Thirty years after the date at which we have now arrived (1866), Miss Nightingale read through the hundreds of letters she had received and kept from Mr. Jowett. She made copious extracts from them in pencil, and sent several to his biographers. Many of his letters to her were included in his Life, though the name of the recipient was not disclosed. She was jealous in her life-time of the privacy of her life. She rebuked Mr. Jowett once for accepting a copy of her cousin's statuette of her. He explained that he had placed it where it would not be observed. “I consider you,” he had already written, “a sort of Royal personage, not to be gossiped about with any one.” The letters to her, hitherto published, were selected to throw light upon his views. In this Memoir, in which it has been decided to give (if it may be) a truthful picture of her life and character, I select rather those letters which show the influence of his character upon hers. The following was noted by Miss Nightingale as “one of the most beautiful, if not the most beautiful, of the whole collection”:—
Askrigg, July [1864]. I am afraid that hard-working persons are very bad correspondents, at least I know that I am, or I should have written to you long ago, which I have always a pleasure in doing. But Plato, who is either my greatest friend or my greatest enemy, and has finally swelled into three large volumes (you will observe that I am proud of the size of my baby), is to blame for preventing me. This place, at which I shall be staying for about five weeks longer, is at the head of Wensleydale, high among mountains in a most beautiful country,[102] and what, I think, adds greatly to the charm of the country, very pleasing for the simplicity and intelligence of the people. Among the enjoyments which I have here, which notwithstanding Plato are really very great, I cannot help remembering you at 115 Park Street. I wish you would venture to see something more of the sights and sounds of nature. You will never persuade me that your way of life is altogether the best for health any more than I could persuade you into Mr. Gladstone's doctrine of the salubrity of living over a churchyard.
As to the rest, I have no doubt that you could not be better than you are. I don't wish to exaggerate (for you are the last person to whom I should think of offering compliments), but I certainly believe that it has been a great national good that you have taken up the whole question of the sanitary condition of the soldier and not confined yourself to hospitals. The difficulties and stupidities would have been as great in the case of the hospitals, and the object really far inferior in importance. Besides you could never have gained the influence over medical men with their professional jealousies that you have had over the War Office and the Indian Government. Also, if your life is spared a few years longer, a great deal more may be done. There are many resources that are not yet exhausted. Therefore never listen to the voice that tells you in a moment of weariness or pain that you ought to have adhered to your old vocation.
I suppose there have been persons who have had so strong a sense of the identity of their own action with the will of God as to exclude every other feeling, who have never wished to live nor wished to die except as they fulfil his will? Can we acquire this? I don't know. But such a sense of things would no doubt give infinite rest and almost infinite power. Perhaps quietists have been most successful in gaining this sort of feeling, but the quietists are not the people who have passed all their lives rubbing and fighting against the world. But I don't see why active life might not become a sort of passive life too, passive in the hands of God and in the fulfilment of the laws of nature. I sometimes fancy that there are possibilities of human character much greater than have been realized, mysteries, as they may be called, of character and manner and style which remain to be called forth and explained. One great field for thought on this subject is the manner in which character may grow and change quite late in life.… [The rest of the letter is about the politics of the day.]
The passages which I have printed in italics are those which Miss Nightingale had specially marked. “Can we help one another,” he wrote in the following year (March 5, 1865), “to make life a higher and nobler sort of thing—more of a calm and peaceful and never-ending service of God? Perhaps—a little.” The marked passages show in what way Miss Nightingale found in Mr. Jowett's friendship a source of comfort, and a fresh inspiration towards her own spiritual ideals. In her meditations of later years, a greater “passivity in action” was the state of perfection which she constantly sought to attain.
Mr. Jowett, as will have been noted, sought to reassure her about her concentration for the most part upon work for the Army and for India. And indeed she was herself intensely devoted to it, nor was it ever deposed from a principal place in her thoughts and interests. Yet there were times, as shown in a letter already quoted (p. [82]), when she felt that this work, insistently though it appealed to her, though it was bound up with some of her fondest memories, was all the while, if not a kind of desertion, yet at best only a temporary call. Her first “call from God” had been to service in another sort, and she was anxious to make peace with “those first affections.” In January 1864 she sent these instructions to Mrs. Bracebridge, who directed that if Miss Nightingale should survive her they were to be handed on to Mrs. Sutherland:—
You know that I always believed it to be God's will for me that I should live and die in Hospitals. When this call He has made upon me for other work stops, and I am no longer able to work, I should wish to be taken to St. Thomas's Hospital and to be placed in a general ward (which is what I should have desired had I come to my end as a Hospital matron). And I beg you to be so very good as to see that this my wish is accomplished, whenever the time comes, if you will take the trouble as a true friend, which you always have been, are, and will be. And this will make me die in peace because I believe it to be God's will.
It was not so to be. But we shall find, on opening the next Part in the story of Miss Nightingale's long life, that she was presently to have time for helping forward the movement, which she had promoted as a Reformer of Hospitals and as the Founder of Modern Nursing, into a new and a wider field.