But she could not please them, because she herself could find no pleasure in their life. She did not say to herself that she was better than they. Still less did she thank God that she was not as they were. But she felt with piteous keenness the gulf that separated her alike from her parents and from her sister. She loved her father, and admired his good impulses and amiable character. But she perceived that his contentment in a life of busy idleness made him constitutionally unable to enter fully into her state of mind. She loved her mother, and considered that she was, within her range, a woman of genius. “She has the genius of order,” she wrote in a character-sketch of her mother, “the genius to organize a parish, to form society. She has obtained by her own exertions the best society in England.” What pained the daughter was the inability to please the mother. “When I feel her disappointment in me, it is as if I was becoming insane.” She loved her sister also, and, I think, yet more tenderly. But as the sister once wrote: “The natures God has given us differ as widely as different races.” Florence was deeply sensible of the attractive side of her sister's character. Lady Verney had indeed a most attractive mind; she was very vivacious, inquiring, and highly gifted, both as an artist and as a writer. She was a perfect hostess, and her memory is pleasant to all who knew her. If she lacked some of her sister's stronger English characteristics, she had a light touch which Florence did not possess. And Florence felt the charm of all this. “No one less than I,” she wrote, “wants her to do one single thing different from what she does. She wants no other religion, no other occupation, no other training than what she has. She has never had a difficulty except with me; she knows nothing of struggle in her own unselfish nature.” But for that very reason she could not sympathize with, because she could not understand, her sister's difficulties. In a passage which is doubtless autobiographical, Florence wrote: “Very few people can sympathise with each other in any pursuit or thought of any importance. If people do not give you thought for thought, receive yours, digest it, and give it back with the impression of their own character upon it, then give you one for you to do likewise, it is best to know what one is about, and not to attempt more than kindly, cheerful outward intercourse. Some find amusement in the outward, do not suffer inwardly, because the attention is turned elsewhere.”[54] Meanwhile Florence felt that everything she said or did was a subject of vexation to her sister, a disappointment to her mother, a worry to her father. “I have never known a happy time,” she exclaimed to herself, “except at Rome and that fortnight at Kaiserswerth. It is not the unhappiness I mind, it is not indeed; but people can't be unhappy without making those about them so.”
She strove to attain happiness. She tried to submit her will to what her spiritual confidantes told her must be taken to be the will of God; to trust that in His own good time He would make her vocation sure; in such confidence to find relief, and to throw herself meanwhile into the round of immediate duties. But the more she struggled, the more she failed. She could not subdue the imperious longing to be up and doing which surged within her. “The thoughts and feelings that I have now,” she wrote, “I can remember since I was six years old. It was not that I made them. A profession, a trade, a necessary occupation, something to fill and employ all my faculties, I have always felt essential to me, I have always longed for, consciously or not. During a middle part of my life, college education, acquirement, I longed for, but that was temporary. The first thought I can remember, and the last, was nursing work; and in the absence of this, education work, but more the education of the bad than of the young. But for this I had had no education myself.” Finding no outlet in active reality, she lived more than ever in a land of dreams. “Everything has been tried,” she exclaimed to herself; “foreign travel, kind friends, everything.” And again, “My God! what is to become of me?” Eighteen months before she had resolved on a great effort to crucify her old self, “to break through the habits, entailed upon me by an idle life, of living, not in the present world of action, but in a future one of dreams. Since then nations have passed before me, but have brought no new life to me. In my 31st year I see nothing desirable but death.” She was perishing, as she put it, for want of food; and she could find no impulse to activity. Her habit of late rising grew upon her; for what had she to wake for? “Starvation does not lead a man to exertion, it only weakens him. O weary days, O evenings that seem never to end! For how many long years, I have watched that drawing-room clock and thought it would never reach the ten! And for 20 or 30 more years to do this!” And again, “Oh, how I am to get through this day, to talk through all this day, is the thought of every morning.… This is the sting of death. Why do I wish to leave this world? God knows I do not expect a heaven beyond, but that He would set me down in St. Giles's, at a Kaiserswerth, there to find my work and my salvation in my work.”
