests, as early as her sixth year—was the sense of a “call”; of some appointed mission in life; of self-dedication to the service of God. “I remember her,” wrote Fanny Allen in 1857 to her niece Elizabeth Wedgwood, “as a little girl of three or four, then the girl of sixteen of high promise. When I look back on every time I saw her after her sixteenth year, I see that she was ripening constantly for her work, and that her mind was dwelling on the painful differences of man and man in this life, and on the traps that a luxurious life laid for the affluent. A conversation on this subject between the father and daughter made me laugh at the time, the contrast was so striking; but now, as I remember it, it was the Divine Spirit breathing in her.”[10] In an autobiographical fragment written in 1867 Florence mentions as one of the crises of her inner life that “God called her to His service” on February 7, 1837, at Embley; and there are later notes which still fix that day as the dawn of her true life. But as yet she knew not whither the Spirit was to lead. For three months, indeed, as she notes in another passage of retrospect, she “worked very hard among the poor people” under “a strong feeling of religion.”
V
Presently, however, a new direction was given to her thoughts and interests. She was now seventeen, her sister eighteen. Their home education had been far advanced, and might seem to require only such “finishing” as masters and society in France and Italy could supply. Mr. Nightingale had, moreover, decided to carry out extensive alterations at Embley. With his wife and daughters, he crossed from Southampton to Havre on September 8, 1837, and they did not return to England till April 6, 1839. Those were days of leisurely travel, such as Ruskin describes, in which “distance could not be vanquished without toil, but in which that toil was rewarded, partly by the power of deliberate survey of the countries through which the journey lay, and partly by the happiness of the evening hours, when from the top of the last hill he had surmounted, the traveller beheld the quiet village where he was to rest, scattered among the meadows beside its valley stream; or, from the long-hoped-for turn in the dusty perspective of the causeway, saw, for the first time, the towers of some famed city, faint in the rays of sunset—hours of peaceful and thoughtful pleasure, for which the rush of the arrival in the railway station is perhaps not always, or to all men, an equivalent.” There were many such hours during the journeys which the Nightingales took with a vetturino through France and Italy; and Florence, writing at a later date, when all her life was fixed on doing, noted that on this tour there was “too much time for dreaming.” Yet it is clear from her diaries that she entered heartily, and with a wider range of interest than some English travellers show, into the life of foreign society and sight-seeing. A love of statistical method which became one of her most marked characteristics may already be seen in an itinerary which she compiled; noting, in its several columns, the number of leagues from place to place, with the day and the hour both of arrival and of departure. They went leisurely through France, visiting, besides many other places, Chartres, Blois, Tours, Nantes, Bordeaux, Biarritz, Carcassonne, Nîmes, Avignon, and Toulon, and then going by the Riviera to Nice. There they stayed for nearly a month (Dec. 1837–Jan. 1838). A month was next spent at Genoa, and two months were given to Florence. The late spring and summer were devoted to travel in the cities of Northern Italy, among the lakes, and in Switzerland. They spent the month of September in Geneva, and reached Paris on October 8, 1838. Miss Nightingale preserved her diary of the greater part of the tour, and it shows her keenly interested alike in scenery and in works of art. It contains also, what records of sentimental pilgrimages often lack, an admixture of notes and statistics upon the laws, the land systems, the social conditions and benevolent institutions of the several states or cantons. Her interest in the politics of the day was keen wherever she was; and the society of many refugees into which she was thrown at Geneva gave her a particularly ardent sympathy with the cause of Italian freedom. The diary contains many biographical notes upon Italian patriots, whose adventures she heard related by their own lips. “A stirring day,” she wrote on September 12 (1838), “the most stirring which we have ever lived.” It was the day on which the news reached Geneva that the Emperor of Austria had declared an amnesty in Italy. The Nightingales attended an evening party at which the Italian refugees assembled and the Imperial decree was read out amidst loud jubilation; which, however, was afterwards abated when it turned out that the “general amnesty” contained many conditions and some exceptions. The Nightingales had the entrée to all the learned