Yet her conception of God was certainly not orthodox. She felt towards Him as she might have felt towards a glorified sanitary engineer; and in some of her speculations she seems hardly to distinguish between the Deity and the Drains. As one turns over these singular pages, one has the impression that Miss Nightingale has got the Almighty too into her clutches, and that, if He is not careful, she will kill Him with overwork.
Then, suddenly, in the very midst of the ramifying generalities of her metaphysical disquisitions there is an unexpected turn, and the reader is plunged all at once into something particular, something personal, something impregnated with intense experience – a virulent invective upon the position of women in the upper ranks of society. Forgetful alike of her high argument and of the artisans, the bitter creature rails through a hundred pages of close print at the falsities of family life, the ineptitudes of marriage, the emptinesses of convention, in the spirit of an Ibsen or a Samuel Butler. Her fierce pen, shaking with intimate anger, depicts in biting sentences the fearful fate of an unmarried girl in a wealthy household. It is a cri du coeur; and then, as suddenly, she returns once more to instruct the artisans upon the nature of Omnipotent Righteousness.
Her mind was, indeed, better qualified to dissect the concrete and distasteful fruits of actual life than to construct a coherent system of abstract philosophy. In spite of her respect for Law, she was never at home with a generalization. Thus, though the great achievement of her life lay in the immense impetus which she gave to the scientific treatment of sickness, a true comprehension of the scientific method itself was alien to her spirit. Like most great men of action – perhaps like all – she was simply an empiricist. She believed in what she saw, and she acted accordingly; beyond that she would not go. She had found in Scutari that fresh air and light played an effective part in the prevention of the maladies with which she had to deal; and that was enough for her; she would not inquire further; what were the general principles underlying that fact – or even whether there were any – she refused to consider. Years after the discoveries of Pasteur and Lister, she laughed at what she called the ‘germ-fetish’. There was no such thing as ‘infection’; she had never seen it, therefore it did not exist. But she had seen the good effects of fresh air; therefore there could be no doubt about them; and therefore it was essential that the bedrooms of patients should be well ventilated. Such was her doctrine; and in those days of hermetically sealed windows it was a very valuable one. But it was a purely empirical doctrine, and thus it led to some unfortunate results. When, for instance, her influence in India was at its height, she issued orders that all hospital windows should be invariably kept open. The authorities, who knew what an open window in the hot weather meant, protested, but in vain; Miss Nightingale was incredulous. She knew nothing of the hot weather, but she did know the value of fresh air – from personal experience; the authorities were talking nonsense; and the windows must be kept open all the year round. There was a great outcry from all the doctors in India, but she was firm; and for a moment it seemed possible that her terrible commands would have to be put into execution. Lord Lawrence, however, was Viceroy, and he was able to intimate to Miss Nightingale, with sufficient authority, that he himself had decided upon the question, and that his decision must stand, even against her own. Upon that, she gave way, but reluctantly and quite unconvinced; she was only puzzled by the unexpected weakness of Lord Lawrence. No doubt, if she had lived today, and if her experience had lain, not among cholera cases at Scutari, but among yellow-fever cases in Panama, she would have declared fresh air a fetish, and would have maintained to her dying day that the only really effective way of dealing with disease was by the destruction of mosquitoes.
Yet her mind, so positive, so realistic, so ultra-practical, had its singular revulsions, its mysterious moods of mysticism and of doubt. At times, lying sleepless in the early hours, she fell into long, strange, agonized meditations, and then, seizing a pencil, she would commit to paper the confessions of her soul. The morbid longings of her pre-Crimean days came over her once more; she filled page after page with self-examination, self-criticism, self-surrender. ‘O Father,’ she wrote, ‘I submit, I resign myself, I accept with all my heart this stretching out of Thy hand to save me…. O how vain it is, the vanity of vanities, to live in men’s thoughts instead of God’s!’ She was lonely, she was miserable. ‘Thou knowest that through all these horrible twenty years, I have been supported by the belief that I was working with Thee who wert bringing every one, even our poor nurses, to perfection’ – and yet, after all, what was the result? Had not even she been an unprofitable servant? One night, waking suddenly, she saw, in the dim light of the night-lamp, tenebrous shapes upon the wall. The past rushed back upon her. ‘Am I she who once stood on that Crimean height?’ she wildly asked – ‘ “The Lady with a lamp shall stand….” The lamp shows me only my utter shipwreck.’
