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.