society of Geneva. Florence records an evening spent with M. de Candolle, the famous botanist; and the diary gives many glimpses of Sismondi, the historian, who was then living in his native city. He escorted the Nightingale party up the Salève. They made that not very formidable ascent first on donkeys and then “in a sledge covered with straw and drawn by four oxen.” Florence was present on another occasion when “all the company gathered round Sismondi who, sitting on a table, gave us a lecture on Florentine history.” The conscientious Florence made a full note in her diary of the great man's discourse. “All Sismondi's political economy,” she also noted, “seems to be founded on the overflowing kindness of his heart. He gives to old beggars on principle, to young from habit. At Pescia he had 300 beggars at his door on one morning. He feeds the mice in his room while he is writing his histories.” Presently there was a new excitement in Geneva. “What a stirring time we live in,” Florence wrote on September 18; “one day to decide the fate of the Italians, to-morrow to decide the fate of Switzerland.” “To-morrow” was the day fixed for the meeting of the Conseil Représentatif which was to take into consideration the demand of Louis Philippe for the expulsion of Louis Napoleon, the future Emperor. Many pages of Miss Nightingale's diary are given up to this affair. She analysed all the pros and cons, and recorded day by day the course of the debate. Sismondi thought that the refugee ought to be surrendered—on principle because he was a pretender, in expediency because Geneva would be unable to withstand a French assault. He “spoke for an hour” in this sense. The Genevois radicals, on the other hand, while entertaining no great love for the pretender, thought that, cost what it might, “the sacred right of asylum” should be maintained. And so the debate continued. The French Government began to move troops from Lyons; the Genevois, to throw up fortifications. Whereupon Mr. Nightingale, like many other English visitors, thought it time to take his family across the frontier. Miss Nightingale's diary written en route to Paris shows her excitement to obtain news of the crisis. When she learnt that it had been solved by Louis Napoleon being given a passport for England, she did not see that Louis Philippe had gained very much; the pretender would be nearer, and not less dangerous, in London than in Geneva—a very just prediction. Not every girl of eighteen, when taking her first tour abroad, shows so lively an interest in political affairs.
Politics and social observations mingle in the diary with artistic and architectural notes. The city which seems most to have appealed to her imagination was not Florence; though she said that she “would not have missed it for anything,” and, curiously, her sojourn in her birthplace was the occasion of a characteristic incident. An English lady, who afterwards became Princess Reuss Köstritz, was staying in the same lodgings and fell ill, and Florence Nightingale volunteered to nurse her. But the city which she most admired was Genoa La Superba. She notes indeed the excessive indolence of the nobles and excessive poverty of the people, but the palaces “realized an Arabian Nights story” for her. Mr. and Mrs. Nightingale had many friends and brought many introductions. In the various towns where they stayed they mixed in the best society, and their daughters were thrown into a lively round of picnics, concerts, soirées, dancing:
| Balls and masks begun at midnight, burning ever to mid-day, When they made up fresh adventures for the morrow— |
There were Court balls at which Grand Dukes were “exceedingly polite” to Florence Nightingale and her sister. They went to an evening Court at Florence, and found “everyone most courteous and agreeable.” There was a ball at the Casino in Genoa, at which, writes Florence in her diary, “my partner and I made an embrouillement, and a military officer came up with a very angry face to challenge me for having refused him and then not dancing.” But the music was not all to the tune of “A Toccata of Galuppi's.” What gave Florence the greatest pleasure on this tour was the Italian opera. In those days the reigning singers were Grisi, Lablache, Rubini, and Tamburini. Florence Nightingale heard them all. Her Italian diary is nowhere so elaborate as in descriptions of the operas and in notes on the performers. She kept a separate book in which she wrote tabulated details of all the performances. “I should like to go every night,” she said in her diary; and for some time after her return from the Continent she was, as she wrote to Miss Clarke, “music-mad.” She took music-lessons at Florence, and in London studied under German and Italian masters. She played and sang. It was as yet uncertain whether “the call”—to what, as yet also unknown—might not be drowned in the tastes, interests, and pursuits which fill the life of other young ladies in her position.