She sought consolation in the writings of the Mystics and in a correspondence with Mr Jowett. For many years the Master of Balliol acted as her spiritual adviser. He discussed with her in a series of enormous letters the problems of religion and philosophy; he criticized her writings on those subjects with the tactful sympathy of a cleric who was also a man of the world; and he even ventured to attempt at times to instil into her rebellious nature some of his own peculiar suavity. ‘I sometimes think,’ he told her, ‘that you ought seriously to consider how your work may be carried on, not with less energy, but in a calmer spirit. I am not blaming the past…. But I want the peace of God to settle on the future.’ He recommended her to spend her time no longer in ‘conflicts with Government offices’, and to take up some literary work. He urged her to ‘work out her notion of Divine Perfection’, in a series of essays for Frazer’s Magazine. She did so; and the result was submitted to Mr Froude, who pronounced the second essay to be ‘even more pregnant than the first. I cannot tell,’ he said, ‘how sanitary, with disordered intellects, the effects of such papers will be.’ Mr Carlyle, indeed, used different language, and some remarks of his about a lost lamb bleating on the mountains having been unfortunately repeated to Miss Nightingale, all Mr Jowett’s suavity was required to keep the peace. In a letter of fourteen sheets, he turned her attention from this painful topic towards a discussion of Quietism. ‘I don’t see why,’ said the Master of Balliol, ‘active life might not become a sort of passive life too.’ And then, he added, ‘I sometimes fancy there are possibilities of human character much greater than have been realized.’ She found such sentiments helpful, underlining them in blue pencil; and, in return, she assisted her friend with a long series of elaborate comments upon the Dialogues of Plato, most of which he embodied in the second edition of his translation. Gradually her interest became more personal; she told him never to work again after midnight, and he obeyed her. Then she helped him to draw up a special form of daily service for the College Chapel, with selections from the Psalms under the heads of ‘God the Lord, God the Judge, God the Father, and God the friend’ – though, indeed, this project was never realized; for the Bishop of Oxford disallowed the alterations, exercising his legal powers, on the advice of Sir Travers Twiss.
Their relations became intimate. ‘The spirit of the Twenty-third Psalm and the spirit of the Nineteenth Psalm should be united in our lives,’ Mr Jowett said. Eventually, she asked him to do her a singular favour. Would he, knowing what he did of her religious views, come to London and administer to her the Holy Sacrament? He did not hesitate, and afterwards declared that he would always regard the occasion as a solemn event in his life. He was devoted to her; though the precise nature of his feelings towards her never quite transpired. Her feelings towards him were more mixed. At first, he was ‘that great and good man’ – ‘that true saint, Mr Jowett’; but, as time went on, some gall was mingled with the balm; the acrimony of her nature asserted itself. She felt that she gave more sympathy than she received; she was exhausted, she was annoyed, by his conversation. Her tongue, one day, could not
refain from shooting out at him. ‘He comes to me, and he talks to me,’ she said, ‘as if I were some one else.’
5
AT one time she had almost decided to end her life in retirement, as a patient of St Thomas’s Hospital. But partly owing to the persuasions of Mr Jowett, she changed her mind; for forty-five years she remained in South Street; and in South Street she died. As old age approached, though her influence with the official world gradually diminished, her activities seemed to remain as intense and widespread as before. When hospitals were to be built, when schemes of sanitary reform were in agitation, when wars broke out, she was still the adviser of all Europe. Still, with a characteristic self-assurance, she watched from her Mayfair bedroom over the welfare of India. Still, with an indefatigable enthusiasm, she pushed forward the work, which perhaps, was nearer to her heart, more completely her own, than all the rest – the training of nurses. In her moments of deepest depression, when her greatest achievements seemed to lose their lustre, she thought of her nurses, and was comforted. The ways of God, she found, were strange indeed. ‘How inefficient I was in the Crimea,’ she noted. ‘Yet He has raised up from it trained nursing.’
