Florence Nightingale.

(From a model of the statue by A. G. Walker. By kind permission of the Sculptor.)

FLORENCE
NIGHTINGALE

A BIOGRAPHY

BY
ANNIE MATHESON
AUTHOR OF
“THE STORY OF A BRAVE CHILD (JOAN OF ARC)”

THOMAS NELSON AND SONS
LONDON, EDINBURGH, DUBLIN, AND NEW YORK

“The Lady with the Lamp.”

(From the statuette in the Nightingale Home.)

PREFACE.

It is hardly necessary to say that this little biography is based mainly upon the work of others, though I hope and believe it is honest enough to have an individuality of its own and it has certainly cost endless individual labour and anxiety. Few tasks in literature are in practice more worrying than the responsibility of “piecing together” other people’s fragments, and “the great unknown” who in reviewing my “Leaves of Prose” thought I had found an easy way of turning myself into respectable cement for a tessellated pavement made of other people’s chipped marble, was evidently a stranger to my particular temperament. Where I have been free to express myself without regard to others, to use only my own language, and utter only my own views, I have had something of the feeling of a child out for a holiday, and of course the greater part of the book is in my own words. But I have often, for obvious reasons, chosen the humbler task, because, wherever it is possible, it is good that my readers should have their impressions at first hand, and in regard to Kinglake especially, from whose non-copyright volumes I have given many a page, his masculine tribute to Miss Nightingale is of infinitely more value than any words which could come from me.

My publisher has kindly allowed me to leave many questions of copyright to him, but I wish, not the less—rather the more—to thank all those authors and publishers who have permitted use of their material and whose names will, in many instances, be found incorporated in the text or in the accompanying footnotes. I have not thought it necessary in every instance to give a reference to volume and page, though occasionally, for some special reason of my own, I have done so.

Of those in closest touch with Miss Nightingale during her lifetime, whose help with original material has been invaluable, not more than one can be thanked by name. But to Mrs. Tooley for her large-hearted generosity with regard to her own admirable biography—to which I owe far more than the mere quotations so kindly permitted, and in most cases so clearly acknowledged in the text—it is a great pleasure to express my thanksgiving publicly.

There are many others who have helped me, and not once with regard to the little sketch have I met with any unkindness or rebuff. Indeed, so various are the acknowledgments due, and so sincere the gratitude I feel, that I scarcely know where to begin.

To Miss Rickards, for the pages from her beautiful life of Felicia Skene, I wish to record heartfelt thanks; and also to Messrs. Burns and Oates with regard to lengthy quotations from the letters of Sister Aloysius—a deeply interesting little volume published by them in 1904, under the title of “A Sister of Mercy’s Memories of the Crimea;” to Dr. Hagberg Wright of the London Library for the prolonged loan of a whole library of books of reference and the help always accessible to his subscribers; and to the librarian of the Derby Free Library for aid in verifying pedigree. Also to Lord Stanmore for his generous permission to use long extracts from his father’s “Life of Lord Herbert,” from which more than one valuable letter has been taken; and to Mr. John Murray for sanctioning this and for like privileges in relation to the lives of Sir John MacNeill and Sir Bartle Frere. To Messrs. William Blackwood, Messrs. Cassell, Messrs. G. P. Putnam and Sons, as well as to the editors and publishers of the Times, Daily Telegraph, Morning Post, and Evening News, I wish to add my thanks to those of my publisher.

To any reader of this book it will be clear how great a debt I owe to General Evatt, and he knows, I think, how sincerely I recognize it. Mr. Stephen Paget, the writer of the article on Miss Nightingale in the Dictionary of National Biography, has not only permitted me to quote from that—a privilege for which I must also thank Messrs. Smith Elder, and Sir Sidney Lee—but has, in addition, put me in the way of other priceless material wherewith to do honour to the subject of this biography. I have long been grateful to him for the inspiration and charm of his own “Confessio Medici”—there is now this other obligation to add to that.

Nor can I forgo cordial acknowledgments to the writer and also the publisher of the charming sketch of Miss Nightingale’s Life published some years ago by the Pilgrim Press and entitled “The Story of Florence Nightingale.”

To my friend Dr. Lewis N. Chase I owe the rare privilege of an introduction to Mr. Walker, the sculptor, who has so graciously permitted for my frontispiece a reproduction of the statue he has just completed as a part of our national memorial to Miss Nightingale.

I desire to thank Miss Rosalind Paget for directing me to sources of information and bestowing on me treasures of time and of memory, as well as Miss Eleanor F. Rathbone and the writer of Sir John MacNeill’s Life for help given by their books, and Miss Marion Holmes for permission to quote from her inspiring monograph; and last, but by no means least, to express my sense of the self-sacrificing magnanimity with which Miss E. Brierly, the present editor of Nursing Notes, at once offered me and placed in my hands—what I should never have dreamed of asking, even had I been a friend of old standing, instead of a comparative stranger—everything she herself had gathered together and preserved as bearing on the life of Florence Nightingale.

When, under the influence of certain articles in the Times, I undertook to write this volume for Messrs. Nelson, I knew nothing of the other biographies in the field. Nor had I any idea that an officially authorized life was about to be written by Sir Edward Cook, a biographer with an intellectual equipment far beyond my own, but who will not perhaps grudge me the name of friend, since his courteous considerateness for all leads many others to make a like claim, and the knowledge that he would put no obstacle in my path has spared me what might have been a serious difficulty. Had I known all this, a decent modesty might have prevented my undertaking. But in every direction unforeseen help has been showered upon me, and nothing but my own inexorable limitations have stood in my way.

If there be any who, by their books, or in any other way, have helped me, but whom by some unhappy oversight I have omitted to name in these brief documentary thanks, I must earnestly beg them to believe that such an error is contrary to my intention and goodwill.

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER FOR THE ELDERS IN MY AUDIENCE.

It is my hope that my younger readers may find this volume all the more to their liking if it is not without interest to people of my own generation. Girls and boys of fourteen to sixteen are already on the threshold of manhood and womanhood, but even of children I am sure it is true that they hate to be “written down to,” since they are eagerly drinking in hopes and ideas which they cannot always put into words, and to such hopes and ideas they give eager sympathy of heart and curiosity of mind.

Florence Nightingale’s Home, Embley Park, Romsey, Hants.

For one of her St. Thomas’s nurses, among the first nine women to be decorated with the Red Cross, the heroine of this story wrote what might well be the marching orders of many a good soldier in the divine army, and not least, perhaps, of those boy scouts and girl guides who would like better a life of adventure than the discipline of a big school or the “duties enough and little cares” of a luxurious home; and as the words have not, so far as I am aware, appeared in print before, it may be worth while to give them here:—

“Soldiers,” she wrote, “must obey orders. And to you the ‘roughing’ it has been the resigning yourself to ‘comforts’ which you detested and to work which you did not want, while the work which wanted you was within reach. A severe kind of ‘roughing’ indeed—perhaps the severest, as I know by sad experience.

“But it will not last. This short war is not life. But all will depend—your possible future in the work, we pray for you, O my Cape of Good Hope—upon the name you gain here. That name I know will be of one who obeys authority, however unreasonable, in the name of Him who is above all, and who is Reason itself—of one who submits to disagreeables, however unjust, for the work’s sake and for His who tells us to love those we don’t like—a precept I follow oh so badly—of one who never criticizes so that it can even be guessed at that she has criticism in her heart—and who helps her companions to submit by her own noble example....

“I have sometimes found in my life that the very hindrances I had been deploring were there expressly to fit me for the next step in my life. (This was the case—hindrances of years—before the Crimean War.)” And elsewhere she writes: “To have secured for you all the circumstances we wished for your work, I would gladly have given my life. But you are made to rise above circumstances; perhaps this is God’s way—His ways are not as our ways—of preparing you for the great work which I am persuaded He has in store for you some day.”

It is touching to find her adding in parenthesis that before her own work was given to her by the Great Unseen Commander, she had ten years of contradictions and disappointments, and adding, as if with a sigh from the heart, “And oh, how badly I did it!”

There we have the humility of true greatness. All her work was amazing in its fruitfulness, but those who knew her best feel sometimes that the part of her work which was greatest of all and will endure longest is just the part of which most people know least. I mean her great labour of love for India, which I cannot doubt has already saved the lives of millions, and will in the future save the health and working power of millions more.

Florence Nightingale would have enriched our calendar of uncanonized saints even if her disciplined high-hearted goodness had exercised an unseen spell by simply being, and had, by some limitation of body or of circumstance, been cut off from much active doing: for so loving and obedient a human will, looking ever to the Highest, as a handmaiden watches the eyes of her mistress, is always and everywhere a humane influence and a divine offering. But in her life—a light set on a hill—being and doing went hand in hand in twofold beauty and strength, for even through those years when she lay on her bed, a secluded prisoner, her activities were world-wide.

In addition to the work for which she is most widely revered and loved, Miss Nightingale did three things—each leaving a golden imprint upon the history of our time:—

She broke down a “Chinese wall” of prejudice with regard to the occupations of women, and opened up a new and delightful sphere of hard, but congenial, work for girls.

She helped to reconstruct, on the lines of feminine common sense, the hygiene and the transport service of our army—yes, of the entire imperial army, for what is a success in one branch of our dominions cannot permanently remain unaccepted by the rest. And in all her work for our army she had, up to the time of his death, unbounded help from her friend, Lord Herbert.

Last, and perhaps greatest of all, she initiated, with the help of Sir Bartle Frere, Sir John Lawrence, and other enlightened men of her time, the reform of insanitary and death-dealing neglect throughout the length and breadth of India, thus saving countless lives, not only from death, but from what is far worse—a maimed or invalid existence of lowered vitality and lessened mental powers.

One of her friends, himself a great army doctor holding a high official position, has repeatedly spoken of her to me as the supreme embodiment of citizenship. She did indeed exemplify what Ruskin so nobly expressed in his essay on “Queens’ Gardens”—the fact that, while men and women differ profoundly and essentially, and life would lose in beauty if they did not, the state has need of them both; for what the woman should be at her own hearth, the guardian of order, of health, of beauty, and of love, that also should she be at that wider imperial hearth where there are children to be educated, soldiers to be equipped, wounded lives to be tended, and the health of this and future generations to be diligently guarded.

“Think,” she said once to one of her nurses, “less of what you may gain than of what you may give.” Herself, she gave royally—gave her fortune, her life, her soul’s treasure. I read in a recent contemporary of high standing a review which ended with what seemed to me a very heathen sentence, which stamped itself on my memory by its arrogant narrowness. “Woman,” wrote the reviewer, “is always either frustrate or absorbed;” and there leaped to my heart the exclamation, “Here in Florence Nightingale is the answer; for in her we have one, known and read of all men, who was neither the one nor the other.” That there was supreme renunciation in her life, none who is born to womanhood can doubt; for where could there be any who would have been more superbly fitted for what she herself regarded as the natural lot of woman as wife and mother? But she, brilliant, beautiful, and worshipped, was called to a more difficult and lonely path, and if there was hidden suffering, it did but make her service of mankind the more untiring, her practical and keen-edged intellect the more active in good work, her tenderness to pain and humility of self-effacement the more beautiful and just.