VI
The fascination of social life must have been brought vividly before her during the winter (1838–39) which they spent in Paris, in apartments in the Place Vendôme (No. 22). She was now introduced into the brilliant circle of the last of the salons. Mary Clarke, afterwards Madame Mohl, was by descent half Irish, half Scottish; by education and residence, almost wholly French. “A charming mixture,” said Ampère of her, “of French vivacity and English originality.” Full at once of esprit and of espièglerie, well read and artistic yet wholly devoid of pedantry, without regular beauty of feature, but alert and piquante, Mary Clarke had gathered round her what Ticknor in 1837 had found the most intellectual circle in Paris. For seven years she and her mother lived in apartments in the Abbaye-au-Bois, adjoining those of Madame Récamier, and Mary was a daily visitor to the famous salon during the reign of Chateaubriand, whose closing years she did much to brighten and amuse. At the time when the Nightingales arrived in Paris, Mrs. and Miss Clarke had left the Abbaye-au-Bois and established themselves in those apartments in the Rue du Bac which for nearly forty years were a haunt of all that was brilliant in the intellectual life of Paris. Mary Clarke took most affectionately to the Nightingale family, who, with some of their connections, remained for long years among her closest friends. She used to pay a yearly visit to Mr. and Mrs. Nightingale, either at Embley or at Lea Hurst, generally staying three weeks or a month; and to her many of Florence's most interesting letters were, as we shall find, addressed. To her other and more superficial qualities, Mary Clarke added great warmth of lasting affection for her intimate friends, and her sympathetic kindness to the Nightingale circle was unfailing. The attraction of Paris to Florence lay principally in its hospitals and nursing sisterhoods, but partly also in that it was the home of “Clarkey,” as they called her. And it was the same with other members of the family. There is a letter from Lady Verney to Clarkey which describes how some one asked Mr. Nightingale, “Are you going to Paris?” “Oh, no,” he replied; “Madame Mohl is ill.” “Then does Paris mean Madame Mohl?” “Yes, certainly,” he replied gravely. During the winter of 1838–39 Miss Clarke, writes Lady Verney, was “exceedingly kind to Florence and me, two young girls full of all kinds of interests, which she took the greatest pains to help. She made us acquainted with all her friends, many and notable, among them Madame Récamier. I know now, better than then, what her influence must have been thus to introduce an English family (two of them girls who, if French, would not have appeared in society) into that jealously guarded sanctuary, the most exclusive aristocratic and literary salon in Paris. We were asked, even, to the reading by Chateaubriand, at the Abbaye-au-Bois, of his Mémoires d'Outre-Tombe, which he could not wait to put forth, as he had intended when writing them, until after his death—desiring, it was said, to discount the praises which he expected, but hardly received. This hearing was a favour eagerly sought for by the cream of the cream of Paris society at that time.”[11] In Miss Clarke's own apartments, the Nightingales met many distinguished men. The intimates who were always there, and who assisted their hostess in making the tea, were MM. Fauriel and Mohl—Claude Fauriel, versed in mediæval and Provençal lore, a man exceedingly handsome, who had captivated Madame de Staël and other ladies besides Mary Clarke in his friendships; and Julius Mohl, one of the first Orientalists in Europe, a more ardent lover whom, after a probation of eighteen years, Miss Clarke married in 1847. M. Mohl was once asked by Queen Victoria why, loving Germany so much, he had given up his native country for France. “Ma foi, madame,” he replied, “j'ètais amoureux.” With M. Mohl, no less than with his wife, Florence Nightingale was on terms of affectionate friendship. Among the frequent visitors whom she and her sister met at Miss Clarke's were Madame Tastu (the poetess), Élie de Beaumont (the geologist), Roulin (the traveller and naturalist), Cousin, Mignet, Guizot, Tocqueville, Barthélemy St. Hilaire, and Thiers. The last-named was one of Miss Clarke's earliest admirers; and many years later, after the Franco-German war, when Thiers was at the head of affairs, Lady Verney heard M. Mohl say to his wife, “Madame, why did you not marry M. Thiers instead of me, for now you would have been Queen of France?”
