In her youth Miss Nightingale was a brilliant talker, as witnesses cited in an earlier chapter have told us. In later years, too, she had flashes of brilliance. Madame Mohl, whose standard was high, wrote to her husband from Lea Hurst in 1873: “Mr. Jowett spent three days here. He is a man of mind; I think he would suit you. He is very fond of Flo, which also would suit you. She is here, and her conversation is most nourishing. I would give a great deal for you to be here to enjoy it. She is really eloquent. Yesterday she quite surprised me.”[184] But for the most part Miss Nightingale's talk was rather earnest, inquiring, sometimes searching, than sparkling or eloquent. “She is worse than a Royal Commission to answer,” said Colonel Yule; “and, in the most gracious, charming manner possible, immediately finds out all I don't know.”[185] Younger visitors sometimes felt in awe of her; she could flash out a searching question upon a rash generalization as formidably as Mr. Gladstone himself. She was interested in everything except what was trivial. Her intellectual vitality was remarkable; visitors who knew nothing of her special interests or pursuits were yet delighted by the stimulating freshness of her talk. She liked to keep herself au courant with all that was going on in the political and learned worlds. The letters to her from more than one Indian Viceroy show that the pleasant gossip from the lobbies or the Universities, with which she relieved her discourses on drains, was keenly appreciated. If the visitor talked of matters which appealed to her, she was instantly curious of detail. “Yes,” she would say, leaning forward, “and what about this or that? and have you thought of doing so and so?” Or if some difficulty were propounded, “I wonder if I could help you at all? The person to speak to is Mr. A. or Mr. B. Do you think that he would be so good as to come and see me?” “I am sure he would feel honoured.” “Then do you think I might write to him? or you will ask him? Very well, then we will see what can be done.” And so a new network of helpful influence would be made. To younger visitors—a London clergyman, it may be, or a student, or a budding official—she would show something of the maternal solicitude that was conspicuous in her intercourse with nursing “daughters.” “But you are not looking well to-day. You have been sitting up too late? Yes? Then you must promise me to take better care of yourself.” Or, “Are you careful to take regular meals? No? Then you must let an old nurse give you some good advice.” The humour which was characteristic of Miss Nightingale came more readily perhaps to her pen than to her tongue; but she always enjoyed a joke in conversation—even, as we have heard already from one of her nursing friends, at her own expense. Sometimes she was teasing. A High Church young lady once went to South Street. She was delighted with her interview, but Miss Nightingale, she said, “laughed at High Church curates a good deal: she said they had no foreheads.” She sometimes quizzed even her greatest friends. She used to talk with humorous indignation of Mr. Jowett's God as a “man-jelly,” in contrast with the future life of work which she looked forward to.
It was in the bedroom above described, or in the smaller room in front with which it communicated, that the greater part of Miss Nightingale's life for forty-five years was passed. She seldom went out of doors in London. It was believed that occasionally, at times when her heart and nerves were giving her less than the usual sense of weakness, she went out on foot into the Park; but the belief was only whispered: it was a point of honour amongst her circle to respect her house-ridden seclusion. The secret may now be divulged, on the authority of many notes from Sir Harry Verney, that he lured her out now and then for a morning drive and stroll in the Park, especially in rhododendron-time, “to remind her of Embley,” as aforesaid. Miss Nightingale, except in the few travel-years of her youth, had little enjoyment from nature in its grander or larger aspects, but she knew how to find pleasure in the commoner sights and sounds; in flowers and birds, and in London skies. There was a tree in the garden of Dorchester House where the birds used to gather, and from which they flew to be fed at Miss Nightingale's window. She had studied the dietary of birds as carefully as of hospital patients, and imparted the rudiments of such lore to the “Dicky-Bird Society.”[186] In the country she liked to have a view from her bedroom of trees and flowers, and often in the early morning watches she wrote down her observations. Her balcony at Lea Hurst gave her a great deal of pleasure. It is large, being the top of the drawing-room bow; you see a wide stretch of sky from it, and it commands the view described by Mrs. Gaskell.[187] At Claydon she had her pet birds and squirrels, and used to write about them to Sir Harry's grandchildren. She took a great interest in elementary education, and insisted almost as much upon the importance of simple nature studies as upon that of physical training. “On very fine noondays in London,” she wrote (Dec. 1888), “when there is nearly as much light as there is in a country dusk, the storm-like effects of the sun peeping out are more like the light streaming from the Glory in Heaven of the old Italian Masters than anything I know. And I wonder whether the poor people see it. And in old days when I walked out of doors, the murky effect at the end of the perspective of a long dull street running E. and W. was a real peep into heaven. I should teach these things in Board Schools to children condemned to live their lives in the streets of London, as I would teach the botany of leaves and trees and flowers to country children.” Cheap popular books were much wanted giving account of “the habits, structure, and characters (what they are about, not classification) of plants as living beings”; and of birds treated in like fashion, and not from the point of view of ornithological classification. “I had a lovely little popular book with woodcuts, published in Calcutta,” she wrote,[188] “on the plants of Bengal. The author, an Englishman, offered me to write one on English plants in the same fashion; but one of the most popular and enterprising of all our publishers refused on the ground that it would not tell in Board School examinations and therefore would not pay.”