At other times she was better satisfied. Looking back, she was amazed by the enormous change which, since her early days, had come over the whole treatment of illness, the whole conception of public and domestic health – a change in which, she knew, she had played her part. One of her Indian admirers, the Aga Khan, came to visit her. She expatiated on the marvellous advances she had lived to see in the management of hospitals, in drainage, in ventilation, in sanitary work of every kind. There was a pause; and then, ‘Do you think you are improving?’ asked the Aga Khan. She was a little taken aback, and said, ‘What do you mean by “improving”?’ He replied, ‘Believing more in God.’ She saw that he had a view of God which was different from hers. ‘A most interesting man,’ she noted after the interview; ‘but you could never teach him sanitation.’
When old age actually came, something curious happened. Destiny, having waited very patiently, played a queer trick on Miss Nightingale. The benevolence and public spirit of that long life had only been equalled by its acerbity. Her virtue had dwelt in hardness, and she had poured forth her unstinted usefulness with a bitter smile upon her lips. And now the sarcastic years brought the proud woman her punishment. She was not to die as she had lived. The sting was to be taken out of her: she was to be made soft; she was to be reduced to compliance and complacency. The change came gradually, but at last it was unmistakable. The terrible commander who had driven Sidney Herbert to his death, to whom Mr Jowett had applied the words of Homer, – raging insatiably – now accepted small compliments with gratitude, and indulged in sentimental friendships with young girls. The author of Notes on Nursing – that classical compendium of the besetting sins of the sisterhood, drawn up with the detailed acrimony, the vindictive relish, of a Swift – now spent long hours in composing sympathetic Addresses to Probationers, whom she petted and wept over in turn. And, at the same time, there appeared a corresponding alteration in her physical mould. The thin, angular woman, with her haughty eye and her acrid mouth, had vanished; and in her place was the rounded, bulky form of a fat old lady, smiling all day long. Then something else became visible. The brain which had been steeled at Scutari was indeed, literally, growing soft. Senility – an even more and more amiable senility – descended. Towards the end, consciousness itself grew lost in a roseate haze, and melted into nothingness. It was just then, three years before her death, when she was eighty-seven years old (1907), that those in authority bethought them that the opportune moment had come for bestowing a public honour on Florence Nightingale. She was offered the Order of Merit. That Order, whose roll contains, among other distinguished names, those of Sir Lawrence Alma Tadema and Sir Edward Elgar, is remarkable chiefly for the fact that, as its title indicates, it is bestowed because its recipient deserves it, and for no other reason. Miss Nightingale’s representatives accepted the honour, and her name, after a lapse of many years, once more appeared in the Press. Congratulations from all sides came pouring in. There was a universal burst of enthusiasm – a final revivification of the ancient myth. Among her other admirers, the German Emperor took his opportunity of expressing his feelings towards her. ‘His Majesty,’ wrote the German Ambassador, ‘having just brought to a close a most enjoyable stay in the beautiful neighbourhood of your old home near Romsey, has commanded me to present you with some flowers as a token of his esteem.’ Then, by Royal command, the Order of Merit was brought to South Street, and there was a little ceremony of presentation. Sir Douglas Dawson, after a short speech, stepped forward, and handed the insignia of the Order to Miss Nightingale. Propped up by pillows, she dimly recognized that some compliment was being paid her. ‘Too kind – too kind,’ she murmured; and she was not ironical.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Sir E. Cook, Life of Florence Nightingale.
A. W. Kinglake, The Invasion of the Crimea.
Lord Sidney Godolphin Osborne, Scutari and its Hospitals.
S. M. Mitra, Life of Sir John Hall.
Lord Stanmore, Sidney Herbert.
Sir G. Douglas, The Panmure Papers.
Sir H. Maxwell, Life and Letters of the Fourth Earl of Clarendon.
