“I had three paths among which to choose,” wrote Miss Nightingale in a diary of 1850: “I might have been a literary woman, or a married woman, or a Hospital Sister.” We have seen how she turned away from the first path. Why did she reject the second?
“Our dear Flo,” wrote Mrs. Bracebridge to Miss Clarke in 1844, “has just recovered from a severe cold, but I hear nothing of what I long for, i.e. some noble-hearted, true man, one who can love her as she deserves to be loved, prepared to take her to a house of her own.” And three years later another friend, Fanny Allen, in describing a visit to Embley, said of Florence: “What a wife she would make for a man worthy of her! but I am not sure I yet know the mate fit for her.” The two Nightingale girls, she surmised, would experience a “difficulty in finding any one they would like well enough to forsake such a home.”[50] In the case of Florence, the position was ill understood by outsiders. To her the home was not a happy garden which she would be very reluctant to forsake, but rather a gilded cage from which she eagerly sought a way of escape. To us who have the means of knowing her inmost thoughts and feelings, the question thus presents itself in another light than that in which it appeared to her friends at the time. She craved for a larger, fuller life than she could find at home. Why could she not, or why did she not, seek it in marriage? It is love that sometimes “frees the imprisoned spirit,” that enables it to find and to express itself. That Miss Nightingale remained single was not the result of lack of opportunity to marry. The reason is to be found elsewhere—in feelings, thoughts, and ideals, in reasoned convictions and aspirations, which, if I can present them aright, will illuminate her character and her career.
In 1873 Miss Nightingale, like the rest of the world, was reading Middlemarch, and a paper which she wrote in that year contained some notice of George Eliot's heroine.[51] “A novel of genius has appeared. Its writer once put before the world (in a work of fiction too), certainly the most living, probably the most historically truthful, presentment of the great Idealist, Savonarola of Florence. This author now can find no better outlet for the heroine—also an Idealist—because she cannot be a ‘St. Teresa’ or an ‘Antigone,’ than to marry an elderly sort of literary impostor, and, quick after him, his relation, a baby sort of itinerant Cluricaune (see Irish Fairies) or inferior Faun (see Hawthorne's matchless Transformation). Yet close at hand, in actual life, was a woman—an Idealist too—and if we mistake not, a connection of the author's, who has managed to make her ideal very real indeed. By taking charge of blocks of buildings in poorest London, while making herself the rent-collector, she found work for those who could not find work for themselves; she organized a system of visitors; … she brought sympathy and education to bear from individual to individual, … so that one might be tempted to say, ‘Were there one such woman with power to direct the flow of volunteer help, nearly everywhere running to waste, in every street of London's East End, almost might the East End be persuaded to become Christian.’ Could not the heroine, the ‘sweet sad enthusiast,’ have been set to some such work as this? Indeed it is past telling the mischief that is done in thus putting down youthful ideals. There are not too many to begin with. There are few indeed to end with—even without such a gratuitous impulse as this to end them.” In this passage, as in much that Florence Nightingale wrote, there is an autobiographical note. She did not marry because she held fast to an ideal—an ideal nearer to that of Octavia Hill than to that of Dorothea Brooke.
II
For two or three years Florence Nightingale was in much trouble of mind from an attachment which one of her cousins had formed for her. In no case would she have thought it right to marry him. “Accident or relationship,” she wrote some years later,[52] “throw people together in their childhood, and acquaintance has grown up naturally and unconsciously. Accordingly in novels it is generally cousins who marry; and now it seems the only natural thing, the only possible way of making an intimacy. And yet we know that intermarriage between relations is in direct contravention of the laws of nature for the well-being of the race.” It was supposed by some of the family circle at the time that this was the only objection to an engagement; but there were others. Florence was in no mood, then or afterwards, to marry for the sake of marrying. Marriage, she had written to Miss Clarke (p. [66]), was not an absolute blessing; and though she liked her cousin, she was in no sense in love with him. She felt relief, intense and unmixed, as she recorded in her private meditations, when she learnt that the young man had at last forgotten her. But though this episode left her heart-whole, it had a great and painful influence upon her mind. “Cleanse all my love from the desire of creating an interest in another's heart” is the burden of many of her meditations.
Among other attachments of which Florence Nightingale was the object, there was one which had a deeper effect and called for a more difficult and searching choice in life. She was asked in marriage by one who continued for some years to press his suit. It was a proposal which seemed to those about her to promise every happiness. The match would by all have been deemed suitable, and by many might have been called brilliant. And Florence herself was strongly drawn to her admirer. She had not come to this state of mind in hasty inclination. She was on her guard against any such temptation. Many years before, in a letter to her “brother Jonathan,” as she called Miss Hilary Bonham Carter, she had written:—
It strikes me that in all the most unworldly poetry (both prose and verse) la passion qu'on appelle inclination is treated in a very extraordinary way. When one finds a comparative stranger becoming all of a sudden more essential to one than one's family (via flattery, in general, of one sort or another), one is content with saying to oneself, “Oh! that's love,” instead of saying, “How unjust and how blind this feeling is.” I wonder whether if people were to examine—for, as Socrates says, the life unexamined is not a living life—they would not find that (whatever it may ripen to afterwards) this feeling at first is generally begun by vanity or jealousy or self-love; and that what is very much to be guarded against, instead of submitted to, is the stranger's admiration (and I suppose everybody has been susceptible at one time of their lives) having more effect upon one than one's own family's.
In this case, however, the stranger's admiration had stood the test. She felt drawn to him, not by vanity or self-love; but because she admired his talents, and because the more she saw of him the greater pleasure did she find in his society. She leaned more and more upon his sympathy. Yet when the proposal first came, she refused it; and when it was renewed, she persisted. Then, it may be said, she cannot have been “in love” with him. And in one sense that is, I suppose, quite true; for love, as the poets tell us, does not reason, and Florence Nightingale reasoned deeply over her case. But it is certain that she felt at least as much affection as suffices to make half the marriages in the world. She turned away from a path to which she was strongly drawn in order to pursue her Ideal.
In one of the many pages of autobiographical notes which she preserved in relation to this episode in her life, Miss Nightingale thus explained her refusal to marry. “I have an intellectual nature which requires satisfaction, and that would find it in him. I have a passional nature which requires satisfaction, and that would find it in him. I have a moral, an active nature which requires satisfaction, and that would not find it in his life. I can hardly find satisfaction for any of my natures. Sometimes I think that I will satisfy my passional nature at all events, because that will at least secure me from the evil of dreaming. But would it? I could be satisfied to spend a life with him combining our different powers in some great object. I could not satisfy this nature by spending a life with him in making society and arranging domestic things.… To be nailed to a continuation and exaggeration of my present life, without hope of another, would be intolerable to me. Voluntarily to put it out of my power ever to be able to seize the chance of forming for myself a true and rich life would seem to me like suicide.”