It has been said, and said truly, that she did not suffer fools gladly, and she knew well how very human she was in this and in other ways, as far removed from a cold and statuesque faultlessness as are all ardent, swift, loving natures here on earth. But her words were words of wisdom when she wrote to one dear to her whom she playfully named “her Cape of Good Hope”: “Let us be persecuted for righteousness’ sake, but not for unrighteousness.”

The italics are mine, because in their warning they seem so singularly timely. And the entire sentence is completely in tune with that fine note with which she ends one of her delightful volumes on nursing—

“I would earnestly ask my sisters to keep clear of both the jargons now current everywhere (for they are equally jargons): of the jargon, namely, about the ‘rights’ of women which urges women to do all that men do, including the medical and other professions, merely because men do it, and without regard to whether this is the best that women can do; and of the jargon which urges women to do nothing that men do, merely because they are women, and should be ‘recalled to a sense of their duty as women,’ and because ‘this is women’s work,’ and ‘that is men’s,’ and ‘these are things which women should not do,’ which is all assertion and nothing more. Surely woman should bring the best she has, whatever that is, to the work of God’s world, without attending to either of these cries. For what are they, both of them, the one just as much as the other, but listening to the ‘what people will say,’ to opinion, to the ‘voices from without’? And as a wise man has said, no one has ever done anything great or useful by listening to the voices from without.

“You do not want the effect of your good things to be, ‘How wonderful for a woman!’ nor would you be deterred from good things by hearing it said, ‘Yes, but she ought not to have done this, because it is not suitable for a woman.’ But you want to do the thing that is good, whether it is ‘suitable for a woman,’ or not.

“It does not make a thing good, that it is remarkable that a woman should have been able to do it. Neither does it make a thing bad, which would have been good had a man done it, that it has been done by a woman.

“Oh, leave these jargons, and go your way straight to God’s work, in simplicity and singleness of heart.”

CHAPTER I.

Florence Nightingale: her home, her birthplace, and her family.

In the heart of Derbyshire there is a quaint old church, once a private chapel, and possessing, instead of a churchyard, a bit of quiet greenness, of which the chief ornament, besides the old yew tree at the church door, is a kind of lovers’ bower made by two ancient elder trees which have so intertwined their branches as to form an arbour, where in summer-time sweethearts can gossip and the children play. It belonged to a world far away from the world of to-day, when, in the high-backed pews reserved for the “quality,” little Florence Nightingale, in her Sunday attire that was completed by Leghorn hat and sandal shoes, made, Sunday after Sunday, a pretty vision for the villagers, in whose cottages she was early a welcome visitor. It was just such a church as we read of in George Eliot’s stories, clerk and parson dividing the service between them, and the rustic bareness of the stone walls matched by the visible bell-ropes and the benches for the labouring people. But the special story that has come down from those days suggests that the parson was more satirical than Mr. Gilfil or Mr. Tryan, and it is to be feared that when he remarked that “a lie is a very useful thing in trade,” the people who quoted him in Derby market-place merely used his “Devil’s text” as a convenience and saw no satire in it at all. Have we really travelled a little way towards honesty since those days, or have we grown more hypocritical?

The little girl in the squire’s pew grew up in a home where religious shams were not likely to be taken at their face value.

Her father, who was one of the chief supporters of the cheap schools of the neighbourhood, had his own ways of helping the poor folk on his estate, but used to reply to some of the beseeching people who wanted money from him for local charities that he was “not born generous.” Generous or not, he had very decided views about the education of his two children, Florence and Parthe. They enjoyed nearly a hundred years ago (Florence was born in 1820) as liberal a course of study as any High School girl of to-day, and no doubt it is true that the orderliness of mind and character, at which his methods aimed, proved of countless value to Florence in those later days, when her marvellous power in providing for minutest details without unnecessary fuss or friction banished the filth and chaos of the first Crimean hospitals, and transformed them into abodes of healing and of order. She grew up to be a beautiful and charming woman, for whom men would gladly have laid down their lives; yet her beauty and her charm alone could not have secured for our wounded soldiers in the Crimea, tortured by dirt and neglect, the swift change to cleanness and comfort and good nursing which her masterly and unbending methods aided her commanding personal influence to win.

But this is leaping too far ahead. As yet she is only Parthenope’s little playfellow and schoolfellow in the room devoted to “lessons” at Lea Hall, the small maiden who climbs the hill on Sundays to the church where the yew tree guards the door, and on week-days is busy or at play in the house that has been the home of her father’s family through many generations, and in the grounds of the manor that surround it.

Lea Hall is in that part of the country which Father Benson has described in his novel, “Come Rack, come Rope,” and the Nightingale children were within easy reach of Dethick Hall, where young Anthony Babington had lived. It must have added zest to their history lessons and their girlish romancings to hear of the secret passage, which was supposed to lead right into Wingfield Manor, from the underground cellar close to the old wall that showed still where Dethick had once reared its stately buildings. The fact that the farm bailiff now kept his potatoes there and could not find the opening, would only make it a constant new ground for adventure and imagination. For they would be told of course—these children—how Mary Stuart had once been a prisoner at Dethick, and Anthony had vowed to be her servant in life or death and never cease from the struggle to set her free so long as life was in him. Nor did he; for he died before her, and it was not at Wingfield, but at Fotheringay, as these little students very well knew, no doubt, that her lovely head soon afterwards was laid upon the block.

Enviable children to have such a playground of imagination at their doors! But, indeed, all children have that, and a bare room in a slum, or a little patch of desert ground, may for them be danced over by Queen Mab and all her fairies, or guarded by the very angel who led St. Peter out of prison. Still, it is very exciting to have history written beside the doorstep where you live, and if you grow up in a home where lesson books are an important part of the day’s duties, it is pleasant to find them making adventures for you on your father’s own estate. It mattered nothing that the story would all be told by those contending against Anthony’s particular form of religion, who would be ready to paint him with as black an ink as their regard for justice would allow. To a child, that would rather enhance the vividness of it all. And there was the actual kitchen still standing, with its little harmless-looking trapdoor in the roof that leads into the secret chamber, where the persecuted priests used to hide when they came to celebrate a secret Mass. No wonder the two children delighted in Dethick, and wove many a tale about it. For had they not seen with their very own eyes the great open fireplace in that kitchen, where venison used to be roasted, and the very roasting-jack hanging from its central beam where all the roof-beams were black with age and dark with many tragic memories?

Dethick is but one of the three villages included in the ancient manor, the other two are Lea and Holloway; and in the days of King John, long before it came to the Nightingales, the De Alveleys had built a chapel there. Those who have read Mr. Skipton’s life of Nicholas Ferrar and know their John Inglesant, will be interested to hear that half this manor had passed through the hands of the Ferrars among others, and another portion had belonged to families whose names suggest a French origin. But the two inheritances had now met in the hands of the Nightingales.

It is a very enchanting part of the Midlands. The silvery Derwent winds through the valleys, keeping fresh the fields of buttercups and meadowsweet and clover, and in the tall hedges wild roses mingle their sweetness with the more powerful fragrance of the honeysuckle, until both yield to the strange and overwhelming perfume of the elder tree. The limestone hills, with their bold and mountainlike outline, their tiny rills, and exquisite ferns, had been less spoiled in those days by the tramp of tourists; and the purity of the air, the peacefulness of the upland solitudes, would have a wholesome share in the “grace that can mould the maiden’s form by silent sympathy.”

Florence Nightingale’s Father.

It was a very youthful little maiden as yet who had been transplanted into these English wilds from the glory and the sunshine of the Italy where she was born. After the valley of the Arno and the splendours of Florence, it may have seemed somewhat cold and bracing at times. Rightly or wrongly, the father of the little girls—for our heroine’s sister, named after another Italian city, shared all her life at this time—seems to a mere outsider a little cold and bracing too. He came of a very old family, and we hear of his “pride of birth.” His wife, on the other hand, whom Florence Nightingale resembled, lives before us in more warm and glowing colours, as one who did much to break down the barriers of caste and, with a heart of overflowing love, “went about doing good.” Both were people of real cultivation—good breeding being theirs by a happy inheritance—and each seems to have had a strong and distinctive personality. It might not be easy to say to which of the two the little daughter, who grew to such world-wide fame, owed most; but probably the equipment for her life-work was fairly divided between the two. There is no magnet so powerful as force of character, and it is clear that her father possessed moral and intellectual force of a notable sort. Love, in the sense of enthusiasm for humanity, will always be the heaven-born gift of one in whom religion is such a reality as it was with Florence Nightingale, but religious ardour may be sadly ineffective if defeated by the slack habits of a lifetime, or even by a moral and mental vagueness that befogs holy intentions. Mr. Edward Nightingale’s daughters were disciplined in a schoolroom where slackness and disorder were not permitted, and a somewhat severe training in the classics was supplemented by the example of Mrs. Nightingale’s excellent housewifery, and by that fine self-control in manners and behaviour which in the old-fashioned days used to be named “deportment.” Sports and outdoor exercises were a part—and a delightful part—of the day’s routine.

But let us go back a few years and give a few pages to the place of Florence Nightingale’s birth and the history of her family. Her name, like that of another social reformer among Englishwomen, was linked with Italy, and she took it from the famous old Italian town in whose neighbourhood she was born. I have tried in vain to trace the authorship[1]—was it Ruskin or some less known writer?—who said of that town, “if you wish to see it to perfection, fix upon such a day as Florence owes the sun, and, climbing the hill of Bellosguardo, or past the stages of the Via Crucis to the church of San Miniato, look forth upon the scene before you. You trace the course of the Arno from the distant mountains on the right, through the heart of the city, winding along the fruitful valley toward Pisa. The city is beneath you, like a pearl set in emerald. All colours are in the landscape, and all sounds are in the air. The hills look almost heathery. The sombre olive and funereal cypress blend with the graceful acacia and the clasping vine. The hum of the insect and the carol of bird chime with the blithe voices of men; while dome, tower, mountains, the yellow river, the quaint bridges, spires, palaces, gardens, and the cloudless heavens overhanging, make up a panorama on which to gaze in trance of rapture until the spirit wearies from the exceeding beauty of the vision.”

When on May 12, 1820, Florence Nightingale was born, her parents were staying at the Villa Colombaia, near to this beautiful City of Flowers; and when the question of a name for her arose, they were of one mind about it—she must be called after the city itself. They had no sons, and this child’s elder sister, their only other daughter, having been born at Naples, had taken its ancient and classical name of Parthenope.[2]

Their own family name had changed. Mr. Nightingale, who was first known as William Edward Shore, was the only son of Mr. William Shore of Tapton, in Derbyshire, and the child who was to reform England’s benighted views of nursing, and do so much for the health, not only of our British troops, but also of our Indian Army, was related through that family to John Shore, a famous physician in Derby in the reign of Charles the Second, as well as to the Governor-General of India who, twenty-three years before her birth, took the title of Baron Teignmouth. It was through her father’s mother, the only daughter of Mr. Evans of Cromford, that she was linked with the family of the Nightingales, whose name her father afterwards took. Mary Evans, her paternal grandmother, was the niece of “Old Peter,” a rich and roystering squire, who was well liked in his own neighbourhood, in spite of his nickname of “Madman Peter” and the rages that now and then overtook him. Florence Nightingale was, however, no descendant of his, for he never married, and all his possessions, except those which he sold to Sir Richard Arkwright, the famous cotton-spinner, came to his niece, who was the mother of Miss Nightingale’s father. When all this landed property came into the hands of Mr. Edward Shore, three years before his marriage and five years before Florence was born, his name was changed under the Prince Regent’s sign manual from Shore to Nightingale, in accordance with Peter Nightingale’s will. But he continued to live in Italy for a great part of every year until Florence was nearly five years old, though the change of ownership on the English estate was at once felt under the new squire, who was in most ways the very opposite of that “Old Peter,” of whom we read that when he had been drinking, as was then the fashion, he would frighten away the servant-maids by rushing into the kitchen and throwing the puddings on the dust-heap.

