She coveted the ability to work more rapidly. She admired that ability, and perhaps overvalued it, in others. She once wrote to me: “Where do you find time to do so many things? One of the griefs of my life is to see other persons getting things done—really done—and I accomplish so little. I don’t see how they do it.”
No more could they see how she did it; but she did it by working with an industry and devotion that never found an easy way of accomplishing results.
A friend of hers was deeply interested in a movement for which he wished the endorsement of Clara Barton. She believed in the work he was doing, and was willing to commend it; but she wanted to know a little more about it, and then she wanted time to think out what she wanted to say about it. He became very desirous of having her commendation in time for a particular use; and his wife invited Clara Barton to their home to dine. She willingly accepted, and enjoyed the visit. She knew the family, and held them in high esteem. After dinner, and some conversation, the man produced a typewritten statement of some length which he had prepared, endorsing his work. This he read to her, and she liked it. But when she understood that he had prepared this for her to sign, she was shocked. She refused to sign it.
Her friend could not at first understand her scruples. Did she not believe in this work? She did. Had she not expressed to him her approval and signified her willingness to furnish him a statement which he would be at liberty to publish? She had. Had she not listened to his reading of this very statement with expressions of hearty approval? She had. Was there anything in it she would like to change? If so, she was at liberty to make any erasure or interlineation she desired. No; there was nothing she cared to change, except that she cared to change everything in it.
He assured her that he was asking nothing of her which men of the highest honor did not do constantly; that in a busy world people had to avail themselves of assistance such as he offered her; that his own standards of honor were high, and he would never think of asking her to sign a statement which did not fully express her own convictions.
All this she understood, and she did not censure him. But she could not do what he asked of her. The statement which he had prepared was not hers. The opinions expressed were in full accord with her own, and the language was as good as any she could have chosen, and there was nothing in the document to which she could object; but it was not hers.
Her idea of a document which she could sign as her own was one which she should have thought out on first wakening, perhaps in the middle of the night, and sketched in pencil on the pages of the little pad at the head of her bed, and then thoughtfully copied in her own hand with careful weighing of each word and phrase. That would have been her own.
Certainly that was a needlessly narrow conception of the extent to which she might honorably have employed the minds and willing hands of others in her own too heavy toil. But it was a conception grounded in the highest possible conviction of honor.
Clara Barton was a self-willed woman. So was Mother Bickerdyke. So was Dorothea Dix. So, most emphatically and uncomfortably for those who withstood her, was Florence Nightingale. If comparisons were in order, which they certainly are not, she was not the least considerate of the four of other people’s opinion, nor most reluctant to admit herself in the wrong. Like Florence Nightingale, she had opportunities of marriage in her youth, and resolutely turned to other work under force of a strong conviction, and that conviction had mighty impelling power. Lytton Strachey, in his remarkably penetrating sketch, says:
Every one knows the popular conception of Florence Nightingale. The saintly, self-sacrificing woman, the delicate maiden of high degree who threw aside the pleasures of a life of ease to succor the afflicted, the Lady with the Lamp, gliding through the horrors of the hospital at Scutari, and consecrating with the radiance of her goodness the dying soldier’s couch—the vision is familiar to all. But the truth was different. The Miss Nightingale of fact was not as facile as fancy painted her. She worked in another fashion, and toward another end; she moved under the stress of an impetus which finds no place in the popular imagination. A Demon possessed her. Now demons, whatever else they may be, are full of interest. And so it happens that in the real Miss Nightingale there was more that was interesting than in the legendary one; there was also less that was agreeable.