In such circles as that which gathered around Miss Clarke, Florence Nightingale was well qualified to hold her own and even to play a brilliant part. Her life of gaiety on the Riviera and in Italy must have rubbed away much of the shyness from which she had suffered. If not beautiful, she was elegant and distinguished. She was both widely and deeply read. She had many and varied interests. She had powers of expression, in which clearness was not unmixed with a note of humorous subacidity. These are social advantages, and she was not without the inclination to use them. She chose in the end another path—a path which was beset by many obstacles of circumstance; but there were obstacles in herself also, and one of the last “temptations” to be overcome, before she was free to interpret her call and to act upon it, was (as she wrote in many a page of confession and self-examination) “the desire to shine in society.”
CHAPTER II
HOME LIFE
(1839–1845)
Her passionate, ideal nature demanded an epic life: what were many-volumed romances of chivalry and the social conquests of a brilliant girl to her? Her flame quickly burned up that light fuel; and, fed from within, soared after some illimitable satisfaction, some object which would never justify weariness, which would reconcile self-despair with the rapturous consciousness of life beyond self.—George Eliot: Middlemarch.
The home life to which Florence Nightingale returned in April 1839 was rich in possibilities of social pleasure, and might have seemed to promise every happiness. She was well fitted by nature and by education to be an ornament of any country house; to shine in any cultivated society; to become the wife, as many of her best friends hoped and believed, of some good and clever man. But Florence, as she passed from childhood to womanhood, came to form other plans. Her life, as she ultimately shaped it, her example, which circumstances were destined to render far-shining, have been potent factors in opening new avenues for women in the modern world. Thousands of women in these days are, in consequence of Florence Nightingale's career, born free; but it was at a great price, and after long and weary struggles, that she herself attained such freedom. During the years with which, in this Part, we shall be concerned, she lived in some sort the life of a caged bird.
The cage, however, was pleasantly gilded. Florence was not always insensible of the gilding; there were times when she was tempted to chafe no longer at its bars, and to accept a restricted life within the conventional lines. I do not propose to detail, as might be done from her letters, diaries, and other materials, the precise succession of her goings and comings, her visits, and her home pursuits. She herself gives an excellent reason in one of her diaries. “Our movements are so regular,” she said; one year was very like another. The setting of Florence Nightingale's life during this period was such as many women have enjoyed, and many others have envied. The lines of the Nightingale family were laid in pleasant places. Their summer months were spent, as in preceding years, at Lea Hurst. A portion of the season was spent in London, and the rest of the year at Embley. On their return from the Continent in 1839, the Nightingales spent some weeks in London, when the two girls were presented at Court, and a letter to Miss Clarke shows Florence absorbed in music, but not so completely as to conquer a lively interest in the politics of the Bedchamber Plot:—
Carlton Hotel, Regent Street, June 1 [1839].… We are enjoying ourselves much, for the Nicholsons, our cousins, came up to town the day after we did, and are living in the same hotel with us in Regent Street, the best situation in London, I think, but some people call it too noisy. As Marianne Nicholson is as music-mad as I am, we are revelling in music all day long. Schulz, who is a splendid player, and Crivelli, her singing master, give us lessons, and the unfortunate piano has been strummed out of tune in a week, not having even its natural rest at nights, as there are other masters as well. We went to Pauline Garcia's début at the opera in Otello. She was exceedingly nervous and trembled all over, but her great improvement towards the end promised well. Her lower notes are very fine indeed, and two shakes she made low down, though too much like instrumental to be agreeable, were very extraordinary. Her voice, however, is excessively unequal, and sometimes her singing is quite commonplace. She makes too much of her execution, which is very uneven. It is very easy to say that she will be another Malibran, but if they were side by side the difference would be seen; so say wiser judges than we. Even Grisi is quite superior to her in Desdemona, although P. Garcia's voice is the most powerful, but then P. Garcia was excessively frightened. We have heard her sing a duet with Persiani in which both were perfect, and I heard Dohler for the[25] first time at the same concert. I was nowise disappointed, although I had heard so much of him at Paris, his execution is extraordinary, but I think one would soon grow tired of it, for both his music and his style are very inferior to Thalberg's. Have you heard Batta on the violoncello at Paris? His playing approaches more nearly to the human voice than anything I ever heard. We are going to hear charming Persiani to-night in the Lucia di Lammermoor. Tamburini, the most good-natured of mortals, has volunteered to come and sing two or three hours with my cousin Marianne every season, whenever she thinks herself sufficiently advanced. We are going to hear him at a private concert on Monday.
