(Miss Nightingale to Benjamin Jowett.)[138] Lea Hurst,[224] Oct. 3 [1871]. I am quite scandalized at your materialism. (I shall shut up you and Plato for a hundred years in punishment in another world till you have both obtained clearer views.) Is it for an old maid like me to be preaching to you a Master in Israel that even “on physical principles” there are essential points in marriage (to turn out the best order of children), which, being absent, the perfection of “health and strength” in both parents is of no avail even for the physical part of the children? And might I just ask one small question: whether you consider man has a little soul? If he has ever such a little one, you can scarcely consider him as a simple body, an animal, or even as a twin, the soul being one twin and the body the other, but as all one, the soul and the body making one being (altho' only in this sense). If you do, at all events God does not. And consequently He makes a great many more things enter into the “physical” constitution even of the children than the mere “health and strength” of the parents. (My son, really Plato talked nonsense about this.) Take a much more material thing than the producing of a bad or degenerate family or race. Take a railway accident. What are the laws therein concerned? You have by no means only to consider the “physical” laws—the strength of iron, the speed of steam, the smoothness of rails, the friction &c., &c.—but you have to consider the state of mind of Directors, whether they care only for their dividends, so that the railway-servants are underpaid or overworked &c., &c. You quote Huxley. He is undoubtedly one of the prime educators of the age, but he makes a profound mistake when he says to Mankind: objects of sense are more worthy of your attention than your inferences and imaginations. On the contrary, the finest powers man is gifted with are those which enable him to infer from what he sees what he can't see. They lift him into truth of far higher import than that which he learns from the senses alone. I believe that the laws of nature all tend to improve the whole man, moral and physical, that it is absurd to consider man either as a body to be “improved,” or as a soul to be “improved,” separately.
As to the “laws of physical improvement requiring that we should get rid of sickly and deformed infants,” they require that we should prevent or improve, not that we should kill them. That would be to get rid of some of the finest intellectual and moral specimens of our human nature that have ever existed. And, even were this not the case, the heroism, the patience, the wisdom of our race have been more called forth by dealing[225] with these and the like forms of evil than by almost anything else. The good of man in its highest sense cannot be attained by neglecting one set of laws or one aspect of man's nature and cultivating another.
I entirely therefore agree that “you must take man as a whole.” But this seems at variance with a celebrated author's next sentence “and make morality and the mind the limit of physical improvement.” If I were writing, I should use a word signifying the exact reverse; not limit, but expansion, enlargement, multiplication, master or informing spirit. As Plato says: the mind informs the body, owns the body, the body is the servant of the mind. How can the owner and the master be the limit? We must really pray for your conversion.…
(Benjamin Jowett to Miss Nightingale.) Torquay, Oct. 4.… What have I said to deserve such an outburst? I have no wish to shake the foundation of Society. What I think about these matters is feebly expressed in a part of Essay at the end of the introduction to the Republic. But when I come to a second edition I will express it better.
A comparison of the passage in the first and second editions of Mr. Jowett's Introduction respectively[139] shows how largely he profited by the criticisms in the foregoing letter. His Plato first appeared in 1871, and at once he began revising it. In this work Miss Nightingale gave him great help. Her Greek had now grown a little rusty,[140] but her interest in the substance of Plato was intense. She annotated Mr. Jowett's summaries and introductions very closely, and sent him voluminous suggestions for revision. “You are the best critic,” he wrote, “whom I ever had.” Several of Miss Nightingale's notes are preserved, in rough copy, amongst her Papers, and by means of them her hand may be traced in many a page of Mr. Jowett's revised work. In the first edition of the introduction to the Republic he made some remarks on love as a motive in poetry which excited Miss Nightingale's strong disapproval. She agreed that “the illusion of the feelings commonly called love” was a motive of which too much had been made; but the poets, she thought, had as yet hardly touched the theme of true love—“two in one, and one in God”—as an incentive to heroic action. “The philosopher may be excused,” Mr. Jowett had written, “if he imagines an age when poetry and sentiment have disappeared, and truth has taken the place of imagination, and the feelings of love are understood and estimated at their proper value.” “Take out that mean calumny, my son,” wrote Miss Nightingale; “take it out this minute; blaspheme not against Love.” The offending sentence was expunged in the second edition. Mr. Jowett had gone on to “blaspheme” a little against Art, citing the Mahommedans as a case of the state of the human mind in which “all artistic representations are regarded as a false and imperfect expression either of the religious or of the philosophical ideal.” Miss Nightingale objected that the Mahommedans had renounced the use of pictures and images, but not of architecture: “Mosques are the highest kind of art: the one true representation of the One God: the Glory of God in the highest: the most high of the Most High: higher than any Christian art or architecture—as you would say if you had seen the mosques of Cairo.” Mr. Jowett recast his passage, and used Miss Nightingale's illustration, almost in her words.[141] “I am always stealing from you,” he said. On his Introduction to the Gorgias, she made an interesting criticism:—
