Mr. Jowett, moreover, was very ill in the same year—having a serious heart attack, from which he barely recovered and which was premonitory of the end. At the beginning of October he spent a few days at Claydon with Sir Harry Verney and Miss Nightingale. On returning to Oxford he was worse. “You will be tired of hearing from me,” he said to her in a dictated letter of farewell (Oct. 16), “and I begin to think that I may as well cease. Many interesting things have been revealed to me in my illness, of which I should like to talk to you. I never had an idea of what death was, or of what the human body was before, and am very far from knowing now. I am always thankful for having known you. I try to go on to the end as I was. I hope you will do so too; it is best. I hope that you may continue many years, and that you may do endless kindnesses to others. Will you cast a look sometimes on my old friends, Miss Knight and Mrs. [T. H.] Green, and my two young friends, F. and J.? It would please me if you could say a word to them from time to time. But perhaps it is rather drivelling to try and make things permanent which are already passing away. Ever yours affectionately, B. J.” He thought that he was on the point of death, and in a will made at this time he bequeathed “£2000 to Miss Nightingale for certain purposes.” It was the sum which he had meant to contribute to the “Nightingale Professorship of Statistics.” He rallied, however, and begged her to do as she had offered, and come over from Claydon to see him. “I am delighted to hear,” he wrote (Nov. 18), “that you will do me the honour to come to Balliol to see me. Acland will send his carriage for you to the station. It will be a great event for me to have a visit from you.” Mr. Jowett was spared for nearly two years, and he still came from time to time to see her. “I want to hold fast to you, dear friend,” he wrote (May 26, 1892), “as I go down the hill. You and I are agreed that the last years of life are in a sense the best, and that the most may be made of them even at a time when health and strength may seem to be failing.” In August 1893 Mr. Jowett was again very ill. He dictated a letter to Miss Nightingale, commending some of his friends to her once more. He rallied a little and came up to London to stay with Mr. and Mrs. Lewis Campbell. On September 18 he dictated his last letter to Miss Nightingale: “We called upon you yesterday in South Street, but finding no one at home supposed you had migrated to Claydon. Fare you well! How greatly am I indebted to you for all your affection. How large a part has your life been of my life. There is only time I think for a few words.” On October 1 he died at the house of Mr. Justice Wright in Hampshire, to which he had gone a few days before. “Do you know,” wrote Miss Nightingale to Mrs. Clough (Nov. 7), “that he sometimes felt glad in the society of ‘Clough’ during his last illness? He was in London at the house of those dear Lewis Campbells for doctoring and nursing from September 16 to 23rd. He was lying in the way he liked—silent, with Mr. Lewis Campbell sitting beside him—when suddenly he opened his eyes and said, ‘Oh, is it you? I thought it was Clough.’” Pinned to Miss Nightingale's letter, there is one which Mr. Jowett had written, thirty-two years before, to Mrs. Clough on the death of his friend, her husband. In it he had said: “I loved him and think of him daily. I should like to have the memory of him, and also of Miss Nightingale, present with me in death, as of the two persons whose example I value most, as having ‘walked by faith.’”
Miss Nightingale had other bereavements at this time. “I have lost,” she wrote, “the three nearest to me in twelve months” (1893–94). In February 1894, Sir Harry Verney died, and she felt the loss of “his courage, his courtesy, his kindness.” In August, her cousin, Mr. Shore Smith, died—“her boy” of the old days, whom throughout his life she had regarded with something of a mother's love; nor had she ever forgotten the fond and dutiful affection which he had shown towards her own mother. Miss Nightingale felt the three losses deeply, but a note of serenity marked her old age. “This is a sad birthday, dearest,” she wrote a little later; “but let me send a few roses to say what words cannot say. There is so much to live for. I have lost much in failures and disappointment, as well as in grief; but, do you know, life is more precious to me now in my old age.” The place left vacant by Mr. Jowett's death was in some respects filled henceforth by the Rev. Thory Gage Gardiner, who from time to time administered the Sacrament to Miss Nightingale in her room, and in whose work in South London she came to take a lively interest.
The Professorship which Mr. Jowett and Miss Nightingale were to have founded was never realized. Miss Nightingale had laid the scheme aside at the end of 1891—“with a sore heart,” she said, for it had been “an object of a lifetime.” Mr. Jowett, knowing that she had abandoned the scheme, had omitted his bequest in a new will made during his last illness. But when three years later she in turn came to make her will she still had the scheme in mind. It was a trust, she used to say, committed to her by M. Quetelet and Dr. Farr, and it was connected with memories of Mr. Jowett. She gave accordingly “to Francis Galton £2000 for certain purposes,” and declared that “the same shall be paid in priority to all other bequests given by her Will for charitable and other purposes.” Her hope was that the £2000 would suffice for some educational work in the use of Statistics, but Mr. Galton differed, and in the following year she revoked the bequest by Codicil. A pencilled note found among her Papers gives the reason: “I recall or revoke the legacy of £2000 to Mr. Francis Galton because he does not think it sufficient for the purpose I wished and proposes a small Endowment for Research, which I believe will only end in endowing some bacillus or microbe, and I do not wish that.”
IV
Miss Nightingale's life, said Mr. Jowett, had been a large part of his. That his life had also been a large part of hers, this Memoir will have shown. Few men or women had known him so well, and into the inscription which she sent with her flowers she distilled her memories: “In loving remembrance of Professor Jowett, the Genius of Friendship, above all the Friend of God.” Among the many letters which she received about his death none touched or interested her so much as those of Lord Lansdowne:—
Simla, October 11. Our dear old friend is, as far as his bodily presence in our midst is concerned, lost to us. It is a real sorrow to me. I had no more constant friend, and I cannot[401] express the gratitude with which I look back to his unfailing interest in all that befell me and to his help and guidance at times when they were most needed. His saying that he meant to get better “because he had yet so much to do” is touching and characteristic. He was one who would never have sate down and said that his task was done, or that he was entitled to rest from toil for the remainder of his days. It would, however, be very far from the truth to think that his work was at an end because he is no longer here to carry it on with his own hands.
Simla, October 25. Of all the true and appreciative words which you have written of him, none seem to me truer than those in which you speak almost impatiently of the shallow fools who thought that he had “no religion.” His religion always seemed to me nearer to that which The Master taught his followers than that of any other man or woman whom I have met, and I doubt whether any one of our time has done so much to spread true religion and Christianity in the best sense of the word.
All this was precisely and profoundly what Miss Nightingale felt about her friend. Of all men whom she had known, none seemed to her to have led a Christian life more consistently than Mr. Jowett. In her thoughts about him she had only one regret. It was that their friendship had never resulted in any formal re-statement of religious doctrine. She had not been able to put into any such form as satisfied him the scheme of Theodicy which they had discussed during thirty years, and he had devoted too much time, she thought, to criticism and too little to reconstruction. But in religious practice, how rich was his legacy—both in precept and in example! In letters of his later years, no thought had been more often expressed by Mr. Jowett than that of Browning's Rabbi Ben Ezra—a poem which he was constantly recommending to Miss Nightingale. And there was another poem which he sent her: The Song Celestial, translated from the Mahâbhârata by Sir Edwin Arnold. “I think,” he wrote (Nov. 6, 1886), “it expresses some of the deepest thoughts of the human heart.” These two poems which Miss Nightingale read, marked, and learnt, were to set the note of her last years.