The Life of Florence Nightingale, vol. 1 of 2

by Sir Edward Tyas Cook

The companionship which Florence had at home was sometimes wearisome to her. The sisters, as we have already seen, were not in full sympathy. The parents were not unintellectual persons, but, again, much the reverse. Mrs. Nightingale was a woman of bright intelligence, and of much social charm. Mr. Nightingale was a highly intellectual man, sensitive, too, and refined. He shot and hunted, but he was not ardently devoted to either sport, and was interested in many things. Perhaps in too many, and yet not enough in any. Florence Nightingale in her later years used sometimes to describe with a twinkle of affectionate humour the routine of a morning in her home life as a girl. Mama, we may suppose, was busy with housekeeping cares. Papa was very fond of reading aloud, and in order to interest his daughters, would take them through the whole of The Times, with many a comment, no doubt, by the way. “Now, for Parthe,” Miss Nightingale used to say, “the morning's reading did not matter; she went on with her drawing; but for me, who had no such cover, the thing was boring to desperation.” “To be read aloud to,” she wrote, “is the most miserable exercise of the human intellect. Or rather, is it any exercise at all? It is like lying on one's back, with one's hands tied, and having liquid poured down one's throat. Worse than that, because suffocation would immediately ensue, and put a stop to this operation. But no suffocation would stop the other.”[28] As the younger daughter of a busily efficient mother, Florence was not often entrusted with household duties; but on one occasion at any rate, she was left in command, and that, during the important season of jam-making. “My reign is now over,” she wrote to her cousin Hilary, who was an art-student (Dec. 1845); “angels and ministers of grace defend me from another! though I cannot but view my fifty-six pots with the proud satisfaction of an Artist, my head a little on one side, inspecting the happy effect of my works with more feeling of the Beautiful than Parthe ever had in hers.” And even housekeeping brought obstinate questionings with it to Florence. She describes a bout of it on another occasion in a letter to Madame Mohl (July 1847):—

I am up to my chin in linen and glass, and I am very fond of housekeeping. In this too-highly-educated, too-little-active age it, at least, is a practical application of our theories to something—and yet, in the middle of my lists, my green lists, brown lists, red lists, of all my instruments of the ornamental in culinary accomplishments which I cannot even divine the use of, I cannot help asking in my head, Can reasonable people want all this? Is all that china, linen, glass necessary to make man a Progressive animal? Is it even good Political Economy (query, for “good,” read “atheistical” Pol. Econ.?) to invent wants in order to supply employment? Or ought not, in these times, all expenditure to be reproductive? “And a proper stupid answer you'll get,” says the best Versailles service; “so go and do your accounts; there is one of us cracked.”

VII

Florence was an affectionate and dutiful daughter. She obeyed and yielded for many years. She strove hard to think that her duty lay at home, and that the trivial round and common task would furnish all that she had any right, before God or man, to ask. But as the sense of a vocation elsewhere strengthened and deepened in her mind, she may well have thought that, as her elder sister was contented to stay at home, a life of activity outside might for the other daughter not be inconsistent with affection for her parents.

She had, indeed, intellectual interests of her own. She read a great deal in English, French, German; in devotional works, in poetry, history, philosophy. And what she read she marked, and inwardly digested. A copy (unfortunately not complete) is preserved of the first edition of Browning's Paracelsus, which she annotated with remarks, paraphrases, and illustrative cases as she read. The first scene of the poem—“Paracelsus Aspires”—contains many a passage which aroused a sympathetic echo in her heart. The key-note is struck early. “Pursuing an aim not to be found in life,” is her comment, “is its true misery.” Then she kept commonplace-books, in which, under heads alphabetically arranged—such as Age of Reason, Bigotry, Creeds, Death, Education, and so forth—she copied out passages which struck her. She was accumulating stores of information and reflection. In some remarks upon Lacordaire in one of her note-books I find this passage copied out:—

I desire for a considerable time only to lead a life of obscurity and toil, for the purpose of allowing whatever I may have received of God to ripen, and turning it some day to the glory of His Name. Nowadays people are too much in a hurry both to produce and consume themselves. It is only in retirement, in silence, in meditation, that are formed the men who are called to exercise an influence on society.

For her own part, as her powers of reflection were strengthened, so did her sense of a vocation become more insistent with every year. In some autobiographical notes, Miss Nightingale records May 7, 1852, as the date at which she was conscious of “a call from God to be a saviour”; but the thought of devoting herself to be a nurse came much earlier. Mrs. Julia Ward Howe, in the reminiscences quoted above, describes how during the visit of herself and her husband to Embley in 1844, Florence had taken Dr. Howe aside and asked him this question: “If I should determine to study nursing, and to devote my life to that profession, do you think it would be a dreadful thing?” Dr. Howe, it will be remembered, was of wide repute as a philanthropist, and Miss Nightingale thought much of his opinion. It was favourable to her wish. “Not a dreadful thing at all,” he replied; “I think it would be a very good thing.” “My idea of heaven,” she wrote a little time afterwards, “is when my dear Aunt Hannah and I and my boy Shore and all of us shall be together, nursing the sick people who are left behind, and giving each other sympathies beside, and our Saviour in the midst of us, giving us strength.” But, meanwhile, she hoped to realize some little piece of the heaven on earth. She pursued other inquiries, laid her plans, kept her own counsel, and then made a first bid for freedom. The nature of her plans, the nipping of them in the bud by maternal frost, and her following dejection are told in a letter to her cousin Hilary (Dec. 11, 1845):—

Well, my dearest, I am not yet come to the great thing I wanted to say. I have always found that there was so much truth in the suggestion that you must dig for hidden treasures in silence or you will not find it; and so I dug after my poor little plan in silence, even from you. It was to go to be a nurse at Salisbury Hospital for these few months to learn the “prax.”; and then to come home and make such wondrous intimacies at West Wellow, under the shelter of a rhubarb powder and a dressed leg; let alone that no one could ever say to me again, your health will not stand this or that. I saw a poor woman die before my eyes this summer because there was no one but fools to sit up with her, who poisoned her as much as if they had given her arsenic. And then I had such a fine plan for those dreaded latter days (which I have never dreaded), if I should outlive my immediate ties, of taking a small house in West Wellow.—Well, I do not like much talking about it, but I thought something like a Protestant Sisterhood, without vows, for women of educated feelings, might be established. But there have been difficulties about my very first step, which terrified Mama. I do not mean the physically revolting parts of a hospital, but things about the surgeons and nurses which you may guess. Even Mrs. Fowler[29] threw cold water upon it; and nothing will be done this year at all events, and I do not believe—ever; and no advantage that I see comes of my living on, excepting that one becomes less and less of a young lady every year, which is only a negative one. You will laugh, dear, at the whole plan, I daresay; but no one but the mother of it knows how precious[45] an infant idea becomes; nor how the soul dies between the destruction of one and the taking up of another. I shall never do anything, and am worse than dust and nothing. I wonder if our Saviour were to walk the earth again, and I were to go to Him and ask, whether He would send me back to live this life again, which crushes me into vanity and deceit. Oh for some strong thing to sweep this loathsome life into the past.

And so ended for the time the dash of the caged bird for liberty.