Florence Nightingale as a girl: about 1845
from a drawing by Miss Hilary Bonham Carter
Of Miss Nightingale's personal appearance in early womanhood, there are pen-pictures by very competent hands. Lady Lovelace, in her verses entitled A Portrait, Taken from Life, emphasises a certain spiritual aloofness in her friend:—
I saw her pass, and paused to think!
She moves as one on whom to gaze
With calm and holy thoughts, that link
The soul to God in prayer and praise.
She walks as if on heaven's brink,
Unscathed thro' life's entangled maze.
I heard her soft and silver voice
Take part in songs of harmony,
Well framed to gladden and rejoice;
Whilst her ethereal melody
Still kept my soul in wav'ring choice,
'Twixt smiles and tears of ecstasy.…
I deem her fair,—yes, very fair!
Yet some there are who pass her by,
Unmoved by all the graces there.
Her face doth raise no burning sigh,
Nor hath her slender form the glare
Which strikes and rivets every eye.
Her grave, but large and lucid eye,
Unites a boundless depth of feeling
With Truth's own bright transparency,
Her singleness of heart revealing;
But still her spirit's history
From light and curious gaze concealing.…
Mrs. Gaskell's picture in prose gives some lighter touches. “She is tall; very straight and willowy in figure; thick and shortish rich brown hair; very delicate complexion; grey eyes, which are generally pensive and drooping, but when they choose can be the merriest eyes I ever saw; and perfect teeth, making her smile the sweetest I ever saw. Put a long piece of soft net, and tie it round this beautifully shaped head, so as to form a soft white framework for the full oval of her face (for she had the toothache, and so wore this little piece of drapery), and dress her up in black silk, high up to the long, white round throat, and with a black shawl on, and you may get near an idea of her perfect grace and lovely appearance. She is so like a saint.”[26] She dressed becomingly; but had a saint's carelessness in such things, somewhat to her elder sister's despair. “Make Flo wear her white silk frock to-night,” she wrote on one occasion to her mother. Many years later, when stores and comforts were being sent out to the East under cover to the Lady-in-Chief, Lady Verney insinuated “one little gown for Flo,” and who will not love her for it? “When in 1849 she started to winter in the East, her mother says”—I quote again from Mrs. Gaskell—“they equipped her en princesse, and when she came back she had little besides the clothes she had on; she had given away her linen, etc., right and left to those who wanted it.”
VI
Those who have social gifts often find sufficient happiness in their exercise; but Florence, though she sometimes enjoyed the intercourse of intellectual society, reproached herself all the while for doing so. She felt increasingly that she had other gifts which were more properly hers, and that the life of society was a distraction into the wrong path. She found even the London season more congenial than the life of the hospitable country-house. “People talk of London gaieties,” she wrote to Miss Nicholson (“Aunt Hannah”); “but there you can at least have your mornings to yourself. To me the country is the place of ‘row.’ Since we came home in September, how long do you think we have been alone? Not one fortnight. A country-house is the real place for dissipation. Sometimes I think that everybody is hard upon me, that to be for ever expected to be looking merry and saying something lively is more than can be asked mornings, noons, and nights.”
When she was alone with her parents and her sister, she hardly found the life at home more satisfying. This was partly, as she confessed in many a page of self-examination, the result of her own shortcomings. “Ask me,” she wrote to “Aunt Hannah,” “to do something for your sake, something difficult, and you will see that I shall do it regularly, which is for me the most difficult thing of all.” Let those who reproach themselves for a desultoriness, seemingly incurable, take heart again from the example of Florence Nightingale! No self-reproach recurs more often in her private outpourings at this time than that of irregularity and even sloth. She found it difficult to rise early in the morning; she prayed and wrestled to be delivered from desultory thoughts, from idle dreaming, from scrappiness in unselfish work. She wrestled, and she won. When her capacities had found full scope in congenial work, nothing was more fixed and noteworthy in her life and work than regularity, precision, method, persistence. But in part, the failings with which she reproached herself were the fault of her circumstances. The fact of the two country homes militated against steady work in either. Her parents were not, indeed, careless or thoughtless beyond others in their station, but rather the reverse. Mr. Nightingale was a careful landlord and zealous in county business, and his wife took some interest, as I have already said, in village schools and charities. But to Florence's parents, these things were rather graces rightly incidental to their station, than the main business of life. Florence's more eager temperament and larger capacity craved for greater consistency in the energies of life. She was expected to play the part of Lady Bountiful one day, and to be equally ready to play that of Lady Graceful the next. A friend who visited at Lea Hurst recalls how Florence would often be missing in the evening, and on search being made she would be found in the village, sitting by the bedside of some sick person, and saying she could not sit down to a grand seven o'clock dinner while this was going on.[27] But by the time she had schooled herself to any regularity of work at Lea Hurst, the hour had come for moving to Embley. By the time she had settled down to work amongst her poor at Embley, the hour of the London season had struck. “I should be very glad,” she wrote to her aunt from Embley, “if I could have been left here when they went to London, as there is so much to be done, but as that would not be heard of, London is really my place of rest.”