E. Abbott and L. Campbell, Life and Letters of Benjamin Jowett.
A. H. Clough, Poems and Memoir.
Dr Arnold
IN 1827 the headmastership of Rugby School fell vacant, and it became necessary for the twelve trustees, noble men and gentlemen of Warwickshire, to appoint a successor to the post. Reform was in the air – political, social, religious; there was even a feeling abroad that our great public schools were not quite all that they should be, and that some change or other – no one precisely knew what – but some change in the system of their management, was highly desirable. Thus it was natural that when the twelve noblemen and gentlemen, who had determined to be guided entirely by the merits of the candidates, found among the testimonials pouring in upon them a letter from Dr Hawkins, the Provost of Oriel, predicting that if they elected Mr Thomas Arnold he would ‘change the face of education all through the public schools of England’, they hesitated no longer: obviously, Mr Thomas Arnold was their man. He was elected therefore; received, as was fitting, priest’s orders; as was no less fitting, a Doctor of Divinity; and in August 1828, took up the duties of his office.
All that was known of the previous life of Dr Arnold seemed to justify the prediction of the Provost of Oriel, and the choice of the Trustees. The son of a respectable Collector of Customs, he had been educated at Winchester and at Oxford, where his industry and piety had given him a conspicuous place among his fellow-students. It is true that, as a schoolboy, a certain pompousness in the style of his letters home suggested to the more clear-sighted among his relatives the possibility that young Thomas might grow up into a prig; but, after all, what else could be expected from a child who, at the age of three, had been presented by his father, as a reward for proficiency in his studies, with the twenty-four volumes of Smollett’s History of England? His career at Oxford had been a distinguished one, winding up with an Oriel fellowship. It was at about this time that the smooth and satisfactory progress of his life was for a moment interrupted: he began to be troubled by religious doubts. These doubts, as we learn from one of his contemporaries, who afterwards became Mr Justice Coleridge, ‘were not low nor rationalistic in their tendency, according to the bad sense of that term; there was no indisposition in him to believe merely because the article transcended his reason; he doubted the proof and the interpretation of the textual authority’. In his perturbation, Arnold consulted Keble, who was at that time one of his closest friends, and a Fellow of the same College. ‘The subject of these distressing thoughts,’ Keble wrote to Coleridge, ‘is that most awful one, on which all very inquisitive reasoning minds are, I believe, most liable to such temptations – I mean, the doctrine of the blessed Trinity. Do not start, my dear C
oleridge; I do not believe that Arnold has any serious scruples of the understanding about it, but it is a defect of his mind that he cannot get rid of a certain feeling of objections.’ What was to be done? Keble’s advice was peremptory. Arnold was ‘bid to pause in his inquiries, to pray earnestly for help and light from above, and turn himself more strongly than ever to the practical duties of a holy life’. He did so, and the result was all that could be wished. He soon found himself blessed with perfect peace of mind, and a settled conviction.
One other difficulty, and one only, we hear of, at this period of his life. His dislike of early rising amounted, we are told, ‘almost to a constitutional infirmity’. This weakness too he overcame, yet not quite so successfully as his doubts upon the doctrine of the Trinity. For in afterlife the Doctor would often declare ‘that early rising continued to be a daily effort to him, and that in this instance he never found the truth of the usual rule, that all things are made easy by custom’.
He married young, and settled down in the country as a private tutor for youths preparing for the Universities. There he remained for ten years – happy, busy, and sufficiently prosperous. Occupied chiefly with his pupils, he nevertheless devoted much of his energy to wider interests. He delivered a series of sermons in the parish church; and he began to write a History of Rome, in the hope, as he said, that its tone might be such ‘that the strictest of what is called the Evangelical party would not object to putting it into the hands of their children’. His views on the religious and political condition of the country began to crystallize. He was alarmed by the ‘want of Christian principle in the literature of the day’, looking forward anxiously to the approach of a greater struggle between good and evil than the world has yet seen’; and, after a serious conversation with Dr Whately, began to conceive a necessity of considerable alterations in the Church Establishment. All who knew him during these years were profoundly impressed by the earnestness of his religious convictions and feelings, which, as one observer said, ‘were ever bursting forth’. It was impossible to disregard his ‘deep consciousness of the invisible world’ and ‘the peculiar feeling of love and adoration which he entertained towards our Lord Jesus Christ’. ‘His manner of awful reverence when speaking of God or of the Scriptures’ was particularly striking. ‘No one could know him even a little,’ said another friend, ‘and not be struck by his absolute wrestling with evil, so that like St Paul he seemed to be battling with the wicked one, and yet with a feeling of God’s help on his side.’
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