The first literary task which Miss Nightingale set herself under this impulse took the form of a series of magazine articles, in which she hoped to embody the leading ideas contained in the voluminous Suggestions for Thought already described (Vol. I. p. [470]). “During the ten years and more that I have known you,” wrote Mr. Jowett (Oct. 31, 1872), “you have repeated to me the expression ‘Character of God’ about 1000 times, but I can't say that I have any clear idea of what you mean.” Why did she not try and explain? In an earlier letter (Feb. 28, 1871) Mr. Jowett had suggested “the form of short papers or essays.” She now wrote three of them (of which the first two were published)—entitled respectively “A ‘Note’ of Interrogation,” “A Sub-Note of Interrogation: What will our Religion be in 1999,” and “On what Government night will Mr. Lowe bring out our New Moral Budget? another Sub-Note of Interrogation.” In the first Paper, Miss Nightingale in a questioning and allusive style defined her conception of God as a God of Law, whose character may be learnt from social and moral science, and defended such a conception against some current ideas of Christian churches on the one side, and against the too cold and impersonal creed, as she thought, of Positivism on the other. The affinity of her doctrine at some points with the creed of Positivism is obvious; but she held as an axiom that the existence of law implied a law-giver; and “it is a very different thing,” she wrote elsewhere,[132] “fighting against evil for our own sakes or fighting for the sake of the Law-Giver who arms us—fighting with or without a Commander.” The scope of the second Paper is harder to describe, for it throws out a large number of criticisms and suggestions on life, morals, and philosophy in no very closely related order. The general idea, however, is that the purification of religion requires not destructive criticism but reconstruction and a re-ordering of modern life on the lines of social service; in which latter connection Miss Nightingale paid a glowing tribute to the pioneer of East-end “settlers.”[133] These two Papers, though they attempt to cover too much ground in a small space, abound in happy things by the way. We are told, for instance, that Matthew Arnold's Literature and Dogma is “marred by a tendency not to fight like a man but to scratch like a cat.” The doctrine of eternal punishment is criticized in the words of the pauper who said to his nurse after seeing the chaplain, “It does seem hard to have suffered so much here, only to go to everlasting torments hereafter.” The creed of some contented politicians is hit off by saying that they talk of “the ‘masses,’ as if they were Silurian strata.” The third of Miss Nightingale's Papers is the hardest to describe, because it is the most crowded of the series. Its practical purpose may be said in the language of later politics to be a plea for “social reform.” “There must be a Chancellor of the Exchequer, and a Budget, for Morality and Crime, as for Finance.” Her conception of social and moral science as an almost statistical study[134] is glanced at, and the controversy between Free Will and Necessity is disposed of by the way. Miss Nightingale sent her Papers successively to Mr. Froude. He was delighted with the first and with the second. “Your second Note,” he said, “is even more pregnant than the first. I cannot tell how sanitary, with disordered intellects, the effects of such Papers will be.” They appeared in Fraser's Magazine for May and July 1873. Carlyle was not so favourably impressed. Miss Nightingale's second Paper, he said, was like “a lost lamb bleating on the mountain.” Mr. Froude's criticism on the third was that it lacked focussing: “the whole art of getting culinary fire out of intellectual sunlight depends on that.” The third article, accordingly, was not printed. Miss Nightingale did not relish Carlyle's remark, and her equanimity was perhaps not restored by the domestic assurance that Florence's mistake had been in not submitting the manuscript to her sister's revision. One of the best things in the Paper which was not published was a Postscript. The first article had been widely noticed in the pulpit and the press, and had brought to the author many letters—some sympathetic, as from Mr. Edward Maitland,[135] others sorrowfully critical. There were those who promised to pray for her conversion daily, and invited her to join them in that exercise. They had not read the article, it seemed, but only a review of it; and among the printed critiques was one which began: “My knowledge of the scope of this Paper is derived from the report of a discourse upon it.” In her proposed Postscript Miss Nightingale took “this opportunity of thanking unknown friends for their sympathy and suggestions, and, still more, unknown friend-enemies for their criticisms; but yet more should I have thanked the latter, had their criticisms been on my poor little Article in its rough state—the ‘Original Cow and Snuffers’—and not on seeing the Extract of a Criticism of an Extract of my Article. Certainly a new Art must have arisen in my elderly age:— out-magazining magazining. And I hereby confidentially inform the shade of Mr. Fraser that he may, on application to me, see columns, closely-printed columns, of small (but cruel) print upon a Paper which the writers state that they have not read.—What! read a Paper which we are going to review!—Yes, Mr. Fraser, this is what magazine-ing has come to. Articles are not even written on original works, even if that work be only an Article, but on a Review of an Article; and not even upon that, but upon a Review of a Review of an Extract of an Article, or sometimes upon an Extract of a Sermon upon an Extract of a Review of an Article. I ought to feel flattered: I try to feel flattered. But, Mr. Fraser, is life long enough for this? is this the way to ‘human progress’? And … but as this will not be read by my unknown critics, I come to a stop.” The practice which Miss Nightingale thus satirised has not become less frequent in later days when the newspapers supply their readers not with political speeches but with opinions based on summaries of them, and when what are called “educational handbooks” aim at giving the student the power of passing a critical judgment upon authors without the necessity of reading them.
