Her mind was interested in all these things, but her heart was elsewhere. “Wherever thou art,” said a famous statesman, “it is with the poor that thou should'st live.” It was so with Florence Nightingale's inmost thoughts. Her greatest pleasure in Athens was found in the society of the American missionaries, Mr. and Mrs. Hill, who conducted a school and orphanage. Of Mrs. Hill she wrote, “From heaven she comes, in heaven she lives.” In charge of the mission school was a Greek refugee from Crete, Elizabeth Kontaxaki, and with her too Florence Nightingale formed a warm friendship. Elizabeth had lived an adventurous life before she found security at Athens. Her father had fallen by a Turkish bullet. Her mother had made an heroic escape from a Turkish captor, and the first years of the child's life were spent in the fastnesses of Mount Ida. “Alas,” wrote Miss Nightingale, “how worthless my life seems to me by the side of these women.” A mood of great dejection appears in her diary of this time, to which an attack of low-fever no doubt contributed. She could not find satisfaction in the interests of foreign travel. She was tortured by unsatisfied longings which could find outlet only in a world of dreams. An entry in her diary for June 7 is in these words: “Grotto of the Eumenides. Will this Fury go on increasing till by degrees my mind is more and more taken off the outer world with all its claims, and I am no longer able to command my attention at all?”

Miss Nightingale and her friends landed at Trieste at the end of June, and thence made their way to Dresden and Berlin. The pictures which most impressed her were Raphael's “Sistine Madonna” and the “Reading Magdalen,” then attributed to Correggio. A year later her mother and sister were at Dresden, and she enjoined them, above all things, to see “the Magdalen, the queen of pictures.” “How I feel that picture now,” she wrote to them (August 26, 1851), “dark wood behind, sharp stones in front, nothing to look back upon, nothing to look forward to, clinging to the present as she does to the book, which beams bright light upon me. Oh what a history that picture contains in its little canvass; and how well it hangs near that glorious Sistine Virgin. All that woman might be, all that she will be, near what she is; for it is not a Magdalen, in the common sense of the word, or rather it is in the common sense of what woman commonly is—not what we mean by a Magdalen.” At Dresden Miss Nightingale was still in much dejection. “I have never felt so bad,” she wrote (July 7); “the habit of living not in the present but in a future of dreams is gradually spreading over my whole existence. It is rapidly approaching the state of madness when dreams become realities.” And now when the goal of Kaiserswerth was near, she felt almost unmanned; almost inclined to turn back and follow another path. “It seemed to me now (July 10) as if quiet, with somebody to look for my coming back, was all I wanted.” But this was only a moment of passing weakness. At Berlin her spirits revived; for her vital interests were satisfied, and she spent some days in inspecting the hospitals and other benevolent institutions. On July 31 she reached Kaiserswerth. “I could hardly believe I was there,” she wrote in her diary. “With the feeling with which a pilgrim first looks on the Kedron, I saw the Rhine, dearer to me than the Nile.” She stayed a fortnight with the Pastor and his wife and the Deaconesses, studying their institutions. “Left Kaiserswerth,” says the diary (August 13), “feeling so brave as if nothing could ever vex me again.”[46] She rejoined her friends at Düsseldorf. “They stayed at Ghent actually for me to finish my MS.” (August 17). “Finished my MS. They read it. Mr. Bracebridge corrected it and sent it off” (August 19). Next day they returned to England. The manuscript was of the pamphlet describing “The Institution of Kaiserswerth on the Rhine,” which was issued anonymously soon after Miss Nightingale's return.[47] Some notice of the pamphlet will be found in a later chapter in connection with her longer sojourn at Kaiserswerth in 1851. It was printed by the inmates of the Ragged School at Westminster in which she was interested. She described in it the work of the Deaconesses, and ended with an appeal to Englishwomen to go and do likewise. The fire burnt within her, and she returned home more than ever resolved to consecrate her life to the service of the sick and sorrowful.