Mr. Edward Nightingale, our heroine’s father, bore a character without fear or reproach. Educated at Edinburgh and at Trinity, Cambridge, he had afterwards travelled a good deal, at a time when travel was by no means the commonplace that it is now.

He is described as “tall and slim,” and from the descriptions we have of him it is clear that no one, even at a glance, could have missed the note of distinction in his bearing, or mistaken him for other than that which he was proud to be, the cultivated and enlightened son of a fine old family.

When we read that the lady he married was daughter of a strong Abolitionist, Mr. William Smith of Parndon, in Essex, we feel that the very name of Abolitionist belongs to a bygone past.

In those days the American Civil War was still to come, but the horizon was already beginning to blacken for it, just as in Europe, while two happy little girls were playing hide-and-seek in the gardens of Lea Hall and racing with their dogs across the meadows to Dethick, the hush before the tempest did not blind wise statesmen to those dangers in the Near East which were to overwhelm us in so terrible a war.

Mr. Smith, in desiring ardently the abolition of slavery, was ahead of many Englishmen of his day. He was an eager philanthropist, who for half a century represented Norwich in Parliament, and had therefore real power in urging any good cause he had at heart. His daughter Frances, when she became Mrs. Nightingale, did not cease to labour among the poor in the spirit of her father and of her own benevolent heart. She was a beautiful and impressive woman, and in her untiring service of others seems to have been just the wife for Mr. Nightingale, who was ready to further every good work in his own neighbourhood. He, in his artistic and scholarly tastes, was as humane and enlightened as was the woman of his choice in her own skill of hand and charm of household guidance.

For Mrs. Nightingale was not only a notable housekeeper and her husband’s companion in the world of books, she was also a woman whose individuality of thought and action had been deepened by her practical faith, so that even at a time when England was still tied and bound by conventions of rank, from which the last fifty years have released many devotees, she felt the call of the Master to a deeper and wider sense of brotherhood, and had a great wish to break through artificial barriers.

As a matter of fact, she found many innocent ways of doing so. But she did not know in these early days that in giving to the world a little daughter who was akin to her in this, she had found the best way of all; for that daughter was to serve others in the very spirit of those great ones of old—S. Teresa and S. Catharine and the Blessed Joan of Arc—to whom the real things were so real and so continually present that the world’s voices were as nothing in comparison. This was true also of Mrs. Browning, whose memory has already come to mind, as linked, like that of Florence Nightingale, though for quite other reasons, with the City of Flowers; and although a life of action in the ordinary sense was impossible for the author of “Aurora Leigh,” yet it is remarkable how much she also did to arouse and set free her sisters, for she too, like the others, was a woman of great practical discernment.

The little peasant maid of France, who was born to be a warrior and the deliverer of her people, had this in common with the little English girl born to a great inheritance and aiming at a higher and humbler estate wherein she was the queen of nurses, that both cared so much for the commands from above as to be very little influenced by the gossip round about.

CHAPTER II.

Life at Lea Hurst and Embley.

Florence was between five and six years old when the Nightingales moved from Lea Hall into their new home at Lea Hurst, a house commanding a specially beautiful outlook, and built under Mr. Nightingale’s own supervision with much care and taste, about a mile from the old home. It is only fourteen miles out of Derby, though there would seem to be many sleepy inhabitants of that aristocratic old town—like the old lady of Hendon who lived on into the twentieth century without having been into the roaring city of London hard by—who know nothing of the attractions within a few miles of them; for Mrs. Tooley tells an amusing story of a photographer there who supposed Lea Hurst to be a distinguished man and a local celebrity.

To some it seemed that there was a certain bleakness in the country surrounding Lea Hall, but, though the two dwellings are so short a distance apart, Lea Hurst is set in a far more perfect landscape. Hills and woodlands, stretching far away to Dovedale, are commanded by the broad terrace of upland on which the house stands, and it looks across to the bold escarpment known as Crich Stand, while deep below, the Derwent makes music on its rocky course. Among the foxglove and the bracken, the gritstone rocks jutting forth are a hovering place for butterflies and a haunt of the wild bee.

The house itself—shaped like a cross, gabled and mullioned, and heightened by substantial chimney-stacks—is solid, unpretending, satisfying to the eye. Above the fine oriel window in the drawing-room wing is the balcony pointed out to visitors where, they are told, after the Crimea “Miss Florence used to come out and speak to the people.”

The building of the house was completed in 1825, and above the door that date is inscribed, together with the letter N. The drawing-room and library look south, and open on to the garden, and “from the library a flight of stone steps leads down to the lawn.” In the centre of the garden front an old chapel has been built into the mansion, and it may be that the prayers of the unknown dead have been answered in the life of the child who grew up under its shadow, and to whom the busy toiling world has owed so much.

The terraced garden at the back of the house, with its sweet old-fashioned flowers and blossoming apple trees, has doubtless grown more delightful with every year of its advancing age, but what an interest the two little girls must have had when it was first being planted out and each could find a home for her favourite flowers! Fuchsias were among those loved by little Florence, who, as has already been noted, was only six years old when she and her sister and father and mother moved into Lea Hurst, and there was a large bed of these outside the chapel. The old schoolroom and nursery at the back of the house look out upon the hills, and in a quiet corner of the garden there is a summer-house where Florence and her only sister, who had no brothers to share their games, must often have played and worked.

Lea Hurst is a quiet, beautiful home, characteristically English and unpretending, with a modest park-gate, and beyond the park those Lea Woods where the hyacinths bloom and where it is still told how “Miss Florence” loved to walk through the long winding avenue with its grand views of the distant hills and woods.

But the Nightingales did not spend the whole year at Lea Hurst. In the autumn it was their custom to move to Embley, in Hampshire, where they spent the winter and early spring. They usually sent the servants on ahead with the luggage, and drove by easy stages in their own carriage, taking the journey at leisure, and putting up at inns by the way. Sometimes, of course, they travelled by coach. Those of us who only know the Derby road in the neighbourhood of towns like Nottingham and Derby now that its coaching glories are past, find it difficult to picture its gaiety in those old coaching days, when the very horses enjoyed the liveliness of the running, and the many carriages with their gay postilions and varied occupants were on the alert for neighbour or friend who might be posting in the same direction.

Whether in autumn or in spring, the drive must have been a joy. The varied beauty of the Midlands recalls the lines in “Aurora Leigh” which speak of

“Such nooks of valleys lined with orchises,

Fed full of noises by invisible streams;

And open pastures where you scarcely tell

White daisies from white dew, ...

... the clouds, the fields,

The happy violets hiding from the roads

The primroses run down to, carrying gold;

The tangled hedgerows, where the cows push out

Impatient horns and tolerant churning mouths

’Twixt dripping ash-boughs,—hedgerows all alive

With birds and gnats and large white butterflies

Which look as if the May-flower had caught life

And palpitated forth upon the wind;

Hills, vales, woods, netted in a silver mist,

Farms, granges, doubled up among the hills;

And cattle grazing in the watered vales,

And cottage-chimneys smoking from the woods,

And cottage-gardens smelling everywhere,

Confused with smell of orchards.”

Derbyshire itself, with its wild lilies of the valley, its ferns and daffodils and laughing streams, is hardly more “taking” than the country through which winds the silver Trent, past Nottingham Castle, perched on its rock and promontory above the fields where the wild crocus in those days made sheets of vivid purple, and the steep banks of Clifton Grove, with its shoals of blue forget-me-not, making a dim, tree-crowned outline, with here and there a gleam of silver, as seen by the chariots “on the road.” Wollaton Park, with its great beeches and limes and glimpses of shy deer, would give gold and crimson and a thousand shades of russet to the picture.

And farther south, at the other end of the journey, what miles of orchards and pine woods and sweet-scented heather—what rolling Downs and Surrey homesteads along the turnpike roads!

Though Parthenope and Florence had no brothers to play with them, they seem to have had a great variety of active occupations, both at Lea Hurst and at Embley. Of course they had their dolls, like other little girls; but those which belonged to Florence had a way of falling into the doctor’s hands—an imaginary doctor, of course—and needing a good deal of tender care and attention. Florence seemed never tired of looking after their various ailments. In fact, she had at times a whole dolls’ hospital to tend. She probably picked up a little amateur knowledge of medicine quite early in life; for the poor people in the neighbourhood used to come to her mother for help in any little emergency, and Mrs. Nightingale was, like many another Lady Bountiful of her generation, equipped with a certain amount of traditional wisdom and kindly common sense, aided in her case by wider reading and a better educated mind than the ordinary.

Florence, having somehow escaped measles and whooping-cough, was not allowed to run into infection in the cottages, but that did not prevent the sending of beef-teas and jellies and other helpful and neighbourly gifts, which could be tied to her pony’s saddle-bow and left by her at the door. She learned to know the cottagers with a frank and very human intimacy, and their homely wit touched her own, their shrewdness and sympathy met their like in her, and as she grew older, all this added to her power and her charm. She learned to know both the north and the south in “her ain countree,” and when, later in life, she was the wise angel of hope to the brave “Tommies,” recruited from such homes, meeting them as she did amid unrecorded agonies that were far worse than the horrors of the battlefield, she understood them all the better as men, because she had known just such boys as they had been and was familiar with just such homes as those in which they grew up. According to Mrs. Tooley’s biography, the farmhouse where Adam Bede fell in love with Hetty was just the other side of the meadows at Lea Hurst, and the old mill-wheel, where Maggie Tulliver’s father ground the corn of the neighbourhood, was only two or three miles away. Marian Evans, of whom the world still thinks and speaks by her pen-name of George Eliot, came sometimes to visit her kinsfolk in the thatched cottage by Wirksworth Tape Mills, and has left us in her earlier novels a vivid picture of the cottage life that surrounded our heroine during that part of the year which she spent in the Derbyshire home. The children, of course, had their own garden, which they dug and watered, and Florence was so fond of flowers and animals that that again was an added bond with her rustic neighbours. Flower-missions had not in those days been heard of, but she often tied up a nosegay of wild flowers for invalid villagers, or took some of her favourites out of her own garden to the sick people whom she visited.

The story of her first patient has already been told several times in print, but no biography would be complete without it.

