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.”