V

Foreign travel, it will thus be seen, had worked no such cure, had created no such diversion, as her family desired. Their hope, even their expectation, was not unreasonable. Florence Nightingale was a woman of learning, and her foreign travels had stimulated her alike to research and to imaginative thought. At home, too, during all the years of restless and unsatisfied yearning for some other life, she had been a diligent reader and student. She had a real gift for literary expression, as her letters may already have indicated, and as her later writings were to prove more decisively. She had, moreover, the instinct for self-expression. She was a constant letter-writer and note-taker. She communed with herself not only in speechless thought, but in written memoranda. Had another impulse not been stronger within her, she might easily have become a literary woman of some distinction. But though she was fond of writing for her own satisfaction, she had a profound distrust of it as a substitute for action. Like one of George Eliot's heroines, “she did not want to deck herself with knowledge—to wear it loose from the nerves and blood that fed her action.” “You ask me,” she had written to Miss Clarke in 1844, “why I do not write something. I think what is not of the first class had better not exist at all; and besides I had so much rather live than write; writing is only a supplement for living. Would you have one go away and ‘give utterance to one's feelings’ in a poem to appear (price 2 guineas) in the Belle Assemblée? I think one's feelings waste themselves in words; they ought all to be distilled into actions, and into actions which bring results. Do you think a babe would ever learn to walk if it were to talk about its living in such ‘strange times,’ ‘I must learn to use my legs,’ and so on? Or do you think anybody ever did anything, who did not go to it with a directness of purpose, which prevented him from frittering away his impressions in words?” She was of Ibsen's persuasion:—

What is Life? a fighting
In heart and in brain with trolls.
Poetry? that means writing
Doomsday-accounts of our souls.[48]

She held in great suspicion and dislike what she called the “artist-like way of looking upon life.” It reduces all religions, she said, and most inward and spiritual feelings “into a sort of magic-lantern, with which to make play for the amusement of the company.” Her mother used to praise her “beautiful letters,” was proud of the “European reputation” she had won among learned men, and wanted to know why she could not be happy in cultivating at home the gifts which God had given her. To Florence Nightingale these things were not gifts to be cultivated, but rather temptations to be subdued. She read with some attention in 1846 a book called Passages from the Life of a Daughter at Home, a religious work containing counsels of submission for women dissatisfied with their home life. “Piling up miscellaneous instruction for oneself,” she wrote in one place in the margin; “the most unsatisfactory of all pursuits!” She strove to say to God, as she wrote in another place, “Behold the handmaid of the Lord! not Behold the handmaid of correspondence, or of music, or of metaphysics!” “That power of always writing a good letter whenever one likes,” she said in one of her pages of self-examination, “is a great temptation”—a temptation, if such it be, to which, it must be confessed, she continually succumbed. But she wished to win no repute from her fall. In 1854 her sister printed the “beautiful letters” from Egypt,[49] and issued a few copies for private circulation. Florence was not pleased, but acquiesced, and corrected the proofs.

Any dreams, then, which she may have harboured of literary distinction, she had put resolutely away from her. “Oh God,” she had written in her diary at Cairo, “thou puttest into my heart this great desire to devote myself to the sick and sorrowful. I offer it to thee. Do with it what is for thy service.” But there was still one other temptation to be subdued.

CHAPTER VII
THE SINGLE LIFE

The craving for sympathy, which exists between two who are to form one indivisible and perfect whole, is in most cases between man and woman, in some between man and God. This the Roman Catholics have understood and expressed under the simile, Christ the bridegroom, the Nun married to Him, the Monk married to the Church; or as St. Francis to poverty, or as St. Ignatius Loyola to the divine mistress of his thoughts, the Virgin. This sort of tie between man and God seems alone able to fill the want of the other, the permanent exclusive tie between the one man and the one woman.—Florence Nightingale: Suggestions for Thought.