She had nursed many dolls back to convalescence—to say nothing of “setting” their broken limbs—tempted their delicate appetites with dainties offered on toy plates, and dressed the burns when her sister let them tumble too near the nursery fire; but as yet she had had no real human patient, when one day, out riding with her friend the vicar over the Hampshire Downs near Embley, they noticed that Roger, an old shepherd whom they knew very well, was having endless trouble in getting his sheep together.

“Where’s Cap?” asked the vicar, drawing up his horse, for Cap was a very capable and trusted sheep-dog.

“T’ boys have been throwing stones at ‘n and they’ve broken t’ poor chap’s leg. Won’t ever be any good no more, a’m thinkin’. Best put him out of ‘s misery.”

“O Roger!” exclaimed a clear young voice, “poor Cap’s leg broken? Can’t we do anything for him?”

“Where is he?” added Florence eagerly, for the voice was that of the future “Queen of Nurses.” “Oh, we can’t leave him all alone in his pain. Just think how cruel!”

“Us can’t do no good, miss, nor you nayther. I’se just take a cord to him to-night; ’tis the only way to ease his pain.”

But Florence turned to plead with the vicar, and to beg that some further effort should be made.

The vicar, urged by the compassion in the young face looking up to his, turned his horse’s head in the right direction for a visit to Cap. In a moment Florence’s pony was put to the gallop, and she was the first to arrive at the shed where the poor dog was lying.

Cap’s faithful brown eyes were soon lifted to hers, as she tenderly tried to make him understand her loving sympathy, caressing him with her little hand and speaking soothingly with her own lips and eyes; till, like the suffering men whose wounds would in the far-off years be eased through her skill, the dog looked up at her in dumb and worshipping gratitude.

The vicar was equal to the occasion, and soon discovered that the leg was not broken at all, but badly bruised and swollen, and perhaps an even greater source of danger and pain than if there had merely been a broken bone.

When he suggested a “compress,” his child-companion was puzzled for a moment. She thought she knew all about poultices and bandages, and I daresay she had often given her dolls a mustard plaster; but a “compress” sounded like something new and mysterious. It was, of course, a great relief when she learned that she only needed to keep soaking cloths in hot water, wringing them out, and folding them over Cap’s injured leg, renewing them as quickly as they cooled. She was a nimble little person, and, with the help of the shepherd boy, soon got a fire of sticks kindled in a neighbouring cottage and the kettle singing on it with the necessary boiling water. But now what to do for cloths? Time is of importance in sick-nursing when every moment of delay means added pain to the sufferer. To ride home would have meant the loss of an hour or two, and thrifty cottagers are not always ready to tear up scant and cherished house-linen for the nursing of dogs. But Florence was not to be baffled. To her great delight she espied the shepherd’s smock hanging up behind the door. She was a fearless soul, and felt no doubt whatever that her mother would pay for a new smock. “This will just do,” she said, and, since that delightful vicar gave a nod of entire approval, she promptly tore it into strips.

Then back to Cap’s hut she hastened, with her small henchman beside her carrying the kettle and the basin; for by this time he, the boy shepherd, began to be interested too, and the vicar’s superintendence was no longer needed. A message of explanation was sent to Embley that Mr. and Mrs. Nightingale might not be anxious, and for several hours Florence gave herself up to nursing her patient. Cap was passive in her hands, and the hot fomentations gradually lessened the pain and the swelling.

Imagine the wonder and gratitude of old Roger when he turned up with the rope in his hand and a leaden weight on his poor old heart! Cap, of course, knew his step and greeted him with a little whine of satisfaction, as if to be the first to tell him the good news.

“Why, missy, you have been doing wonders,” he said. “I never thought to see t’ poor dog look up at me like that again.”

“Yes,” exclaimed the happy young nurse; “doesn’t he look better? Well, Roger, you can throw away the rope. I shall want you to help me make these hot compresses.”

“Miss Florence is quite right, Roger,” interposed the vicar; “you’ll soon have Cap running about again.”

“I’m sure I cannot thank you and the young lady enough, yer riv’rence. And I’ll mind all the instrooctions for he.”

As the faithful dog looked up at him, eased and content, it was a very happy man that was old Roger. But the doctor-nurse was not prepared to lose her occupation too quickly.

“I shall come and see him again to-morrow, Roger,” she said; “I know mamma will let me, when I just explain to her about it all.”

CHAPTER III.

The weaving of many threads, both of evil and of good.

While Florence Nightingale and her sister were working hard at history and languages and all useful feminine arts, romping in the sunny Hampshire gardens, or riding amongst the Derbyshire hills, the big world outside their quiet paradise was heaping fuel for the fires of war, which at last, when after a quarter of a century it flared up out of its long-prepared combustibles, was “to bring to death a million workmen and soldiers, consume vast wealth, shatter the framework of the European system, and make it hard henceforth for any nation to be safe except by sheer strength.” And above all its devastation, remembered as a part of its undying record, the name of one of these happy children was to be blazoned on the page of history.

Already at the beginning of the century the first Napoleon had said that the Czar of Russia was always threatening Constantinople and never taking it, and by the time Florence Nightingale was twelve years old, it might be said of that Czar that while “holding the boundless authority of an Oriental potentate,” his power was supplemented by the far-reaching transmission of his orders across the telegraph wires, and if Kinglake does not exaggerate, “he would touch the bell and kindle a war, without hearing counsel from any living man.”

The project against Constantinople was a scheme of conquest continually to be delayed, but never discarded, and, happen what might, it was never to be endured that the prospect of Russia’s attaining some day to the Bosphorus should be shut out by the ambition of any other Power. Nicholas was quite aware that multitudes of the pious throughout his vast dominions dwelt upon the thought of their co-religionists under the Turkish rule, and looked to the shining cross of St. Sophia, symbol of their faith above the church founded by Constantine, as the goal of political unity for a “suppliant nation.”

And Kinglake tells us with an almost acid irony of Louis Napoleon, that he who was by the Senatus-Consulte of 1804 the statutory heir of the great Bonaparte, and after his exile and imprisonment had returned to France, laboured to show all men “how beautifully Nature in her infinite wisdom had adapted that same France to the service of the Bonapartes; and how, without the fostering care of these same Bonapartes, the creature was doomed to degenerate, and to perish out of the world, and was considering how it was possible at the beginning of the nineteenth century to make the coarse Bonaparte yoke of 1804 sit kindly upon her neck.”

The day was drawing near when a great war would seem to him to offer just the opportunity he wanted.

Far away as yet was that awful massacre of peaceful citizens in Paris in 1851, with which the name of Louis Napoleon was associated as responsible for the coup d’état—a massacre probably the result of brutal panic on the part of the soldiers, the civilians, and that craven president, Louis Napoleon himself, whose conscience made a coward of him, and whose terror usually took the form of brutality—but long before that date, by his callous plotting and underhand self-seeking, he was preparing forces which then made for death and terror, and by that time had more or less broken the manhood of his beautiful Paris.

Yet all over the world at all times, while the enemy is sowing tares in the field, the good seed is ripening also in the ground for the harvest; and through these same years far-off threads were being woven, ready to make part of the warp and woof of a life, as yet busied with the duties and joys of childhood, but one day to thrill the hearts of Europe and be remembered while time shall last.

Elizabeth Fry, who was to be one of its decisive influences, was bringing new light and hope into the noisome prisons of a bygone century, and we shall see how her life-work was not without its influence later on the life of the child growing up at Embley and Lea Hurst.

And a child nearly of Florence Nightingale’s own age, who was one day to cross her path with friendly help at an important crisis, was playing with her sister Curlinda—Sir Walter Scott’s nickname for her real name of Caroline—and being drilled in manners in French schools in Paris and Versailles, before her family moved to Edinburgh and her more serious lessons began. This was Felicia Skene, who was afterwards able to give momentary, but highly important help, at a critical moment in Florence Nightingale’s career. Like Florence herself, she was born amid romantic surroundings, though not in Italy but in Provence, and was named after her French godmother, a certain Comtesse de Felicité. Her two earliest recollections were of the alarming and enraged gesticulations of Liszt when giving a music lesson to her frightened sisters, and the very different vision of a lumbering coach and six accompanied by mounted soldiers—the coach and six wherein sat Charles the Tenth, who was soon afterwards to take refuge in Holyrood. That was in Paris, where her family went to live when she was six years old, but at the time of Cap’s accident they had already moved to Edinburgh, where her chief friends and playmates were the little Lockharts and the children of the murdered Duc de Berri. It was there that Sir Walter Scott, on the day when he heard of his bankruptcy, came and sat quietly by the little Felicia, and bade her tell him fairy stories, as he didn’t want to talk much himself. He was an old and dear friend of her father, one link between them being the fact that Mr. Skene was related by marriage to the beautiful Williamina Stuart with whom Scott in his early days had fallen deeply and ardently in love.

The little Felicia was at this time a very lively child and full of innocent mischief. Her later devotion to the sick and poor did not begin so early as was the case with Florence Nightingale, though there came a time when she and Florence met in after life as equals and fellow-soldiers in the great campaign against human suffering. Her travels and adventures in Greece and her popularity at the Athenian court were still hidden in the future, and while Florence at Embley and Lea Hurst was gradually unfolding a sweetness of nature that was by no means blind to the humorous side of things, and a highly practical thoroughness in all she undertook, Felicia was enjoying a merry home-life under the governorship of Miss Palmer, whom she nicknamed Pompey, and being prepared for confirmation by her father’s friend, Dean Ramsay. We are told of her that she might have said with Coppée, “J’ai eu toujours besoin de Dieu.” Full of fun and of interest in life’s great adventure, for others quite as much as for herself, religion was the moving force that moulded the soul of her to much unforeseen self-sacrifice as yet undreamed.

CHAPTER IV.

The activities of girlhood—Elizabeth Fry—Felicia Skene again.

But we are wandering away from Embley and from the two daughters of the squire, who were already the delight of the village.

Cap was by no means the only animal who owed much to Florence, and Peggy, a favourite old pony, now holiday-making in the paddock, looked for frequent visits and much sport between lesson hours.

“Poor old Peggy, then; would she like a carrot?”

“Well, where is it, then? See if you can find it, Peggy.”

And then a little game followed, to which the beloved pony was quite accustomed—snuffing round her young mistress and being teased and tantalized for a minute or two, just to heighten the coming pleasure, until at last the pocket was found where the precious delicacy was hidden, and the daily feast began, a feast not of carrots only, for caresses were of course a part of the ritual.

Florence had much good fellowship also with the wild squirrels of the neighbourhood, especially in one long avenue that was their favourite abode. They were not in the least afraid of her, and would come leaping down after the nuts that she dropped for them as she walked along. Sometimes she would turn sharp round and startle them back into their homes, but it was easy to tempt them down again. She was quick at finding and guarding the nests of brooding birds, and suffered very keenly as a child when the young ones were taken away from their mothers.

Lambs and calves soon learned that she was fond of them, and the affection was not on her side only. But among the pets that the two girls were allowed to have, the ailing ones were always the most interesting to the future nurse.