V
During the years following her father's death (1874), Miss Nightingale devoted much time to the society of her mother, and this took her for a considerable part of each year out of London. In 1874 she and her mother spent a month at Claydon (Aug.–Sept.), and then two months at Lea Hurst. In 1875 the experiment was tried of taking a house at Upper Norwood, and there Miss Nightingale lived with her mother for some weeks (June–July). “I am out of humanity's reach,” wrote Florence to Madame Mohl (June 18): “in a red villa like a monster lobster: a place which has no raison d'être except the raison d'être of lobsters or crabs—viz. to go backward and to feed and be fed upon. Stranger vicissitudes than mine in life few men have had—vicissitudes from slavery to power, and from power to slavery again. It does not seem like a vicissitude: a red villa at Norwood: yet it is the strangest I yet have had. It is the only time for 22 years that my work has not been the first cause for where I should live and how I should live. Here it is the last. It is the caricature of a life.” The lobster-like villa was, however, soon given up. Mrs. Nightingale longed to be taken to her home—though, strictly, hers no longer, and from July to October she and Florence were at Lea Hurst. The year's routine now became fixed. The care of Mrs. Nightingale in London was undertaken by her nephew, Mr. Shore Smith, and his wife. She lived with them in their house in York Place, and from July or August in each year to November or December the Shore Smith family, with Mrs. Nightingale and her companion, moved to Lea Hurst, and there also Florence went—sometimes going to Lea Hurst before the others arrived, and sometimes staying there when they were absent.[189] Mr. Shore Smith was “more than son and daughter to her,” Mrs. Nightingale said; and Florence, during her residence at Lea Hurst, devoted a stated number of hours each day—generally two or three in the morning—to companionship with her mother. In the country, as in South Street, Miss Nightingale constantly had nursing friends to stay with her. “At Lea Hurst,” writes the friend already quoted, “she was as good to us as in London. I remember being there once with another of her pupils, and she told us that the rooms assigned to us had been the nurseries of her childhood. Long drives were contrived for us; luncheon was packed in the waggonette, and excursions were mapped out. During our visit Mr. Jowett came for a few days; he was very pleasant to us and full of kindness. I remember his speaking of a quality in our hostess which always struck us; I mean the thoroughness in all details of her hospitality, even to putting flowers in our rooms, gathered by herself in the garden. Miss Nightingale thought one of us was tired, and said she was not to get up too early in the morning. Mr. Jowett reminded us in this connection of the man who made a virtue of always rising very early and who was ‘conceited all the morning and cross all the afternoon.’”
