But there was no exaggeration in one of her woes. A third of her time was taken up with the Nightingale Nurses; another third with Indian affairs (for in relation to India, as we shall hear, she never quite “went out of office”); the remaining third, which might have been devoted to working out a scheme of social and moral science on the statistical methods of M. Quetelet, or on preparing for the press her selections from the Mystics, was being wasted in family worries. M. Quetelet, with whom she had been corresponding, had recently died. “I cannot say,” she wrote to Dr. Farr (Feb. 23, 1874), “how the death of our old friend touches me: he was the founder of the most important science in the whole world. Some months ago I prepared the first sketch of an Essay I meant to publish and dedicate to him on the application of his discoveries to explain the Plan of God in teaching us by these results the laws by which our Moral Progress is to be attained. I had pleased myself with thinking that this would please him. But painful and indispensable business prevented the finishing of my paper.” “O God,” she exclaimed in the bitterness of her heart, “let me not sink in these perplexities: but give me a great cause to do and die for.” And again: “What makes the difference between man and woman? Quetelet did his work, and I am so disturbed by my family that I can't do mine.”
IV
So, then, Miss Nightingale never finished her book on the Mystics; but she did something which, if we take her view of literary work, we may account far better; she lived it. No words of Florence Nightingale's that have been quoted in the course of this Memoir are more intensely autobiographical, none express more truly the spirit in which she lived and moved and had her being, than those which I have put together on a preceding page from her Notes on the Mystics. Her creed may seem cold to some minds, but she invested it with a spiritual fervour which none of the Mystics has surpassed. This woman, so practical, so business-like, and in her outward dealings with men and affairs so worldly-wise, was a dreamer, a devotee, a religious enthusiast. The Lady-in-Chief, who was to others a tower of strength, was to herself a weak vessel, praying continually for support, and conscious, with bitter intensity, of short-coming, of faithlessness, of rebellion to the will of God. Self-possessed in the presence of others, she was tortured and agonized, often to the verge of despair, in the solitude of her chamber. “I have done nothing for seven years,” she said to a friend, “but write regulations.” And that was broadly true of one side of her life. Of another side, she might have said with almost equal truth, “I have done nothing all my life but write spiritual meditations.” She lived with a pen or pencil ever at her side; and reams of her paper are covered with confessions, self-examinations, communings with God. She suffered much, and especially during these years, from sleeplessness, and in the watches of the night she would turn to read the Mystics for comfort, or to write on her tablets for spiritual exercise. Though she liked best the books of the Catholic saints, her Catholicism was wider than theirs, and she could find spiritual kinship also, as in the lines prefixed to the present Part, with the hymns of American evangelists. At one and the same time mystic and practical administrator, Miss Nightingale had two soul-sides; but each was a reflection of the other. Her religion was her work; and her work was her religion. She read the Mystics, not to lull her active faculties into contemplative ecstasy, but to consecrate them to more perfect service. In one place she makes these notes from St. Catherine of Siena:—“It is not the occupation but the spirit which makes the difference. The election of a bishop may be a most secular thing. The election of a representative may be a religious thing. It is not the preluding such an election with public prayer that would make it a religious act. It is religious so far as each man discharges his part as a duty and a solemn responsibility. The question is not whether a thing is done for the State or the Church, but whether it is done with God or without God.” Miss Nightingale's heading to this passage was “Drains.” She applied her religion to every aspect of her life; and in her meditations, passages of solemn profundity are sometimes side by side with entries of a quaint, and almost humorous, directness, like a gargoyle above a church porch or a dog in a Madonna picture. “O Lord I offer him to Thee. He is so heavy. Do Thou take care of him. I can't.” “I must strive to see only God in my friends, and God in my cats.” Such passages are thought “profane” by professors of a purely formal religion; but are characteristic of the true mystics in all denominations.