It cannot, however, be too strongly stated that there was nothing sentimental or lackadaisical in the very vigorous and hard-working life that she led. It was not by any means all songs and roses, though it was full of the happiness of a well-ordered and loving existence. Her father was a rigid disciplinarian, and nothing casual or easygoing was allowed in the Embley schoolroom. For any work carelessly done there was punishment as well as reproof, and no shamming of any sort was allowed. Hours must be punctually kept, and, whether the lesson for the moment was Latin, Greek, or mathematics, or the sewing of a fine and exquisite seam, it must come up to the necessary standard and be satisfactorily done. The master-mind that so swiftly transformed the filthy horrors of Scutari into a well-ordered hospital, and could dare to walk through minor difficulties and objections as though they did not exist, was educated in a severe and early school; and the striking modesty and gentleness of Florence Nightingale’s girlhood was the deeper for having grappled with enough real knowledge to know its own ignorances and limitations, and treat the personality of others with a deference which was a part of her charm.

And if study was made a serious business, the sisters enjoyed to the full the healthy advantages of country life. They scampered about the park with their dogs, rode their ponies over hill and dale, spent long days in the woods among the bluebells and primroses, and in summer tumbled about in the sweet-scented hay. “During the summer at Lea Hurst, lessons were a little relaxed in favour of outdoor life; but on the return to Embley for the winter, schoolroom routine was again enforced on very strict lines.”[3]

In Florence Nightingale’s Derbyshire home the experiments in methods of healing which dispensed with drugs could not fail to arouse attention and discussion, for Mr. John Smedley’s newly-built cure-house stood at the foot of the hill below Lea Hurst, and before Florence Nightingale was twenty she had already begun to turn her attention definitely in the direction of nursing. Everything tended to deepen this idea. She was already able to do much for the villagers, and in any case of illness they were always eager to let her know. The consumptive girl whose room she gladdened with flowers was but one of the many ailing folk who found comfort and joy in her presence. “Miss Florence had a way with her that made them feel better,” they said.

In those days nursing as a profession did not exist. When it was not done wholly for love by the unselfish maiden aunt or sister, who was supposed, as a matter of course, to be always at the disposal of the sick people among her kinsfolk, it had come to be too often a mere callous trade, carried on by ignorant and grasping women, who were not even clean or of good character. The turning of a Scutari hell into a hospital that seemed heaven by comparison, was a smaller miracle than that which Miss Nightingale’s influence was destined later to achieve in changing a despised and brutalized occupation throughout a whole empire into a noble and distinguished art.

Of course it must never be forgotten that through all the centuries since the Christian Church was founded, there had been Catholic sisterhoods with whom the real and the ideal were one—Sisters of Mercy, who were not only refined and cultivated gentlewomen, but the most devoted and self-sacrificing of human souls.

And now in England, in that Society of Friends, which among Christian communities might seem outwardly farthest away from a communion valuing as its very language the ancient symbols and ritual of the Catholic Church, yet was perhaps by its obedience to the inward voice more in sympathy with the sisterhoods of that Church than were many other religious groups, there had been lifted up by Elizabeth Fry a new standard of duty in this matter, which in her hands became a new standard of nursing, to be passed on in old age by her saintly hands into the young and powerful grasp of the brilliant girl who is the heroine of our story. The name of Elizabeth Fry is associated with the reform of our prisons, but it is less commonly known that she was also a pioneer of decent nursing. She understood with entire simplicity the words, “I was sick and in prison, and ye visited me.” Perhaps it was not mere coincidence that the words occur in the “lesson” appointed for the 15th of February—the day noted in Elizabeth Fry’s journal as the date of that visit to Newgate, when the poor felons she was yearning to help fell on their knees and prayed to a divine unseen Presence. In a recent number of the Times which celebrates her centenary a quotation from her diary is given which tells in her own words:—

“I heard weeping, and I thought they appeared much tendered; a very solemn quiet was observed; it was a striking scene, the poor people on their knees around us, in their deplorable condition.”

And the Times goes on to say, “nothing appears but those qualities of helpfulness, sympathy, and love which could tame the most savage natures, silence the voice of profanity and blasphemy, and subdue all around her by a sense of her common sisterhood even with the vilest of them in the love of God and the service of man.... But the deepest note of her nature was an intense enthusiasm of humanity. It was this which inspired and sustained all her efforts from first to last—even in her earlier and more frivolous days—for the welfare and uplifting of her fellow-creatures; and it is only right to add that it was itself sustained by her deep and abiding conviction that it is only by the love of God that the service of man can be sanctified and made to prosper.” A letter followed next day from Mr. Julian Hill, who actually remembers her, and tells how the Institution of Nursing Sisters which she organized grew out of her deep pity for the victims of Sairey Gamp and her kind.

All this was preparing the way for the wider and more successful nursing crusade in which her memory and influence were to inspire the brave young soul of Florence Nightingale. Speaking of all the difficulties that a blindly conventional world is always ready to throw in the way of any such new path, her old friend writes: “Such difficulties Mrs. Fry and Miss Nightingale brushed contemptuously aside.”

But in our story Miss Nightingale is as yet only lately out of the schoolroom. And Elizabeth Fry’s life was by no means alone, as we have seen, in its preparation of her appointed path, for about the time that Florence Nightingale was taking her place in the brilliant society that met about her father’s board, and Felicia Skene was “coming out,” a new experiment was being made by a devout member of the Lutheran Church, an experiment which was to play an important part in the world’s history, though so quietly and unobtrusively carried out.

We must not anticipate—we shall read of that in a later chapter.

CHAPTER V.

Home duties and pleasures—The brewing of war.

Florence was very happy as her mother’s almoner, and in her modest and unobtrusive way was the life and soul of the village festivities that centred in the church and school and were planned in many instances by her father and mother. It is one of the happy characteristics of our time that much innocent grace and merriment have been revived in the teaching of beautiful old morris dances and other peasant festivities that had been banished by the rigour of a perverted Puritanism, and the squire of Lea Hurst and his wife were before their time in such matters. There was a yearly function of prize-giving and speech-making and dancing, known as the children’s “Feast Day,” to which the scholars came in procession to the Hall, with their wreaths and garlands, to the music of a good marching band provided by the squire, and afterwards they had tea in the fields below the Hall garden, served by Mrs. Nightingale and her daughters and the Hall servants, and then ended their day with merry outdoor dancing. For the little ones Florence planned all kinds of games; the children, indeed, were her special care, and by the time the evening sun was making pomp of gold and purple in the sky above the valley of the Derwent, there came the crowning event of the day when on the garden terrace the two daughters of the house distributed their gifts to the happy scholars.

Mrs. Tooley in her biography calls up for us in a line or two a vision of Florence as she was remembered by one old lady, who had often been present and recalled her slender charm, herself as sweet as the rose which she often wore in her neatly braided hair, brown hair with a glint of gold in it, glossy and smooth and characteristic of youth and health. We have from one and another a glimpse of the harmonious simplicity also of her dress—the soft muslin gown, the little silk fichu crossed upon her breast, the modest Leghorn bonnet with its rose. Or in winter, riding about in the neighbourhood of Embley and distributing her little personal gifts at Christmas among the old women—tea and warm petticoats—her “ermine tippet and muff and beaver hat.”

She helped in the training of young voices in the village, and was among the entertainers when the carol-singers enjoyed their mince-pies and annual coins in the hall. The workhouse knew her well, and any wise enterprise in the neighbourhood for help or healing among the poor and the sad was sure of her presence and of all the co-operation in the power of her neighbours, Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Herbert, with whom for some years before the Crimea she shared much companionship in such work. This friendship was an important influence in our heroine’s life, for Mr. Herbert was of those who reveal to the dullest a little of the divine beauty and love, and his wife was through all their married life his faithful and devoted friend, so that they made a strong trio of sympathetic workers; for “Liz,” as her husband usually called her in his letters to their common friend Florence Nightingale, seemed to have fully shared his unbounded faith in the noble powers and high aims of the said Florence, whom she too loved and admired. She was a daughter of General Charles Ashe à Court, and she and Sidney Herbert had known one another as children. Indeed, it was in those early days, when she was quite a little child, that Elizabeth, who grew up to be one of the most beautiful women of her day, said of Sidney, then, of course, a mere boy, that that was the boy she was going to marry, and that she would never marry any one else. Many a long year, however, had rolled between before he rode over to Amington from Drayton, where he often met her, though no longer such near neighbours as in the early Wiltshire days, and asked the beautiful Elizabeth to be his wife. The intimacy between the two families had never ceased, and General à Court, himself member for Wilton, had worked hard for Sidney’s first election for the county. We shall hear more of these dear and early friends of Florence Nightingale as her story unfolds, but let us turn now for a moment to herself.

Her life was many-sided, and her devotion to good works did not arise from any lack of knowledge of the world. She was presented, of course, like other girls of her order, and had her “seasons” in London as well as her share in country society. A young and lovely girl, whose father had been wise enough to give her all the education and advantages of a promising boy, and who excelled also in every distinctive feminine accomplishment and “pure womanliness,” had her earthly kingdom at her feet. But her soul was more and more deeply bent on a life spent in service and consecrated to the good of others. Her Sunday class, in the old building known as the “Chapel” at Lea Hurst, was but one of her many efforts in her father’s special domain in Derbyshire, and girls of every faith came to her there without distinction of creed. They were mostly workers in the hosiery mills owned by John Smedley, and many of them, like their master, were Methodists. She sang to them, and they still remember the sweetness of her voice and “how beautifully Miss Florence used to talk,” as they sat together through many a sunny afternoon in the tiny stone building overlooking Lea Hurst gardens. Cromford Church, built by Sir Richard Arkwright, was then comparatively new, and time had not made of it the pretty picture that it is now, in its bosoming trees above the river; but it played a considerable part in Florence Nightingale’s youth, when the vicar and the Arkwright of her day—old Sir Richard’s tomb in the chancel bears the earlier date of 1792—organized many a kind scheme for the good of the parish, in which the squire’s two daughters gave their help.

But Miss Nightingale was not of a type to consider these amateur pleasures a sufficient training for her life-work, and that life-work was already taking a more or less definite shape in her mind.

She herself has written:—

“I would say to all young ladies who are called to any particular vocation, qualify yourselves for it as a man does for his work. Don’t think you can undertake it otherwise. Submit yourselves to the rules of business as men do, by which alone you can make God’s business succeed, for He has never said that He will give His success and His blessing to sketchy and unfinished work.” And on another occasion she wrote that “three-fourths of the whole mischief in women’s lives arises from their excepting themselves from the rules of training considered needful for men.”

It has already been said that her thought was more and more directed towards nursing, and in various ways she was quietly preparing herself to that end.

Her interview with the Quaker-saint, Elizabeth Fry, though deliberately sought and of abiding effect, was but a brief episode. It was about this time that they met in London. The serene old Quakeress, through whose countenance looked forth such a heavenly soul, was no doubt keenly interested in the ardent, witty, beautiful girl who came to her for inspiration and counsel. They had much in common, and who knows but the older woman, with all her weight of experience, her saintly character, and ripened harvest, may yet in some ways have felt herself the younger of the two; for she had come to that quiet threshold of the life beyond, where a soul like hers has part in the simple joys of the Divine Child, and looks tenderly on those who are still in the fires of battle through which they have passed.

Her own girlhood had defied in innocent ways the strictness of the Quaker rule. Imagine a young Quakeress of those days wearing, as she had done on occasion, a red riding habit!