Now there has been enough and too much of musical news, but political news is scarce.… London was in a perfect whirlwind of excitement for the few days that the Melbourne ministry was out, but that is stale already. Our little Queen, who was sadly unpopular when we first came to England, recovered much of her former favour with the Whig party after the firmness she showed in this affair. She was cheered and called forward at the opera, which had not been done for months, and again returning from chapel. And the birthday drawing-room was overflowing, whereas at the two first she gave this season, there were hardly forty people! The story of this last fracas is that on Tuesday, the day of Lord Melbourne's resignation, the Queen dined upstairs with her mother, Baroness Lehzen, and Lady F. Hastings, which she had never done since her accession, and it is supposed that the amende honorable was then made to Lady Flora, and that in this partie carrée was also arranged the course which was to be pursued with Sir Robert Peel. The poor little Queen was seen in tears by several people who told us in the course of the three days, and struggled for her Ladies, as you see, manfully. However matters may turn out now, it is said that she has taken so tremendous a dislike to Sir R. Peel in this affair, that she will never send for him again.
Since that, the House has been adjourned for a fortnight and only met last Monday when the Speaker was elected, Abercromby going up to the House of Peers. We are rejoicing in the election of Shaw Lefevre, by a majority of eighteen; rather less than was expected, however, Spring Rice arriving half an hour too late to vote, which has made rather a commotion. Shaw Lefevre is a great friend of ours, and a very agreeable man, which is his chief qualification for the chair. Macaulay is not likely to come into the Ministry; Lord Melbourne says that it is impossible to get on with a man who talks so fast. So he is now writing history, and saying that it is the only thing worth doing, except, however, standing for Edinburgh in Abercromby's room[26] against Crawford. Macaulay has made an admirable speech in favour of ballot there.
The Queen is vibrating between popularity and unpopularity, and it is not yet known which way the scale will turn between the two parties; she was very much applauded, and Lord Melbourne too, at Ascot yesterday. He is likely to keep the upper hand, as the Tories have not such a man as Lord John Russell in all their party, and the nine obstreperous Radicals have had a sop and give in their adhesion for the present. Papa is shocked to hear that M. Guizot has declared himself so anti-English.…
We always talk of you and all that you did for us at Paris. I heard yesterday that Gonfalonieri was coming to London in a month. Is he at Paris now? I have just been reading the account of M. Mignet's éloge of Talleyrand. I hope you were there, for it must have been very interesting, but did not he make rather an extraordinary defence of Talleyrand's political tergiversation, and of his conduct while the Allies were at Paris? extraordinary to our ideas of political integrity. We met “ubiquity” Young and Mr. Babbage yesterday at dinner at the E. Strutts', who told all sorts of droll stories about Lord Brougham, who seems to have fairly lost his wits. He had Lord Duncannon to dine with him the other day, which is new, he having formerly stipulated when he went out to dinner that he should see none of his former colleagues. He sends his carriage to stand before Lord Denman's house for hours while he goes and walks in the Park, or even while he is out of town, to give the idea that they are very intimate.…
In another letter to Miss Clarke (Sept. 18), some further gossip is given. Miss Nightingale was on her way back to London from Lea Hurst, and had broken the journey at Nottingham:—
The next day we went up to town by rail in six and a half hours, notwithstanding that the engine was twice out of order and stopped us. We had very agreeable company on the road, a neighbour of ours and equerry to the Queen,[12] who was full of her virtues and condescensions. How much pleasanter it is travelling by these public conveyances than in one's own stupid carriage. He said that Lord Melbourne called the Queen's favourite terrier a frightful little beast, and often contradicted her flat, all which she takes in good part, and lets him go to sleep after dinner,[27] taking care that he shall not be waked.[13] She reads all the newspapers and all the vilifying abuse which the Tories give her, and makes up her mind that a queen must be abused, and hates them cordially.