Thus day after day and year after year did such correspondence continue—now grave, now gay; filled alike with affection and with counsel. I have counted as many as a hundred letters received in a year from a single Superintendent. There were several years in which the total of Miss Nightingale's nursing correspondence has to be counted in thousands. As the years passed the demand on her affections, her brain-power, and her bodily strength became well-nigh overwhelming.
IV
Miss Nightingale did not rely only upon individual intercourse for the exercise of influence. She believed in the pulpit, as well as in the closet, and from time to time addressed the Probationer-Nurses collectively.[160] Of the first of the series, written in 1872, Dr. Sutherland, to whom Miss Nightingale submitted her manuscript, said: “It is just what it ought to be, written as the thoughts come up. This is the only writing which goes like an arrow to its mark. It is full of gentle wisdom and does for Hospital nursing what your Notes did for nursing.” It is the best of her Addresses, and the medical officers at St. Thomas's insisted on every Probationer mastering it. There is naturally a good deal of repetition in the Discourses as a whole. The gist of them is: that nursing requires a special call; that it needs, more than most occupations, a religious basis; that it is an art, in which constant progress is the law of life; and lastly, that the nurse, whether she wills it or not, has of necessity a moral influence. These ideas appear in almost every Address, and are illustrated in various ways. “A woman who takes the sentimental view of Nursing (which she calls ‘ministering,’ as if she were an angel) is of course worse than useless; a woman possessed with the idea that she is making a sacrifice will never do; and a woman who thinks any kind of Nursing work ‘beneath a Nurse’ will simply be in the way.” The true Nurse must have a vocation; and, next, she must follow the call in a religious spirit. “If we have not true religious feeling and purpose, Hospital life, the highest of all things with these, becomes without them a mere routine and bustle, and a very hardening routine and bustle.” To follow nursing as a religious vocation is, however, not enough; for it is a difficult art, requiring constant study and effort. This is the note which Miss Nightingale struck in the opening words of her first Address and it is the one which most frequently recurs. The besetting sin of the Nightingale Nurses in the early days was, it seems, self-sufficiency. They knew that their Training School was the first of its kind; and they were apt to give themselves airs. Mr. Henley's character-sketches in verse of the “Lady Probationer” and “Staff-Nurse, New Style,” hint pleasantly at this, and in plain prose men used to write of “the conceited Nightingales.” The day is gone by, it was said in a medical journal, when a novel would picture a Nurse as a Mrs. Gamp; she would figure, rather, as active, useful, and clever, but also as “a pert and very conceited young woman.” Self-sufficiency, then, is the failing which the Chief of the Nurses constantly chastises. She does so by holding up before her pupils the ideal of nursing as a progressive art. “For us who nurse,” she says, “our nursing is a thing in which, unless in it we are making progress every year, every month, every week,—take my word for it, we are going back. The more experience we gain, the more progress we can make. The progress you make in your year's training with us is as nothing to what you must make every year after your year's training is over. A woman who thinks in herself: ‘Now I am a full Nurse, a skilled Nurse, I have learnt all that there is to be learnt’—take my word for it, she does not know what a Nurse is, and she never will know; she is gone back already.” This rule applies to the technical side of the work, and perhaps yet more to the moral side. Nurses cannot avoid exercising a moral influence. They exercise it by their characters, and no point can ever be reached at which a woman can say, “Now my character is perfect.” “Nurses are not chaplains”; “it is what a nurse is in herself, and what comes out of herself, out of what she is (almost without knowing it herself) that exercises a moral or religious influence over her patients. No set form of words is of any use. And patients are so quick to see whether a Nurse is consistent always in herself—whether she is what she says to them. And if she is not, it is no use. If she is, of how much use may the simplest word of soothing, of comfort, or even of reproof—especially in the quiet night—be to the roughest patient! But if she wishes to do this, she must keep up a sort of divine calm and high sense of duty in her own mind.” And every good nurse ought to wish to do this, because her opportunities are unique. “Hospital nurses have charge of their patients in a way that no other woman has charge. No other woman is in charge really of grown-up men. Also the hospital nurse is in charge of people when they are singularly alive to impressions. She leaves her stamp upon them whether she will or no.”