She had been fond of dancing, and would have, I suspect, a very healthy human interest in the activities of a girl in Society, though she would enter into Florence Nightingale’s resolve that her life should not be frittered away in a self-centred round, while men and women, for whom her Master died, were themselves suffering a slow death in workhouses and prisons and hospitals, with none to tend their wounds of soul and body.

Be this as it may—and without a record of their conversation it is easy to go astray in imagining—we do know that like all the greatest saints they were both very practical in their Christianity, and did not care too much what was thought of their actions, so long as they were right in the sight of God. In their common sense, their humility, their warm, quick-beating heart of humanity, they were kindred spirits.

The interview bore fruit even outwardly afterwards in a very important way. For it was from Elizabeth Fry that Florence Nightingale first heard of Pastor Fliedner and his institute for training nurses at Kaiserswerth, as well as of Elizabeth Fry’s own institute for a like purpose in London, which first suggested the Kaiserswerth training home, thus returning in ever-widening blessing the harvest of its seed.

Her desire was for definite preparatory knowledge and discipline, and we of this generation can hardly realize how much searching must have been necessary before the adequate training could be found. Certificated nursing is now a commonplace, and we forget that it dates from Miss Nightingale’s efforts after her return from the Crimea. We have only to turn to the life of Felicia Skene and her lonely labour of love at the time when the cholera visited Oxford—some twelve years later than Florence Nightingale’s seventeenth birthday, that is to say, in 1849-51, and again in 1854—to gain some idea of the bareness of the field. Sir Henry Acland, whose intimate friendship with Felicia dates from their common labours among the cholera patients, has described one among the terrible cases for which there would, it seems, have been no human aid, but for their discovery of the patient’s neglected helplessness.

“She had no blanket,” he says, “or any covering but the ragged cotton clothes she had on. She rolled screaming. One woman, scarcely sober, sat by; she sat with a pipe in her mouth, looking on. To treat her in this state was hopeless. She was to be removed. There was a press of work at the hospital, and a delay. When the carriers came, her saturated garments were stripped off, and in the finer linen and in the blankets of a wealthier woman she was borne away, and in the hospital she died.”

This is given, it would seem, as but one case among hundreds.

Three old cattle-sheds were turned into a sort of impromptu hospital, to which some of the smallpox and cholera patients were carried, and the clergy, especially Mr. Charles Marriott and Mr. Venables, did all they could for old and young alike, seconding the doctors, with Sir Henry at their head, in cheering and helping every one in the stricken town; and Miss Skene’s friend, Miss Hughes, Sister Marion, directed the women called in to help, who there received a kind of rough-and-ready training. But more overwhelming still was Miss Skene’s own work of home nursing in the cottages, at first single-handed, and afterwards at the head of a band of women engaged by the deputy chairman as her servants in the work, of whom many were ignorant and needed training. “By day and by night she visited,” writes Sir Henry. “She plied this task, and when she rested—or where as long at least as she knew of a house where disease had entered—is known to herself alone.”

Meanwhile a critical moment had arisen in the affairs of Europe. Our own Premier, Lord Aberdeen, had long been regarded as the very head and front of the Peace Movement in England, and when he succeeded the wary Lord Palmerston, it is said that Nicholas, the Czar of Russia, made no secret of his pleasure in the event, for he saw tokens in England of what might at least leave him a chance of pulling Turkey to pieces. He seems also to have had a great personal liking for our ambassador, Sir Hamilton Seymour, who was fortunately a man of honour as well as a man of discretion and ready wit. The account given by Kinglake of the conversations in which the Emperor Nicholas disclosed his views, and was not permitted to hint them merely, makes very dramatic reading. The Czar persisted in speaking of Turkey as a very sick man, whose affairs had better be taken out of his hands by his friends before his final dissolution. Sir Hamilton courteously intimated that England did not treat her allies in that manner; but Nicholas was not to be put off, and at a party given by the Grand Duchess Hereditary on February 20, 1853, he again took Sir Hamilton apart, and in a very gracious and confidential manner closed his conversation with the words, “I repeat to you that the sick man is dying, and we can never allow such an event to take us by surprise. We must come to some understanding.”

The next day he explained how the partition should in his opinion be made. Servia and Bulgaria should be independent states under his protection. England should have Egypt and Candia. He had already made it clear that he should expect us to pledge ourselves not to occupy Constantinople, though he could not himself give us a like undertaking.

“As I did not wish,” writes Sir Hamilton Seymour, “that the Emperor should imagine that an English public servant was caught by this sort of overture, I simply answered that I had always understood that the English views upon Egypt did not go beyond the point of securing a safe and ready communication between British India and the mother country. ‘Well,’ said the Emperor, ‘induce your Government to write again upon these subjects, to write more fully, and to do so without hesitation. I have confidence in the English Government. It is not an engagement, a convention, which I ask of them; it is a free interchange of ideas, and in case of need the word of a “gentleman”—that is enough between us.’”

In reply, our Government disclaimed all idea of aiming at any of the Sultan’s possessions, or considering the Ottoman Empire ready to fall to bits; and while accepting the Emperor’s word that he would not himself grab any part of it, refused most decisively to enter on any secret understanding.

All through 1853 these parleyings were kept secret, and in the meantime the Czar had failed in his rôle of tempter. In the interval the Sultan, who perhaps had gained some inkling of what was going on, suddenly yielded to Austria’s demand that he should withdraw certain troops that had been harassing Montenegro, and thereby rousing the Czar’s religious zeal on behalf of his co-religionists in that province. Everything for the moment lulled his previous intention of a war against Turkey.

But the Emperor Louis Napoleon had in cold blood been driving a wedge into the peace of the world by reviving a treaty of 1740, which had given to Latin monks a key to the chief door of the Church of Bethlehem, as well as the keys to the two doors of the Sacred Manger, and also the right to place a silver star adorned with the arms of France in the Sanctuary of the Nativity. That the Churches should fight for the key to the supposed birthplace of the Prince of Peace is indeed grotesque. But the old temple had in His day become a den of thieves; and even the new temple, built through His own loving sacrifice, is ever being put to uses that are childish and greedy.

It is not difficult to understand that, by means of this treaty, awakening the vanity and greed that cloak themselves under more decent feelings in such rivalries, Louis Napoleon made his profit for the moment out of the powers of evil.

The Czar’s jealousy for his own empire’s Greek version of the faith made the triumph of this treaty wormwood to him and to his people. “To the indignation,” Count Nesselrode writes, “of the whole people following the Greek ritual, the key of the Church of Bethlehem has been made over to the Latins, so as publicly to demonstrate their religious supremacy in the East.” ...

“A crowd of monks with bare foreheads,” says Kinglake, “stood quarrelling for a key at the sunny gates of a church in Palestine, but beyond and above, towering high in the misty North, men saw the ambition of the Czars.”

The Czars did not stand alone: “some fifty millions of men in Russia held one creed, and they held it too with the earnestness of which Western Europe used to have experience in earlier times.... They knew that in the Turkish dominions there were ten or fourteen millions of men holding exactly the same faith as themselves ... they had heard tales of the sufferings of these their brethren which seemed,” they blindly thought, “to call for vengeance.”

Nicholas himself was a fanatic on such questions, and the end of it was that his rage hoodwinked his conscience, and he stole a march upon England and France, which destroyed their trust in his honour. He had already gathered troops in the south, to say nothing of a fleet in the Euxine; and having determined on an embassy to Constantinople, he chose Mentschikoff as his messenger, a man who was said to hate the Turks and dislike the English, and who, according to Kinglake, was a wit rather than a diplomat or a soldier. Advancing with much of the pomp of war, and disregarding much of the etiquette of peace, his arrival and behaviour caused such a panic in the Turkish capital that Colonel Rose was besought to take an English fleet to the protection of the Ottoman Empire. Colonel Rose’s friendly willingness, though afterwards cancelled by our Home Government, at once quieted the terror in Constantinople; but the Emperor of the French cast oil upon the smouldering flame by sending a fleet to Salamis. This greatly angered Nicholas, and, although he was pleased to find England disapproved of what France had done, Mentschikoff offered a secret treaty to Turkey, with ships and men, if she ever needed help, and asked in return for complete control of the Greek Church. This broke all his promises to the Western Powers, and England at once was made aware of it by the Turkish minister.

Prince Mentschikoff meanwhile drew to himself an army, and the English Vice-consul at Galatz reported that in Bessarabia preparations were already made for the passage of 120,000 men, while battalions from all directions were making southward—the fleet was even then at Sebastopol.

Florence Nightingale.

(From the painting in the National Portrait Gallery by Augustus Egg, R.A.)

The double-dealing of Russia was met by a gradual and tacit alliance between England and the Sultan; and Lord Aberdeen, whose love of peace has been described by one historian as “passionate” and “fanatical,” was unknowingly tying his own hands by the advice he gave in his despatches when consulted by Turkey. Moreover, in Turkey, our ambassador, Lord Stratford de Redcliffe, stiffened the back of Ottoman resistance against the Czar’s wily handling of “the sick man.” Lord Stratford’s tact and force of character had moulded all to his will, and our admiral at Malta was told to obey any directions he received from him. Our fleets were ordered into the neighbourhood of the Dardanelles, and Lord Stratford held his watch at Therapia against the gathering wrath of the Czar. Only a very little kindling touch was needed to light the fires of a terrible conflict in Europe.

CHAPTER VI.

Pastor Fliedner.

A pebble thrown into a lake sends the tiny circling ripples very far, and one good piece of work leads to others of a quite different kind. Pastor Fliedner, inspired by love to his Master and deeply interested in Elizabeth Fry’s efforts, began to help prisoners. Finding no nurses for those of them who were ill, he was led to found the institution at Kaiserswerth, where Miss Nightingale afterwards received a part of her training.

His story is a beautiful one. His father and grandfather had both been pastors in the Lutheran Church, and, like so many sons of the Manse, he was exceedingly poor, but he lived to justify his name of Theodor. He was born twenty years before Miss Nightingale, in the village of Eppstein, and perhaps he was the more determined to prove to himself and others that he had a soul, because he was one of those plump children who get teased for looking like dumplings, and when his father laughingly called him the “little beer-brewer” he didn’t like it, for he was a bit thin-skinned. He worked his way bravely through school and college, Giessen and Göttingen, and not only earned his fees by teaching, but also his bread and roof; and when teaching was not enough, he had the good sense to turn shoeblack and carpenter and odd man. He valued all that opens the eyes of the mind and educates what is highest and best. Many a time, heedless of hardship and privation, he would, in his holidays, tramp long distances that he might see more of God’s world and learn more of men and things. He taught himself in this way to speak several languages, learned the useful healing properties of many herbs, and other homely knowledge that afterwards helped him in his work among the sick. Then, too, the games and songs that he picked up on his travels afterwards enriched his own kindergarten. While tutoring at Cologne, he did quite informally some of the work of a curate, and, through preaching sometimes in the prison, became interested in the lot of discharged prisoners. It was at Cologne too that he received from the mother of his pupils kindly suggestions as to his own manners, which led him to write what is as true as it is quaint, that “gentle ways and polite manners help greatly to further the Kingdom of God.”