II
Such cries from the heart, cries for the food for which she was hungering and which her parents could or would not let her take, filled many a sheet of Florence Nightingale's diaries, letters, and memoranda. “Mountains of difficulties,” as she says in one place, were “piled up” around her. Looking forward to a New Year (1851) she could see nothing in front of her but the same unsatisfying routine. “The next three weeks,” she said, in one of her written colloquies with herself, “you will have company; then a fortnight alone; then a few weeks of London, then Embley; then perhaps go abroad; then three months of company at Lea Hurst; next the same round of Embley company.” And then, with a humorous transition not infrequent in her musings, she asks, “But why can't you get up in the morning? I have nothing I like so much as unconsciousness, but I will try.” As the year advanced a more decided spirit of revolt begins to appear in her diaries. One of her perplexities hitherto had been a doubt whether the “mountains of difficulties” were to be taken as occasions for submission to God's will, or whether they were piled up in order to try her patience and her resolve, and were to be surmounted by some initiative of her own. She now began to interpret God's will in the latter sense. “I must take some things,” she wrote on Whitsunday (June 8, 1851), “as few as I can, to enable me to live. I must take them, they will not be given me; take them in a true spirit of doing Thy will, not of snatching them for my own will. I must do without some things, as many as I can, which I could not have without causing more suffering than I am obliged to cause any way.” She would cease looking for the sympathy and understanding of her mother and sister. “I have been so long treated as a child and have so long allowed myself to be treated as a child.” She would submit to such tutelage no longer.
Various plans had at different times found place in her dreams. She would collect funds for founding a sisterhood, an institution, a hospital; but one thing she saw clearly and consistently. If she were ever to have an opportunity of doing good work in nursing or otherwise in service to the poor, she must first learn her business. There is a long letter of 1850 from her to her father in which she argues the point, not specifically with reference to herself, but as a general proposition. Something more than good intention is necessary in order to do good. Philanthropy is a matter of skill, and an apprenticeship in it is necessary. An opportunity occurred sooner than she had dared to hope which enabled her to serve such an apprenticeship. Her sister was still in bad health, and a visit to Carlsbad was again proposed. She insisted on being allowed to start with her mother and her sister, and to spend at Kaiserswerth the time that they would spend upon the cure and subsequent travels.
She reached Kaiserswerth early in July and stayed there as an inmate of the Institution until October 8.
III
Kaiserswerth is an ancient town on the Rhine, on the right bank, six miles below Düsseldorf. In its Church of the twelfth century a reliquary is shown, in which are preserved the bones of St. Suitbertus, who came there from Ireland to preach the Gospel in 710. Eleven centuries later, a Protestant pastor of Kaiserswerth repaid the debt to the British Isles by founding the famous Institution for Deaconesses which was now to give Florence Nightingale an important part of her training. The order of deaconesses, as she was careful to point out in her account of Kaiserswerth, was known in the Primitive Church; and long before St. Vincent de Paul established the Sisters of Mercy in 1633, Protestant communities had in 1457 organized “Presbyterae,” since “many women chose a single state, not because they expected thereby to reach a super-eminent degree of holiness, but that they might be better able to care for the sick and young.” It was in 1823–24 that the young pastor of Kaiserswerth, Theodor Fliedner, set out on a journey to Holland and England to beg for funds to relieve his parish, which had been ruined by the failure of a silk-mill. In England, the little Princess Victoria headed his list of subscribers. In London he met Mrs. Elizabeth Fry and was greatly impressed with her work in Newgate. Shortly after his return he founded (1826) the Rhenish-Westphalian Prison Association. Presently he met a kindred spirit in Friederike Münster, a woman in comparatively easy circumstances who was devoting herself to reformatory work. They married, and in 1833—in a tiny summer-house in the pastor's garden—a refuge was opened for the reception of a single discharged prisoner. Three years later, they added, on an equally modest scale at first, an Infant School, and a Hospital in which to train volunteer-nurses as deaconesses. From these humble beginnings has grown a great congeries of institutions, the fame of which has spread throughout the philanthropic world. There are thirty branch or daughter houses in various parts of Germany. They are to be found also at Jerusalem, Alexandria, Cairo, Beirut, Smyrna, and Bucharest. “Not only its own daughter houses, but all independent institutions for deaconesses, owe their existence to Kaiserswerth, for all subsequent work wrought by deaconesses whether in France, Switzerland, or America, whether Lutheran, Methodist, or Episcopalian, has been the fruit of the Kaiserswerth tree.”[55]
But the forest began as a tiny acorn. Pastor Fliedner started his work not with grandiose schemes or full-fledged programmes, but with individual cases and personal devotion. This was a point to which Miss Nightingale called particular attention in her account of the place. “It is impossible not to observe,” she said, “how different was the beginning from the way in which institutions are generally founded—a list of subscribers with some royal and noble names at the head—a double column of rules and regulations—a collection of great names begin (and end) most new enterprises. The regulations are made without experience. Honorary members abound, but where are the working ones? The scheme is excellent, but what are the results?” Miss Nightingale's intensely practical genius had ever a holy horror of prospectuses. In some notes written on June 15, 1848, I find this passage:—