Such are the leading ideas which Miss Nightingale develops in her series of Hospital Sermons. I have heard it said that she addressed the Nurses in the style and spirit of the Sunday School. There are passages to which such a description may be applied; but, taken as a whole, the discourses suggest a different comparison: they recall the style and spirit of the best Public School or College Sermons. Sometimes the likeness is close and explicit. On one occasion Miss Nightingale thought that the prevailing evil in her School was a spirit of irresponsible and ill-informed criticism. She rebuked it by telling a true story, which perhaps she may have had from Mr. Jowett:—
In a large college, questions, about things which the students could but imperfectly understand in the conduct of the college, had become too warm. The superintendent went into the hall one morning, and after complimenting the young men on their studies, he said: “This morning I heard two of the porters, while at their work, take up a Greek book lying on my table; one tried to read it, and the other declared it ought to be held upside down to be read. Neither could agree which was upside down, but both thought themselves quite capable of arguing about Greek, though neither could read it. They were just coming to fisticuffs when I sent the two on different errands.” Not a word was added: the students laughed and retired, but they understood the moral well enough, and from that day there were few questions or disputes about the plans and superiors of the college, or about their own obedience to rules and discipline.
Then, again, what boy has not heard in Chapel or in school-song a moral drawn from how things will look “forty years on”? Here is Miss Nightingale's passage on the theme:—
Most of you here present will be in a few years in charge of others, filling posts of responsibility. All are on the threshold of active life. Then our characters will be put to the test, whether in some position of charge or of subordination, or of both. Shall we be found wanting? unable to control ourselves, therefore unable to control others? with many good qualities, perhaps,[266] but owing to selfishness, conceit, to some want of purpose, some laxness, carelessness, lightness, vanity, some temper, habits of self-indulgence, or want of disinterestedness, unequal to the struggle of life, the business of life, and ill-adapted to the employment of Nursing which we have chosen for ourselves and which, almost above all others, requires earnest purpose and the reverse of all these faults. Thirty years hence, if we could suppose us all standing here again passing judgment on ourselves, and telling sincerely why one has succeeded and another has failed—why the life of one has been a blessing to those she has had charge of, and another has gone from one thing to another, pleasing herself and bringing nothing to good—what would we give to be able now to see all this before us?
Then she exhorted her pupils not to be too nice in the picking and choosing of places. “Our brains are pretty nearly useless, if we only think of what we want and should like ourselves; and not of what posts are wanting us, what our posts are wanting in us. What would you think of a soldier who—if he were to be put on duty in the honourable post of difficulty, as sentry may be, in the face of the enemy (and we nurses are always in the face of the enemy, always in the face of life or death for our patients)—were to answer his commanding officer, ‘No, he had rather mount guard at barracks or study musketry’; or, if he had to go as pioneer, or on a forlorn hope, were to say, ‘No, that don't suit my turn?’” So, again, there are excellent little discourses on the Uses and Limits of School Friendships, on the Right Use of Dress, and on the Art of Exercising Authority, with wise sayings taken direct in some cases from Plato. “Those who rule must not be those who are desirous to rule.” “The world, whether of a ward or of an Empire, is governed, not by many words, but by few; though some, especially women, seem to expect to govern by talk and nothing else.” “She who is the most royal mistress of herself is the only woman fit to be in charge; for she who has no control over herself, who cannot master her own temper, how can she be placed over others, to control them through the better principle, if she has none or little of her own?” Her remarks on Dress are interesting, and might be applied, mutatis mutandis, to young men who sometimes combine a habit of slovenliness with a garish taste in waistcoats. Some of the Nightingale nurses seem to have grumbled at the uniform, and to have taken their revenge upon it by gorgeous apparel when off duty. Miss Nightingale avers that to her eye no women's dress was so becoming as that of her Nurses, and for the rest she draws a moral from God's “clothing” of the field flowers:—
First: their “clothes” are exactly suitable for the kind of place they are in and the kind of work they have to do. So should ours be. Second: field flowers are never double: double flowers change their useful stamens for showy petals and so have no seeds. These double flowers are like the useless appendages now worn on the dress, and very much in your way. Wild flowers have purpose in all their beauty. So ought dress to have;—nothing purposeless about it. Third: the colours of the wild flower are perfect in harmony, and not many of them. Fourth: there is not a speck on the freshness with which flowers come out of the dirty earth. Even when our clothes are getting rather old we may imitate the flower: for we may make them look as fresh as a daisy.… Oh, my dear Nurses, whether gentlewomen or not, don't let people say of you that you are like “Girls of the Period”: let them say that you are like “field flowers,” and welcome.