He was only twenty-two when he became pastor of the little Protestant flock at Kaiserswerth, having walked there on foot and purposely taken his parishioners by surprise that they might not be put to the expense of a formal welcome. His yearly salary was only twenty pounds, and he helped his widowed mother by sharing the parsonage with a sister and two younger brothers, though in any case he had to house the mother of the man who had been there before him. Then came a failure in the business of the little town—the making of velvet—and though there were other rich communities that would have liked to claim him, he was true to his own impoverished flock, and set forth like a pilgrim in search of aid for them. In this apostolic journey he visited Holland and England as well as Germany, and it was in London that, in Elizabeth Fry, he found a noble kindred spirit, much older, of course, than himself, as we count the time of earth, but still full of all the tender enthusiasm of love’s immortal youth. Her wonderful work among the prisoners of Newgate sent him back to his own parish all on fire to help the prisoners of his own country, and he began at once with Düsseldorf, the prison nearest home. Through him was founded the first German organization for improving the discipline of prisons.

Most of all he wanted to help the women who on leaving the prison doors were left without roof or protector.

With his own hands he made clean his old summer-house, and in this shelter—twelve feet square—which he had furnished with a bed, a chair, and a table, he asked the All-father to lead some poor outcast to the little home he had made for her.

It was at night that for the first time a poor forlorn creature came in answer to that prayer, and he and his wife led her in to the place prepared for her. Nine others followed, and, by the time the number had risen to twenty, a new building was ready for them with its own field and garden, and Fliedner’s wife, helped by Mademoiselle Gobel, who gave her services “all for love and nothing for reward,” had charge of the home, where many a one who, like the woman in the Gospel, “had been a great sinner” began to lead a new life and to follow Christ.

For the children of some of these women a kindergarten arose; but the work of all others on which the pastor’s heart was set was the training of women to nurse and tend the poor; for in his own parish, where there was much illness and ignorance, there was no one to do this. Three years after his earlier venture, in 1836 when Miss Nightingale in her far-away home was a girl of sixteen still more or less in the schoolroom, this new undertaking was begun, this quiet haven, from which her own great venture long afterwards took help and teaching, was built up by this German saint.

The failure of the velvet industry at Kaiserswerth, in the pastor’s first year, had left an empty factory which he turned into a hospital.

But when it was opened, the faith needed was much like the faith of Abraham when great blessing was promised to a son whom the world thought he would never possess; for the Deaconess Hospital, when the wards were fitted up by its pastor with “mended furniture and cracked earthenware,” had as yet no patients and no deaconesses.

There is, however, one essential of a good hospital which can be bought by labour as well as by money; and by hard work the hospital was kept admirably clean.

The first patient who knocked at its doors was a servant girl, and other patients followed so quickly that within the first year sixty patients were nursed there and seven nurses had entered as deaconess and probationers. All the deaconesses were to be over twenty-five, and though they entered for five years, they could leave at any moment. The code of rules drawn up by the pastor was very simple, and there were not any vows; but the form of admission was a solemn one and included the laying on of hands, while the pastor invoked the Threefold Name, saying: “May God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, three Persons in one God, bless you; may He stablish you in the Truth until death, and give you hereafter the Crown of Life. Amen.”

It all had a kind of homely grace, even in outward things. The deaconesses wore a large white turned-down collar over a blue cotton gown, a white muslin cap tied on under the chin with a large bow, and a white apron—a dress so well suited to the work that young and old both looked more than usually sweet and womanly in it.

The story of how the deaconesses found a head, and Fliedner a second helper after the death of his first wife, reads rather like a Hans Andersen fairy tale.

He travelled to Hamburg to ask Amalie Sievekin to take charge of the Home, and as she could not do so, she advised him to go to her friend and pupil Caroline Berthean, who had had experience of nursing in the Hamburg Hospital.

The pastor was so pleased with Miss Caroline that he then and there offered her the choice of becoming either his wife or the Superintendent of the Deaconesses’ Home.

She said she would fill both the vacant places, and their honeymoon was spent in Berlin that they might “settle” the first five deaconesses in the Charité Hospital.

Caroline, young though she was, made a good Deaconess Mother,[4] and she seems also to have been an excellent wife, full of devotion to the work her husband loved, through all the rest of her life. The deaconesses give their work, and in a sense give themselves. They do not pay for their board, but neither are they paid for their work, though they are allowed a very simple yearly outfit of two cotton gowns and aprons, and every five years a new best dress of blue woollen material and an apron of black alpaca. Also their outdoor garb of a long black cloak and bonnet is supplied to them, and each is allowed a little pocket money. Their private property remains their own to control as they please, whether they live or die.

The little account of Kaiserswerth which Miss Nightingale wrote is most rare and precious, having long been out of print, but from the copy in the British Museum I transfer a few sentences to these pages, because of their quaintness and their interest for all who are feeling their way in the education of young children:—

“In the Orphan Asylum,” wrote Miss Nightingale, “each family lives with its deaconess exactly as her children. Some of them have already become deaconesses or teachers, some have returned home. When a new child is admitted, a little feast celebrates its arrival, at which the pastor himself presides, who understands children so well that his presence, instead of being a constraint, serves to make the little new-comer feel herself at home. She chooses what is to be sung, she has a little present from the pastor, and, after tea, at the end of the evening, she is prayed for....

“One morning, in the boys’ ward, as they were about to have prayers, just before breakfast, two of the boys quarrelled about a hymn book. The ‘sister’ was uncertain, for a moment, what to do. They could not pray in that state of mind, yet excluding them from the prayer was not likely to improve them. She told a story of her own childhood, how one night she had been cross with her parents, and, putting off her prayers till she felt good again, had fallen asleep. The children were quite silent for a moment and shocked at the idea that anybody should go to bed without praying. The two boys were reconciled, and prayers took place....”

In the British Museum also is a copy of the following letter:—

“Messrs. Dubaw,—A gentleman called here yesterday from you, asking for a copy of my ‘Kaiserswerth’ for, I believe, the British Museum.

“Since yesterday a search has been instituted—but only two copies have been found, and one of those is torn and dirty. I send you the least bad-looking. You will see the date is 1851, and after the copies then printed were given away I don’t think I have ever thought of it.

“I was twice in training there myself. Of course, since then hospital and district nursing have made great strides. Indeed, district nursing has been invented.

“But never have I met with a higher love, a purer devotion than there. There was no neglect.

“It was the more remarkable because many of the deaconesses had been only peasants (none were gentlewomen when I was there).

“The food was poor—no coffee but bean coffee—no luxury but cleanliness.

“Florence Nightingale.”

CHAPTER VII.

Years of preparation.

Florence Nightingale, like Felicia Skene, had that saving gift of humour which at times may make bearable an otherwise unbearable keenness of vision.

Here, for instance, is her account of the customary dusting of a room in those days (is it always nowadays so entirely different as might be wished?):—

“Having witnessed the morning process called ‘tidying the room’ for many years, and with ever-increasing astonishment, I can describe what it is. From the chairs, tables, or sofa, upon which ‘things’ have lain during the night, and which are therefore comparatively clean from dust or blacks, the poor ‘things’ having ‘caught it,’ they are removed to other chairs, tables, sofas, upon which you could write your name with your finger in the dust or blacks. The other side of the things is therefore now evenly dirtied or dusted. The housemaid then flaps everything or some things not out of her reach with a thing called a duster—the dust flies up, then resettles more equally than it lay before the operation. The room has now been ‘put to rights.’”

You see the shrewd humour of that observation touches the smallest detail. Miss Nightingale never wasted time in unpractical theorizing. In discussing the far-off attainment of ideal nursing she says:—

“Will the top of Mont Blanc ever be made habitable? Our answer would be, it will be many thousands of years before we have reached the bottom of Mont Blanc in making the earth healthy. Wait till we have reached the bottom before we discuss the top.”

Did she with her large outlook and big heart see our absurdity as well as our shame when, pointing a finger of scorn at what we named the superstition of other countries, we were yet content to see Spain and France and Italy sending out daily, in religious service to the poor, whole regiments of gentle and refined women trained in the arts of healing and the methods of discipline, while even in our public institutions—our hospitals and workhouses and prisons—it would hardly have been an exaggeration to say that most of the so-called “nurses” of those days were but drunken sluts?

She herself has said:—

“Shall the Roman Catholic Church do all the work? Has not the Protestant the same Lord, who accepted the services not only of men, but also of women?”

One saving clause there is for England concerning this matter in the history of that time, in the work of a distinguished member of the Society of Friends, even before Florence Nightingale or Felicia Skene had been much heard of. We read that “the heavenly personality of Elizabeth Fry (whom Miss Nightingale sought out and visited) was an ever-present inspiration in her life.” From Elizabeth Fry our heroine heard of Pastor Fliedner’s training institute for nurses at Kaiserswerth, already described in the foregoing chapter; but, before going there, she took in the meantime a self-imposed course of training in Britain, visiting the hospitals in London, Edinburgh, and Dublin, though, so far as the nursing was concerned, the criticisms in her own Nursing Notes of later years would certainly suggest that what she learned was chiefly what not to do. Her gracious and winning dignity was far indeed from the blindness of a weak amiability, and it can hardly be doubted that what she saw of the so-called “nurses” in our hospitals of those days, went far to deepen her resolve to devote herself to a calling then in dire neglect and disrepute. Dirt, disorder, drunkenness—these are the words used by a trustworthy biographer in describing the ways of English nurses in those days—of whom, indeed, we are told that they were of a very coarse order—ill-trained, hard-hearted, immoral. There must surely have been exceptions, but they seem to have been so rare as to have escaped notice. Indeed, it was even said that in those days—so strong and stupefying is the force of custom—decent girls avoided this noble calling, fearing to lose their character if found in its ranks.

But whatever were Florence Nightingale’s faults—and she was by no means so inhuman as to be without faults—conventionality of thought and action certainly cannot be counted among them; and what she saw of the poor degraded souls who waited on the sick in our hospitals did but strengthen her resolve to become a nurse herself.

Since she found no good school of nursing in England, she went abroad, and visited, among other places, the peaceful old hospital of St. John at Bruges, where the nuns are cultivated and devoted women who are well skilled in the gentle art of nursing.

To city after city she went, taking with her not only her gift of discernment, but also that open mind and earnest heart which made of her life-offering so world-wide a boon.

I do not think I have used too strong a word of the gift she was preparing. For the writer of an article which appeared in Nursing Notes[5] was right when, at the end of Miss Nightingale’s life, she wrote of her:—

“Miss Nightingale belongs to that band of the great ones of the earth who may be acclaimed as citizens of the world; her influence has extended far beyond the limits of the nation to which she owed her birth, and in a very special sense she will be the great prototype for all time to those who follow more especially in her footsteps, in the profession she practically created. We must ever be grateful for the shining example she has given to nurses, who in her find united that broad-minded comprehension of the ultimate aim of all their work, with a patient and untiring devotion to its practical detail, which alone combine to make the perfect nurse.”

But as yet she was only humbly and diligently preparing herself for the vocation to which she had determined, in face of countless obstacles, to devote herself, little knowing how vast would be the opportunities given to her when once she was ready for the work.