At Lea Hurst, during these years, Miss Nightingale devoted herself to her poorer neighbours, and threw into the task the thoroughness and system which characterized all her doings. She took a part in establishing a village coffee-room and a village library, and in organizing mothers' meetings. She gave doles to all deserving families. The dossiers which she kept of their characters and circumstances were as careful as those referring to the Nightingale Probationers. There are sheets and sheets amongst her papers, on which she entered the quantities of each kind of provision supplied to each family, as elaborate as the purveying accounts which she kept at Scutari. She was a sort of National Health Insurance scheme (non-contributory) for the neighbourhood; for she employed a doctor to attend the sick and infirm at her expense, and to report fully to her on all the cases. There are fifty letters from him in this sort during a single year, and as many of a like kind from the village schoolmaster, whom she commissioned to give extra tuition to promising pupils. There were those who thought that Miss Nightingale wasted on these rustic cares energies that might swell the great wave of the world. Among the number was her old friend, Madame Mohl. “Now, my own Flo,” she wrote (Oct. 16, 1879), “you believe me, I am sure, to love you truly; therefore you will bear what I say, and also you believe me to have common sense: you can't help believing it, I defy you! Now I declare that if you don't leave that absurd place, Lea Hurst, immediately, you must be a little insane—partially, not entirely; and that if you saw another person knowingly risking a life that might be useful dans les grandes choses d'ensemble to potter after sick individuals, and if you were in a lucid moment you would say, ‘That person is not quite sane or she has not the strength of will to follow her judgment in her actions.’” Miss Nightingale was not well pleased by this letter. She felt something of the sort herself; but it is one thing to doubt our own wisdom, and quite another to hear it doubted even by our oldest friends. Miss Nightingale replied that she was doing her duty, which was a duty of affection, to her mother, and Madame Mohl, with ready tact, explained her letter away by saying that the real reason of it was only a selfish impatience to see her dear “Flochen” in London.
Miss Nightingale's mother was now very old; her mind was barely coherent; and it would perhaps have been much the same to her if Florence had not been by her side. Yet the actual presence was a great comfort; and Miss Nightingale, whose calls in earlier life had estranged her somewhat from her mother, was the more anxious to be with her now. There were gleams of brightness in the mother's manner which touched the daughter deeply. “Her mind,” she afterwards wrote, “was like the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel—darkened, blotted, effaced, and with great gaps; but if you looked and looked and accustomed your eye to the dimness and the broken lights, there were the noble forms transparent through the darkness.”[190] Mother and daughter had much converse on spiritual things. At other times, pride and pleasure in her famous daughter were mixed in the mother's mind with the regrets of earlier years. “Where is Florence?” she once asked, in the daughter's absence; “is she still in her hospital? I suppose she will never marry now.” She loved to have Longfellow's poem read to her; “it is all true,” she would say, “all real.” When Florence came, the mother loved her presence dearly. “Who are you? Oh, yes, I see you are Florence. Stay with me. Do not leave me. It makes me so happy to see you sitting by me. You come down to teach us to love; but you have so much that is important to do, you must not stay with me.” “Oh, are you my dearest Florence? I ought to kiss your hand, I am sure.” The daughter's wit cheered her mother. “You have a right to laugh,” she said; “so few of us have. You are so good—so much better than the rest of us. You do me so much good.”
Something of the same impression was made by Miss Nightingale upon all who visited her, whether at Lea Hurst or in her upper room at South Street. She was often lonely and despondent, and accounted herself, as we have heard, the weakest of human vessels, the lowest of God's servants. To those who knew her well, she was a tower of strength. Mr. Jowett used to say that he never saw Miss Nightingale or received a letter from her without feeling strengthened for his duties. The thought of her working in solitude was constantly with him. “I think no day passes,” he wrote to her, “in which I do not think of you and your work with pride and affection.” If men admired Miss Nightingale, women worshipped her. To many a devoted woman, who had learnt from her example and who was inspired by her friendship, she was “My Mistress and Queen,” or “My Hero Saint.” Women of the great world laid at her feet an almost equal adoration, and young girls had something of the same feeling. “I used at first to be shy with her,” says one of them, “but when I was older and talked more freely, I found her the most charming person to talk to. She always seemed interested and glad to see one. I always used to come away with a sort of buoyant feeling. She seemed to raise one into a different atmosphere.” “I shall ever remember my visit to you,” wrote her “ever affectionate Luise” (the Grand Duchess of Baden) in 1879, “as one of those moments coming directly out of God's hand and leading men's hearts up to Him in thankfulness. It belongs to those things which are in themselves a sanctuary.”[191] And Lady Ashburton, who still came sometimes to see the friend of earlier days, her “Beloved Zoë,” wrote: “I like to think of you in your tower—so high up above us all”; and, again, “I am humbled in the dust when I think of what you say of me—poor, wretched, profitableless me, and yourself the guiding-star to so many of our lives.”
VI
The friends to whom Miss Nightingale wrote most regularly on matters other than business, and in whose visits she took the greatest intellectual pleasure, were, next to Mr. Jowett, Monsieur and Madame Mohl. Her letters to them show some of her more general interests:—