Is not Socrates more ineffably tiresome, and at the same time does he not speak higher truth, in the Gorgias than anywhere else? Why call these higher truths “paradoxes”? Are not your sermons always a sort of apology for talking to them of God? And why should your Introductions be a sort of apology for recognizing that Socrates speaks the highest truth and no paradox? Have guarded statements, whether about God or any particular moral or truth, ever produced enthusiasm of religion or in morality? Is there any Dialogue, not even excepting the Phaedo and Crito, where he is so much in earnest? He is so terribly in earnest that towards the end he even throws all his dialectic aside, and makes even Polus in earnest. To me, speaking as one of the stupid and ignorant, it seems that your[227] Introduction dwells too much on the form of the Gorgias and does not bring out in sufficiently striking relief the great truths which Socrates labours so strenuously to enforce that he almost seems to lose himself in them. These great moral truths are (are they not?):—(1) It is a greater evil to do than to suffer injustice. If you call this a “paradox,” why do you not call the 53rd Chapter of Isaiah a paradox? Is it not the highest of truths? (2) It is a greater evil not to be punished than to be punished for wrong. I have no idea why you call this a paradox. It follows from all the higher experience of the life of every one of us. In family life I see it every day. I see the “spoilt child” making himself, and oftener herself, and everyone else miserable, down to mature life or extreme old age. (Tho' the “punishments” of my life have been somewhat severe, yet I can bless God, even in this world, that never in all my life have I been allowed to “do as I liked.”) …
If the reader cares to take this passage to a comparison of the second with the first edition of Mr. Jowett's Introduction,[142] he will discover again how largely, and closely, Miss Nightingale's criticisms were accepted. She dealt similarly—giving precise references for every statement—with the greater part of the Dialogues. “In the Phaedrus,” said Mr. Jowett (July 22, 1873), “I have put in most of what you suggested and made some additions. You are quite right in thinking that I should get as much modern truth into the Introductions as possible. It is a great opportunity; which I have had in view, but not so clearly as since you wrote to me.”
Miss Nightingale continued, as in former years, to send Mr. Jowett suggestions for sermons. “I have written part of your sermon,” he wrote, when she had sent him an outline of what she would like him to preach from the University pulpit. When he became Master of Balliol he projected a Special Form for daily service in the College Chapel, and Miss Nightingale suggested a selection of passages from the Psalms under the heads of “God the Lord,” “God the Judge,” “God the Father,” “God the Friend,” “the Way of the Cross,” and so forth. Mr. Jowett had, however, to abandon the project in deference to superior authority.[143] Another scheme was carried out. In 1873 an edition of the Bible appeared which has a history of some interest. The School and Children's Bible it was called; the name of the Rev. William Rogers, of Bishopsgate, appears on the title-page, but the selection was in fact made for the most part by Mr. Jowett, with the help of some of his friends.[144] That Mr. Swinburne was one of these friends, we know from the poet's own recollections; it is not generally known that the other principal collaborator with Mr. Jowett was Miss Nightingale. Mr. Swinburne's help was in one respect disappointing. “I wanted you,” said Mr. Jowett to him with a smile, “to help me to make this book smaller, and you have persuaded me to make it much larger.” The poet, who was complimented on his thorough familiarity with sundry parts of the sacred text, thought that Mr. Jowett had excluded too much of the prophetic and poetic elements, not taking into account “the delight that a child may take in things beyond the grasp of his perfect comprehension, though not beyond the touch of his apprehensive or prehensile faculty.” Miss Nightingale, whose familiarity with the Bible was probably even closer and more extensive than Mr. Swinburne's and with whom Biblical criticism was a favourite study, also wanted a great deal put in which Mr. Jowett had left out, but her instinct for edification led her to suggest equivalent omissions. She took great pains with her suggestions, illustrating them in letters to Mr. Jowett with many characteristic remarks by the way:—
It is impossible to keep up acquaintance with a man, however otherwise estimable, who separates the 26 last chapters of Isaiah from Isaiah merely by a shabby little note and asterisk. Surely those chapters belong to the end of the Babylonish Captivity[229] and should be separated by a distinct division; while the shabby little note and asterisk might go to some isolated chapters (e.g. xiii., xiv.) among the first 39 which belong to the same time, the end of the Captivity—whereas the first 39 chapters (generally) appear to belong to the “Middle Ages” of Prophecy. But as it may be judged inconvenient to put Chaps. xl.–lxvi. of Isaiah in a different part of the Bible, I will concede that point and simply classify them (I follow Ewald's order). But they must be under a separate Heading with “End of Babylonian Captivity” (or words to that effect) printed distinctly under the heading (not in a note).
More generally, she criticized the first selection sent to her as showing some want of proportion. There was no clear plan, she thought, as to the space to be given, respectively, to:—