During the winter and spring of 1849-50 she made a long tour through Egypt with Mr. and Mrs. Bracebridge. On her way there she met in Paris two Sisters of the Order of St. Vincent de Paul, from whom she took introductions to the schools and “miséricorde” in Alexandria. There she saw the fruits of long and self-denying discipline among the Nursing Sisters, and in the following year she visited Pastor Fliedner’s Institute at Kaiserswerth, where, among Protestant deaconesses, the life of ordered simplicity and service showed some of the same virtues.

Miss Nightingale’s first visit to Kaiserswerth was comparatively short, but in the following year, 1852, she went there again and took four months of definite training, from June to October.

A deep and warm regard seems to have arisen between the Fliedners and their English pupil, and the pastor’s friendship for Miss Nightingale’s revered counsellor, Elizabeth Fry, must have been one pleasant link in the happy bond.

Fliedner was certainly a wonderful man, and Miss Nightingale’s comment on the spirit of his work was as true as it was witty. “Pastor Fliedner,” she said, “began his work with two beds under a roof, not with a castle in the air, and Kaiserswerth is now diffusing its blessings and its deaconesses over almost every Protestant land.” This was literally true. Within ten years of founding Kaiserswerth he had established sixty nurses in twenty-five different centres. Later he founded a Mother-house on Mount Zion at Jerusalem, having already settled some of his nurses at Pittsburg in the United States. The building for the Jerusalem Mother-house was given by the King of Prussia, and, nursing all sick people, without any question of creed, is a school of training for nurses in the East.

Alexandria, Beyrout, Smyrna, Bucharest—he visited them all, and it is due to his efforts nearer home that to-day in almost all German towns of any importance there is a Deaconess Home, sending out trained women to nurse in middle-class families at very moderate fees, and ready to nurse the poor without any charge at all.

When, in 1864, “he passed to his glorious rest”—the words are Miss Nightingale’s—there were already one hundred such houses, and during part of Miss Nightingale’s visit to Kaiserswerth, Pastor Fliedner was away a good deal on the missionary journeys which spread the Deaconess Homes through Germany, but they met quite often enough for each to appreciate the noble character of the other. In all his different kinds of work for helping the poor she was eagerly interested, and it may be that some of her wise criticisms of district visiting in later years may have been suggested by the courtesy and good manners that ruled the visiting of poor homes at Kaiserswerth in which she shared. It was there also that she made warm friendship with Henrietta Frickenhaus, in whose training college at Kaiserswerth 400 pupils had already passed muster. It should be added that Henrietta Frickenhaus was the first schoolmistress of Kaiserswerth.

Mr. Sidney Herbert visited Kaiserswerth while Miss Nightingale was there, and when, in the great moment that came afterwards, he asked her to go out to the Crimea, he knew well how detailed and definite her training had been.

Pastor Fliedner’s eldest daughter told Mrs. Tooley how vividly she recalled her father’s solemn farewell blessing when Miss Nightingale was leaving Kaiserswerth; laying his hands on her bent head and, with eyes that seemed to look beyond the scene that lay before him, praying that she might be stablished in the Truth till death, and receive the Crown of Life.

And even mortal eyes may read a little of how those prayers for her future were fulfilled.

She left vivid memories. “No one has ever passed so brilliant an examination,” said Fliedner, “or shown herself so thoroughly mistress of all she had to learn, as the young, wealthy, and graceful Englishwoman.” Agnes Jones, who was trained there before her work in Liverpool left a memorable record of life spent in self-denying service, tells how the workers at Kaiserswerth longed to see Miss Nightingale again, how her womanliness and lovableness were remembered, and how among the sick people were those who even in dying blessed her for having led them to the Redeemer; for throughout her whole life her religion was the very life of her life, as deep as it was quiet, the underlying secret of that compassionate self-detachment and subdued fire, without which her wit and shrewdness would have lost their absolving glow and underlying tenderness. Hers was ever the gentleness of strength, not the easy bending of the weak. She was a pioneer among women, and did much to break down the cruel limitations which, in the name of affection and tradition, hemmed in the lives of English girls in those days. Perhaps she was among the first of that day in England to realize that the Christ, her Master, who sent Mary as His first messenger of the Resurrection, was in a fine sense of the word “unconventional,” even though He came that every jot and tittle of religious law might be spiritually fulfilled.

It was after her return to England from Germany that she published her little pamphlet on Kaiserswerth, from which quotations have already been given.

Her next visit was to the Convent of St. Vincent de Paul in Paris, where the nursing was a part of the long-established routine, and while there she was able to visit the hospitals in Paris, and learned much from the Sisters in their organized work among the houses of the poor. In the midst of all this she was herself taken ill, and was nursed by the Sisters. Her direct and personal experience of their tender skill no doubt left its mark upon her own fitness. On her return home to complete her recovery, her new capacity and knowledge made a good deal of delighted talk in the cottages, and Mrs. Tooley tells us how it was rumoured that “Miss Florence could set a broken leg better than a doctor,” and made the old rheumatic folk feel young again with her remedies, to say nothing of her “eye lotions,” which “was enough to ruin the spectacle folk.” She was always ahead of her time in her belief in simple rules of health and diet and hatred of all that continual use of drugs which was then so much in fashion, and she no doubt saw many interesting experiments at Matlock Bank in helping Nature to do her own work.

Florence Nightingale in 1854.

(From a drawing by H. M. B. C.)

As soon as her convalescence was over she visited London hospitals, and in the autumn of 1852 those of Edinburgh and Dublin, having spent a part of the interval in her home at Embley, where she had again the pleasure of being near her friends the Herberts, with whose neighbourly work among the poor she was in fullest sympathy.

Her first post was at the Harley Street Home for Sick Governesses. She had been interested in many kinds of efforts on behalf of those who suffer; Lord Shaftesbury’s Ragged School labours, for instance, had appealed to her, and to that and other like enterprises she had given the money earned by her little book on Kaiserswerth. But she always had in view the one clear and definite aim—to fit herself in every possible way for competent nursing. It was on August 12, 1853, that she became Superintendent of the Harley Street institution, which is now known as the Florence Nightingale Hospital. It was founded in 1850 by Lady Canning, as a Home for Invalid Gentlewomen, and when an appeal was made to Miss Nightingale for money and good counsel, she gave in addition herself and became for a time the Lady Superintendent.

The hospital was intended mainly for sick governesses, for whom the need of such a home of rest and care and surgical help had sometimes arisen, but it had been mismanaged and was in danger of becoming a failure. There Miss Nightingale, we read, was to be found “in the midst of various duties of a hospital—for the Home was largely a sanatorium—organizing the nurses, attending to the correspondence, prescriptions, and accounts; in short, performing all the duties of a hard-working matron, as well as largely financing the institution.”

“The task of dealing with sick and querulous women,” says Mrs. Tooley, “embittered and rendered sensitive and exacting by the unfortunate circumstances of their lives, was not an easy one, but Miss Nightingale had a calm and cheerful spirit which could bear with the infirmities of the weak. And so she laboured on in the dull house in Harley Street, summer and winter, bringing order and comfort out of a wretched chaos, and proving a real friend and helper to the sick and sorrow-laden women.

“At length the strain proved too much for her delicate body, and she was compelled most reluctantly to resign her task.”

She had worked very hard, and was seldom seen outside the walls of the house in Harley Street. Though she was not there very long, the effect of her presence was great and lasting, and the Home, which has now moved to Lisson Grove, has increased steadily in usefulness, though it has of necessity changed its lines a little, because the High Schools and the higher education of women have opened new careers and lessened the number of governesses, especially helpless governesses. It gives aid far and wide to the daughters and other kindred of hard-worked professional men, men who are serving the world with their brains, and nobly seeking to give work and service of as good a kind as lies within their power, rather than to snatch at its exact value in coin, even if that were possible—and in such toil as theirs, whether they be teachers, artists, parsons, or themselves doctors, it is not possible; for such work cannot be weighed in money.

Queen Alexandra is President, and last year 301 patients were treated, besides the 16 who were already within its walls when the new year began.

CHAPTER VIII.

The beginning of the war—A sketch of Sidney Herbert.

It was on April 11, 1854, that war was declared by Russia, and four days later the invasion of the Ottoman Empire began. England and France were the sworn allies of Turkey, and though the war had begun with a quarrel about “a key and a trinket,” the key and the trinket were, after all, symbols, just as truly as the flags for which men lay down their lives.

England had entrusted the cause of peace to those faithful lovers of peace, Lord Aberdeen, Mr. Gladstone, Mr. Cobden, and Mr. Bright; but no single man in our “constitutional” Government is in reality a free agent, and the peace-loving members of the Cabinet had been skilfully handled by the potent Lord Palmerston, and did not perceive soon enough that the understanding with Turkey and with France, into which they had drifted, must endanger the peace of Europe because the other Powers were ignored. If the English people had been secretly longing for war—and it is said that they had—then the terrible cup they had desired was to be drunk to the lees: the war on which they were entering was a war of agony and shame, a war in which men died by hundreds of neglect and mismanagement, before a woman’s hand could reach the helm and reform the hospital ordinances in the ship of State.

Meanwhile, before we plunge into the horrors of the Crimean War we may rest our minds with a few pages about Miss Nightingale’s friend, Mr. Sidney Herbert, who became an active and self-sacrificing power in the War Office.

When Florence Nightingale was born, Sidney Herbert—afterwards Lord Herbert of Lea—was already a boy of ten.

Those who know the outlook over the Thames, from the windows of Pembroke Lodge at Richmond, will realize that he too, like Florence Nightingale, was born in a very beautiful spot. His father, the eleventh Earl of Pembroke, had married the daughter of Count Woronzow, the Russian Ambassador, and, in Sidney’s knowledgeable help afterwards at the War Office during the Crimean War, it is not without interest to remember this.

His birth had not been expected so soon, and there were no baby clothes handy at Pembroke Lodge, where his mother was staying. It would seem that shops were not so well able to supply every need with a ready-made garment as they are in these days; so the first clothes that the baby boy wore were lent by the workhouse until his own were ready.

In later days, when he cared for the needs of all who crossed his path, until his people feared—or pretended to fear—that he would give away all he had, his mother used to say that workhouse clothes were the first he had worn after his birth, and were also clearly those in which he would die.

He had good reason to rejoice in his lineage, for he was descended from the sister of Sir Philip Sidney, after whom he was named. He too, like his great namesake, was all his life full of that high courtesy which comes of loving consideration for others rather than for self, and is never more charming than in those who, being in every sense “well-born,” have seen it in their fathers, and in their fathers before them, notwithstanding that in those others who, less fortunate, whether they be rich or poor, having come of an ill brood, are yet themselves well-bred, such courtesy is of the courts of heaven.

The boy’s father had much individuality. Being the owner of some thirty villages, and lord-lieutenant of the county, he was naturally a great magnate in Wiltshire. He was very fond of dogs, and his favourites among them sat at his own table, each with its own chair and plate.

Sidney was almost like an only son at home, for his elder brother, who was, of course, the heir to Lord Herbert’s patrimony, had married unhappily and lived abroad.