The mystical self-abasement of the Saints was never more complete than in the private meditations of Florence Nightingale. Once in the middle of the night she started up and saw pictures on the wall by the night-light lamp. “Am I she who once stood on that Crimean height? ‘The Lady with a Lamp shall stand.’ The lamp shows me only my utter shipwreck.” From the year 1872 onwards, when she went “out of office,” and with increased intensity after her father's death, Miss Nightingale's mood, in all communings with herself, was of deep dejection and of utter humbleness. The notes are often heart-rending in their impression of loneliness, of craving for sympathy which she could not find, of bitter self-reproach. The loss of friends may account for something of all this, and even her friendship with Mr. Jowett had now lost somewhat of its consoling power. She felt that she gave more sympathy than she received; she sometimes found her interviews with him exhausting or disturbing; “he talks to me,” she said once, “as if I were some one else.” The strange manner of her life should be remembered. Her habit of seeing only one person at a time, and that at set times, must have made intercourse rather formidable for both parties. Nobody, even if staying in the house, ever happened to come into her room, and no outside visitor appeared unexpectedly. She never had the relief of hearing two other people talk, or of witnessing, even for a moment, two other personalities in contact. Something too must be accounted to the fact that many of her meditations were written at night or in the early morning hours when she could not sleep. Periods of sleepless dejection, which in the lives of most men and women leave little record of themselves behind, were by her spent in writing down their weary tale. No doubt, the self-expression gave relief; and she would often turn at the instant from her tablets of despair to amuse a visitor with humorous conversation, or write a vivacious letter to a friend.
These are considerations for which allowance must be made in estimating what was morbid in Miss Nightingale's moods. But for the most part the despondency and the self-abasement which coloured her meditations, and which sometimes appear in her letters, were the expression of the mystical way of her soul. They are the utterance of a soul which was striving after perfection, and found the path difficult and thorny. Miss Nightingale was masterful and eager; she had often been able to impress her will upon men and upon events; she found it difficult to bear disappointments and vexations with that entire resignation which the mystics taught her. She was “out of office”; she had been interrupted, suddenly and painfully, in a long career of almost unceasing action. The pause in her public life gave her new occasion for self-criticism and fresh consciousness of the difficulty of sustaining in active life that absolute purity of motive which makes light even of success or failure. She strove to attain, and she taught others to ensue, passivity in action—to do the utmost in their power, but to leave the result to a Higher Power. In a poem which gave her much comfort in later years she marked this passage:—
Abstaining from attachment to the work,
Abstaining from rewardment in the work,
While yet one doeth it full faithfully,
Saying, “'Tis right to do!”—that is true act
And abstinence! Who doeth duties so,
Unvexed if his work fail, if it succeed
Unflattered, in his own heart justified,
Quit of debates and doubts, his is “true” act.[146]
But the lesson was hard to learn. “There are trying days before us,” she wrote to one of her dearest friends (Aug. 1873); “however, we cannot change a single ‘hair’; we must look to Him ‘Alike who grasps eternity, And numbers every hair.’ I don't know that it is ever difficult to me to entrust my ‘hair’ to Him, but to entrust A.'s, and yours, and poor matron's I find very difficult. And I thought He did not take care of B.'s hairs. What a reprobate I am!” And a worse “reprobate” than this letter says; for in fact she did find it very difficult to entrust even her own “hair to Him”—as she confessed in another letter to the same friend: “God is displeased when we enquire too anxiously. A soul which has really given itself to God does His will in the present, and trusts to the Father for the future. Now it is twenty years to-day [Aug. 11, 1873] since I entered ‘public life’—and I have not learnt that lesson yet—though the greater part of those twenty years have been as completely out of my hands to mould, and in His alone, as if they had been the movements of the planets.” The surrender of her will to the keeping of the Supreme Will was the spiritual perfection at which she most continuously aimed. In consciousness of failure, she reproached herself for censoriousness, rebellion, impatience. She knew that some of all this, and much of her dejection, were morbid, and warned others against the like weakness. “Do not depend, darling,” she wrote to a friend, “upon ‘light’ in one sort of mystical way. There are things, as I know by experience, in which He