In these days, when all our great hospitals have their training schools for nurses, when the tendency is towards increasing the requirements beyond the standard described in this chapter, and when nursing has become a highly organized profession, it requires some effort to realize how novel, and even how daring, was the work of the founder of modern nursing. Just as a Colonel of the old school helped us to understand the difficulties of Miss Nightingale's experiment in the Crimean War, so a Surgeon of the old school wrote a little book which is invaluable in helping us to realize the novelty of her experiment in St. Thomas's Hospital. This is the book by Mr. South, to which I have already referred. He was of the highest distinction in his profession; Hunterian orator and twice President of the College of Surgeons. He was also Senior Surgeon at St. Thomas's Hospital, a fact which perhaps explains Mrs. Wardroper's anticipation of “rather harsh criticism”; for Mr. South was strongly, and even bitterly, opposed to the whole idea of the Nightingale Fund, and of any new provision for the training of nurses. He was “not at all disposed to allow that the nursing establishments of our hospitals are inefficient, or that they are likely to be improved by any special institution for training.” He believed that the nursing at St. Thomas's was good (as indeed in many respects it was), and he did not perceive that what the Nightingale Fund had in view was to raise the general level, and to send out from St. Thomas's trained nurses, who in their turn would train other nurses elsewhere. Perhaps, if he had perceived this, he would have regarded it as superfluous. His point of view was that of the man who finds the world very well as it is. I have cited the pleasure with which certain army doctors in the East found in the fact that few of their colleagues had subscribed to the Nightingale Fund. Mr. South found similar satisfaction in scanning the subscription list at home. “That this proposed hospital nurse-training scheme has not met with the approbation or support of the medical profession is,” he wrote, “beyond doubt. The very small number of medical men whose names appear in the enormous list of subscribers to the fund cannot have passed unnoticed. Only three physicians and one surgeon from one (London) hospital, and one physician from a second, are found among the supporters.” Miss Nightingale's nursing work had the support of some leading doctors, but I suppose we must take Mr. South's word for it that the medical profession as a whole was unsympathetic or hostile towards reforms which in a later generation received general approbation. The doctors do not stand alone among the professions in a tendency to oppose reforms. The hostility of lawyers to legal reform is almost proverbial; and as for the politicians, one-half of them is professionally engaged in predicting dire results from reforms introduced by the other half. And so it continues until the paradoxes of one generation become the commonplaces of the next.
But if the course of political and social progress is strewn with the wrecks of predictions of ruin, neither is it free from the disillusionments of reformers. Fears may be liars, but hopes are sometimes dupes. Miss Nightingale, as the founder of modern nursing, achieved great and beneficent results, but she lived to experience some disappointments. Her standard was so high that she was more conscious of shortcoming than of achievement. We shall perhaps better understand her mind when we pass, in the next chapter, to consider the religious sanction and the ideal of human perfectibility which she had worked out for herself in the world of thought, and which inspired her efforts in the world of action.
CHAPTER V
THE RELIGIOUS SANCTION: “SUGGESTIONS FOR THOUGHT”
(1860)
It fortifies my soul to know
That, though I perish, Truth is so:
That, howsoe'er I stray and range,
Whate'er I do, Thou dost not change.
I steadier step when I recall
That, if I slip, Thou dost not fall.
A. H. Clough.
The life and work of Miss Nightingale, as described in the foregoing chapters of this Memoir, were such as were unlikely to have proceeded from any one who was not possessed by some strong spiritual impulse. It was a life devoted to work, and in that work she sought and found herself. Yet from what is ordinarily called “self-seeking” her work was conspicuously free. The body was so weak that the wonder is how a woman in delicate health was able to perform so much of what Sidney Herbert called “a man's work” in the world. She was supported, sustained, inspired by great spiritual force and energy, which drove her to seek self-satisfaction in a dedicated life of work, and which in its turn found expression in a form of religion, independently attained and intensely held.
In a previous chapter I have traced the development of Miss Nightingale's religious views during her earlier years, and have shown how they broadened out into a tolerance which took more account of deeds than of creeds. But, as was there said, she was interested in creeds also.[348] Her nature was profoundly religious, and she had a mind as apt for speculative as for practical thought. Her critical spirit had detected weak places, as she deemed them, in the creed alike of Protestants and of Catholics. The precise and practical bent of her mind could not be satisfied until she had found for the feelings of her heart some more logical basis. She was thus driven forward to that reconstruction of her religious creed, to which passing reference has already been made. At the beginning of her diary for 1853, on a page placed opposite January for “Memoranda from 1852,” there is this entry: “The last day of the old year. I am so glad this year is over. Nevertheless it has not been wasted, I trust. I have remodelled my whole religious belief from beginning to end. I have learnt to know God. I have recast my social belief; have them both written for use, when my hour is come.” This entry refers to the manuscripts called respectively “Religion” and “Novel” in a letter of 1852, already cited.[349] The manuscripts, after being read by one or two friends, remained for some years in Miss Nightingale's desk, though during that period of strenuous activity in the world of deeds the subject-matter, we may be sure, often occupied her thoughts. In 1858 and 1859 she took up the manuscripts again. The companionship of Arthur Hugh Clough, who at this time was much with her, was doubtless one of the causes which led to an active resumption of her theological speculations. She was rereading Mill's Logic and reading Edgar Quinet's Histoire de mes idées. Mr. Clough's notes of conversation with her show how much she was indebted in her speculations to Mill. “Quinet and J. S. Mill,” wrote Mr. Clough (March 2, 1859), “seemed, she said, the two men who had the true belief about God's laws. She referred in particular to two chapters in Mill's Logic about Free Will and Necessity, which seemed to her to be the beginning of the true religious belief. The excellence of God, she said, is that He is inexorable. If He were to be changed by people's praying, we should be at the mercy of who prayed to Him. It reminded her, she said, of what old James Martin said some years ago when she saw him—that he didn't like having dissenters praying—he liked to have the prayers all set down and arranged: he didn't know what people mightn't be praying, perhaps that the money might be taken out of his pocket and put into theirs.” She rewrote some of what had been written six or seven years before; and she added a great deal more. Towards the end of 1859 she began printing it. In the following year the whole was in type, and a very few copies were struck off. This book, entitled Suggestions for Thought, is in three volumes, comprising in all 829 large octavo pages. It was never published by her. It has with conspicuous merits equally conspicuous defects. The merits are of the substance; the defects are of form and arrangement; but Miss Nightingale never found time or strength or inclination—I know not which or how many of the three were wanting—to remove the defects by recasting the book. Unpublished, therefore, it is likely, I suppose, to remain. But as it stands it is a remarkable work. No one, indeed, could read it without being impressed by the powerful mind, the spiritual force, and (with some qualifications) the literary ability of the writer. If she had not during her more active years been absorbed in practical affairs, or if at a later time her energy or inclination had not been impaired by ill-health, Miss Nightingale might have attained a place among the philosophical writers of the nineteenth century.
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]