[250] In later years Miss Nightingale was not quite so strict as formerly (see above, p. [73]) in abstaining from asking such favours.
[252] Miss Nightingale's signature was “subject to the addition of a request that an independent inquiry be at the same time set on foot at the several stations in India as recommended by the Governor-General in Council on Nov. 4, 1896.”
[253] For Miss Nightingale's tribute to his memory, see above, p. [124].
CONCLUSION
The character and the life described in this book had many sides; and though the essential truth consists in the blending of them all, it is necessary in the medium of recital in prose to depict first one side and then another. The artist on canvas exhibits the blended tints at one time. That is why the portrait by a great painter sometimes tells us more of a character at a glance than is gathered from volumes of written biography. But no artist painted a portrait of Miss Nightingale in her prime, and I must do as best I may with my blotching prose in an endeavour to collect into some general impression what has been told in these volumes. I begin with recalling some of the stronger traits; they will presently be softened when I turn to other sides of the character which has been illustrated in this Memoir.
Florence Nightingale was by no means a Plaster Saint. She was a woman of strong passions—not over-given to praise, not quick to forgive; somewhat prone to be censorious, not apt to forget. She was not only a gentle angel of compassion; she was more of a logician than a sentimentalist; she knew that to do good work requires a hard head as well as a soft heart. It was said by Miss Nightingale of a certain great lady that “with the utmost kindness and benevolent intentions she is in consequence of want of practical habits of business nothing but good and bustling, a time-waster and an impediment.” Miss Nightingale knew hardly any fault which seemed worse to her in a man than to be unbusiness-like; in a woman, than to be “only enthusiastic.” She found no use for “angels without hands.” She was essentially a “man of facts” and a “man of action.” She had an equal contempt for those who act without knowledge, and for those whose knowledge leads to no useful action. She was herself laborious of detail and scrupulously careful of her premises. “Though I write positively,” she once said, “I do not think positively.” She weighed every consideration; she sought much competent advice; but when once her decision was taken, she was resolute and masterful—not lightly turned from her course, impatient of delay, not very tolerant of opposition.
Something of this spirit appears in her view of friendship and in the conduct of her affections. Men and women are placed in the world in order, she thought, to work for the betterment of the human race, and their work should be the supreme consideration. Mr. Jowett said of Miss Nightingale that she was the only woman he had ever known who put public duty before private. Whosoever did the will of the Father, the same was her brother, and sister, and mother. “The thing wanted in England,” she wrote to Madame Mohl (April 30, 1868), “to raise women (and to raise men too) is: these friendships without love between men and women. And if between married men and married women all the better.… I think a woman who cares for a man because of his convictions, and who ceases to care for him if he alters those convictions, is worthy of the highest reverence. The novels—all novels, the best—which represent women as in love with men without any reason at all, and ready to leave their highest occupations for love—are to me utterly wearisome—as wearisome as a juggler's trick—or Table-turning—or Spiritual rapping, when the spirit says Aw! and that is so sublime that all the women are subjugated. Madame Récamier's going to Rome when M. de Chateaubriand was made Minister is exactly to me as a soldier deserting on the eve of a battle.” The occasion of this letter was some gossip of the day about a great lady whose friendship with a politician was supposed to have cooled owing to some intellectual or political disagreement. “I have the greatest reverence for——; and I think hers was one of the best friendships that ever was—and for the oddest reason—what do you think?—Because she has broken it.” What she said about Chateaubriand reflected, from a different point of view, something that Mr. Jowett had written to her in the previous year. “I am not at all tired,” he had said (Sept. 1867), “of hearing about Lord Herbert. That was one of the best friendships which there ever was upon earth. Shall I tell you why I say this? Because you were willing to have gone to India in 1857.” Devotion to a common purpose in active life and equal zeal in the co-operative prosecution of it: these were the conditions which Miss Nightingale required in friendship. They were realized the most fully in the case of five years of her friendship with Sidney Herbert—a period of which she used to speak, accordingly, as her “heaven upon earth.” It was the work with him, more than the charm of his conversation and manner (though he had both and though she was susceptible to both), that was the essence of her pleasure. She had as little taste for conversation as for knowledge that led nowhither. “There is nothing so fatiguing,” she said, “as a companion who is always effleurant the deepest subjects—never going below the surface; as a person who is always inquiring and never coming to any solution or decision. I don't know whether Hamlet was mad. But certainly he would have driven me mad.”