IV
A few days after the appearance of Miss Nightingale's first Paper in Fraser, Mr. Mill died of a “local endemic disease” at his house near Avignon. She was profoundly moved:—
(Miss Nightingale to Julius Mohl.) May 20 [1873]. John Stuart Mill's death was a great shock to me. Mr. Grote used to say of him “Talk of Mill's Logic! why he is thrilling with emotion to the very finger-ends.” That is just what he was. Now, speaker and subject are both gone. He said at Mr. Grote's funeral, with an agony of tears, “We might have kept him 10 years longer.” And now we say of himself with tears “We might have kept him for 10 years longer.” He was only 67. He was always urging me to publish. He used to say, with the passion which he put into everything he did say: “I have no patience with people who will not publish because they think the world is not ripe enough for their ideas: that is only conceit or cowardice. If anybody has thought out any thing which he conceives to be truth, in Heaven's name, let him say it!” I did not answer that letter. I thought that this year (I have left much of the India and War Office work, and much of it has left me) I would resume with John Stuart Mill and do as he told me. I put the article in Fraser's Magazine (which I now send you) to please him. And now he is dead, and will never know that I intended to do what he wished. He used to say, “Tell the world what you think—your experience. It will probably strike the world more than anything that could be told it.” He quoted my “Stuff” in his book, which he ought not to have done.[136] I published my book on Socrates' mother[137] partly to please him.[222] It was a very odd thing: it was a subject he had taken up: he was President of a Society for that. When he was in England (till a fortnight before his death) I could not find his address: I was so overwhelmed with business and illness. I did not know he was going away. And I did not send him this book. And now he is dead, and will never know. But I scarcely regret his death. He was not a happy man. He was a man who was so sure to develop very much in a future life. He had queer religious notions: did not believe in a God or in a future life: but believed in a sort of conflict between two Powers of Good and Evil. I remember showing you one of his letters. And you said it was just like Zoroaster. But he was the most truly “Liberal” man I ever knew. If it were for the cause of Truth that he should be defeated, he would have liked to have been defeated. And now he is dead. And we shall never see his like again.
It was characteristic of Miss Nightingale that she entered into correspondence with Mr. Chadwick on the sanitary state of Mr. Mill's house and the climatic conditions of Provence in May. Mr. Chadwick had to put himself right in her eyes by explaining that he had not been consulted by their friend on those subjects and had never been invited by him to Avignon.
V
Other literary work which occupied Miss Nightingale a good deal at this time was undertaken either to help Mr. Jowett or in accordance with his advice. He had urged her to work out her notion of Divine Perfection, and her theory of the Family in relation to “sisterhoods” and other forms of association. Miss Nightingale wrote Essays accordingly on “What is the Evidence that there is a Perfect God?” on “What is the Character of God?” and on “Christian Fellowship as a Means to Progress.” The gist of the latter essay may be given in a letter of an earlier date:—
(Miss Nightingale to Benjamin Jowett.) July [1870].… I think that Faraday's idea of friendship is very high: “One who will serve his companion next to his God.” And when one thinks that most, nay almost all people have no idea of friendship at all except pleasant juxtaposition, it strikes one with admiration. Yet is Faraday's idea not mine. My idea of a friend is one who[223] will and can join you in work the sole purpose of which is to serve God. Two in one, and one in God. It almost exactly answers Jesus Christ's words. And so extraordinarily blessed have I been that I have had three such friends. I can truly say that, during the 5 years that I worked with Sidney Herbert every day and nearly all day, from the moment he came into the room no other idea came in but that of doing the work with the best of our powers in the service of God. (And this tho' he was a man of the most varied and brilliant conversational genius I have ever known—far beyond Macaulay whom I also knew.) This is Heaven; and this is what makes me say “I have had my heaven.”
The two other friends with whom in former time she had been a fellow-worker were Arthur Clough and her Aunt, Mrs. Smith. Miss Nightingale's other Essays led to much correspondence with Mr. Jowett, but as they failed to come up to his standard they were laid aside. Many of her letters to him were themselves almost Essays. Extracts from one or two consecutive letters will show the kind of discussions into which Miss Nightingale loved to involve her Oxford friend, and upon which he was nothing loath to enter:—
(Benjamin Jowett to Miss Nightingale.) Torquay, Sept. 29 [1871].… I must answer your letter by driblets. When you admit that a part of the witness of the character of God is to be sought for in nature, how do you distinguish between the true and false witness of nature? For we cannot deny that physical good is sometimes at variance with moral—e.g. in marriage the sole or chief principle ought to be health and strength in the parents whether with or without a marriage ceremony—in other words Plato's Republic: I mean on physical principles. Or again the laws of physical improvement would require that we should get rid of sickly and deformed infants. And if, as Huxley would say, you reconstruct the world on a physical basis, you have to go to war with received principles of morality. I suppose that the answer is you must take man as a whole, and make morality and the mind the limit of physical improvement. But it is not easy to see what this limit is, because men's conceptions of morality vary, and although we may form ideals we have to descend from them in practice. Therefore I do not agree with you in thinking that there are no difficulties, although the old difficulties, about origin of evil &c., are generally a hocus of Theologians.