“It is true we make no ‘vows.’ But is a ‘vow’ necessary to convince us that the true spirit for learning any art, most especially an art of charity, aright, is not a disgust to everything or something else? Do we really place the love of our kind (and of nursing as one branch of it) so low as this? What would the Mère Angélique of Port Royal, what would our own Mrs. Fry, have said to this?”
How silly, in the light of these words, was the gossip of the idle person, proud of her shopping and her visiting list and her elaborate choice of dinner, who greeted the news of this nursing embassy to the Crimea with such cheap remarks as that the women would be all invalided home in a month; that it was most improper for “young ladies”—for it was not only shop assistants who were called “young ladies” in early Victorian days—to nurse in a military hospital; it was only nonsense to try and “nurse soldiers when they did not even yet know what it was to nurse a baby!”
Such folly would only shake its hardened old noddle on reading, in the Times reprint of the article in the Examiner, that Miss Nightingale was “a young lady of singular endowments both natural and acquired. In a knowledge of the ancient languages and of the higher branches of mathematics, in general art, science, and literature, her attainments are extraordinary. There is scarcely a modern language which she does not understand, and she speaks French, German, and Italian as fluently as her native English. She has visited and studied all the various nations of Europe, and has ascended the Nile to its remotest cataract. Young (about the age of our Queen), graceful, feminine, rich, popular, she holds a singularly gentle and persuasive influence over all with whom she comes in contact. Her friends and acquaintances are of all classes and persuasions, but her happiest place is at home, in the centre of a very large band of accomplished relatives.”
Girton and Newnham, Somerville and Lady Margaret did not then exist. If any one had dreamed of them, the dream had not yet been recorded. Perhaps its first recognized expression, in Tennyson’s “Princess” in 1847, mingling as it does with the story of a war and of the nursing of wounded men, may have imperceptibly smoothed away a few coarse prejudices from the path Florence Nightingale was to tread, but far more effectually was the way cleared by her own inspiring personality. Mrs. Tooley quotes from an intimate letter the following words: “Miss Nightingale is one of those whom God forms for great ends. You cannot hear her say a few sentences—no, not even look at her—without feeling that she is an extraordinary being. Simple, intellectual, sweet, full of love and benevolence, she is a fascinating and perfect woman. She is tall and pale. Her face is exceedingly lovely, but better than all is the soul’s glory that shines through every feature so exultingly. Nothing can be sweeter than her smile. It is like a sunny day in summer.”
She who advised other women to make ready for the business of their lives as men make ready had been for long years preparing herself, and there was therefore none of the nervous waste and excitement of those who in a moment of impulse take a path which to their ignorance is like leaping in the dark.
But she knew well how much must depend on those she took with her, and it was clear that many who desired to go were quite unfitted for the work.
With her usual clearsightedness she knew where to turn for help. Felicia Skene was among those whom she consulted and whose advice she found of good service. It has already been noted in these pages that Miss Skene had, without knowing it, been preparing one of the threads to be interwoven in that living tapestry in which Miss Nightingale’s labours were to endure in such glowing colours. Like Miss Nightingale she had real intimacy with those outside her own order, and by her practical human sympathy understood life, not only in one rank, but in all ranks. By night as well as by day her door was open to the outcast, and in several life-stories she had played a part which saved some poor girl from suicide. Full of humour and romance, and a welcome guest in every society, she will be remembered longest for her work in rescuing others both in body and in soul, and you will remember that, on the two occasions when the cholera visited Oxford, she nursed the sick and the dying by day and by night, and did much to direct and organize the helpful work of others. Miss Wordsworth speaks of her “innate purity of heart and mind,” and says of her, “one always felt of her that she had been brought up in the best of company, as indeed she had.” It was just such women that Miss Nightingale needed—women who, in constant touch with what was coarse and hard, could never become coarse or hard themselves; women versed in practical service and trained by actual experience as well as by hard-won knowledge.
Moreover, it chanced that after Miss Skene’s labour of love in the cholera visitation, her niece, “Miss Janie Skene, then a girl of fifteen, who was staying in Constantinople with her parents, had gone with her mother to visit the wounded soldiers at Scutari. Shocked by their terrible sufferings and the lack of all that might have eased their pain, she wrote strongly to her grandfather, who sent her letter to the Times, where it did much to stir up public opinion.”
“It struck Felicia,” says Miss Rickards, “that having with great pains trained her corps of nurses for the cholera, they might now be utilized at Scutari, her great desire being to go out herself at the head of them. Had these events occurred at the present day, when ideas have changed as to what ladies, still young, may and may not do in the way of bold enterprise, perhaps she might have obtained her parents’ permission to go. As it was the notion was too new and startling to be taken into consideration; and she had to content herself with doing all she could at home to send out others.