sends us light by the hard good sense of others, not by our going over in sickness and solitude one thought, or rather feeling, over and over again by ourselves, which rather brings darkness. I have felt this so much in my lonely life.” But there was another mystical way in which she found strength. In her spiritual life, which was at once the complement and the sustaining source of her outward life, she followed, as she was fond of writing, “the Way of the Cross.” There were moments indeed, but they were rare, in which she was inclined to draw back, and when her faith grew faint. “O my Creator, art Thou leading every man of us to perfection? Or is this only a metaphysical idea for which there is no evidence? Is man only a constant repetition of himself? Thou knowest that through all these 20 horrible years [1873] I have been supported by the belief (I think I must believe it still or I am sure I could not work) that I was working with Thee who wert bringing every one, even our poor nurses, to perfection.” Yet from every doubt her assurance grew the stronger; and as she followed the Way of the Cross, she rose triumphant over suffering, finding in each loss of human sympathy a lesson that she should throw herself more entirely into the Eternal Arms, and in every outbreak of human despondency or rebellion a call to closer union with the Eternal Goodness. “O Father, I submit, I resign myself,” she wrote in one of hundreds of similar meditations, “I accept with all my heart this stretching out of Thy hand to save me: Deal with me as Thou seest meet: Thy work begin, Thy work complete. O how vain it is, the vanity of vanities, to live in men's thoughts, instead of God's.” And again: “Wretch that I was not to see that God was taking from me all human help in order to compel me to lean on Him alone.” She had little interest in rites and ceremonies as such, and she interpreted the doctrines of Christianity in her own way; but she found great comfort in the Communion Service, as an expression of the individual believer's participation in the sufferings and the triumph of the greatest of the Mystics. For some years she entered in her diary a text from the mystical writers for each day. She took to herself their devotion, their communion with God, their self-surrender; she adjusted their doctrine to her own beliefs. “I believe,” she wrote, “in God the Father Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth. And in Jesus Christ, His best son, our Master, who was born to show us the way through suffering to be also His sons and His daughters, His handmen and His handmaidens, who lived in the same spirit with the Father, that we may also live in that Holy Spirit whose meat was to do His Father's will and to finish His work, who suffered and died saying, ‘That the world may love the Father.’ And I believe in the Father Almighty's love and friendship, in the service of man being the service of God, the growing into a likeness with Him by love, the being one with Him in will at last, which is Heaven. I believe in the plan of Almighty Perfection to make us all perfect. And thus I believe in the Life Everlasting.”
This was the creed by which Miss Nightingale guided her life; this, the path to perfection along which she ever moved. There was nothing ecstatic in her mysticism, though she notes occasionally that she heard “The voice,” and often that she was conscious of receiving “strong impressions.” They were impressions which came in moments of imaginative insight, but yet which followed rationally from self-examination and meditation on her creed. Patience and resignation were the states of the purified soul which she found hardest of attainment. She marked for her edification many a passage from devotional writers in which such virtues are enjoined; as in this from Thomas à Kempis: “Oh Lord my God, patience is very necessary for me, for I perceive that many things in this life do fall out as we would not.… It is so, my son. But my will is that thou seek not that peace which is void of temptations, or which suffereth nothing contrary; but rather think that thou hast found peace, when thou art exercised with sundry tribulations and tried in many adversities.” Her tribulations were often caused, she confessed, by her impatience. “O Lord, even now I am trying to snatch the management of Thy world out of Thy hands.” The middle path of perfection between the acquiescence of the quietist and the impatience of the worker was hard. “Too little have I looked for something higher and better than my own work—the work of Supreme Wisdom, which uses us whether we know it or not. O God to Thy glory not to mine whatever happens, may be all my thought!”
Miss Nightingale's meditations, written in the purgatorial stage, are many and poignant. But there were times also when the mount of illumination was reached, when “the palace of her soul” was enlarged to receive the indwelling Presence, and she found the perfect peace of the mystic in the consciousness of union with the Supreme Wisdom; times when on the wings of the soul she attained with Dante to the empyrean:—