EVERY one knows the popular conception of Florence Nightingale. The
saintly, self-sacrificing woman, the delicate maiden of high degree who
threw aside the pleasures of a life of ease to succour the afflicted;
the Lady with the Lamp, gliding through the horrors of the hospital at
Scutari, and consecrating with the radiance of her goodness the dying
soldier's couch. The vision is familiar to all--but the truth was
different. The Miss Nightingale of fact was not as facile as fancy
painted her. She worked in another fashion and towards another end; she
moved under the stress of an impetus which finds no place in the popular
imagination. A Demon possessed her. Now demons, whatever else they may
be, are full of interest. And so it happens that in the real Miss
Nightingale there was more that was interesting than in the legendary
one; there was also less that was agreeable.
Her family was extremely well-to-do, and connected by marriage with a
spreading circle of other well-to-do families. There was a large country
house in Derbyshire; there was another in the New Forest; there were
Mayfair rooms for the London season and all its finest parties; there
were tours on the Continent with even more than the usual number of
Italian operas and of glimpses at the celebrities of Paris. Brought up
among such advantages, it was only natural to suppose that Florence
would show a proper appreciation of them by doing her duty in that state
of life unto which it had pleased God to call her--in other words, by
marrying, after a fitting number of dances and dinner-parties, an
eligible gentleman, and living happily ever afterwards. Her sister, her
cousins, all the young ladies of her acquaintance, were either getting
ready to do this or had already done it.
It was inconceivable that Florence should dream of anything else; yet
dream she did. Ah! To do her duty in that state of life unto which it
had pleased God to call her! Assuredly, she would not be behindhand in
doing her duty; but unto what state of life HAD it pleased God to call
her? That was the question. God's calls are many, and they are strange.
Unto what state of life had it pleased Him to call Charlotte Corday, or
Elizabeth of Hungary? What was that secret voice in her ear, if it was
not a call? Why had she felt, from her earliest years, those mysterious
promptings towards ... she hardly knew what, but certainly towards
something very different from anything around her? Why, as a child in
the nursery, when her sister had shown a healthy pleasure in tearing her
dolls to pieces, had SHE shown an almost morbid one in sewing them up
again? Why was she driven now to minister to the poor in their cottages,
to watch by sick-beds, to put her dog's wounded paw into elaborate
splints as if it was a human being? Why was her head filled with queer
imaginations of the country house at Embley turned, by some enchantment,
into a hospital, with herself as matron moving about among the beds? Why
was even her vision of heaven itself filled with suffering patients to
whom she was being useful? So she dreamed and wondered, and, taking out
her diary, she poured into it the agitations of her soul. And then the
bell rang, and it was time to go and dress for dinner.
As the years passed, a restlessness began to grow upon her. She was
unhappy, and at last she knew it. Mrs. Nightingale, too, began to notice
that there was something wrong. It was very odd--what could be the
matter with dear Flo? Mr. Nightingale suggested that a husband might be
advisable; but the curious thing was that she seemed to take no interest
in husbands. And with her attractions, and her accomplishments, too!
There was nothing in the world to prevent her making a really brilliant
match. But no! She would think of nothing but how to satisfy that
singular craving of hers to be DOING something. As if there was not
plenty to do in any case, in the ordinary way, at home. There was the
china to look after, and there was her father to be read to after
dinner. Mrs. Nightingale could not understand it; and then one day her
perplexity was changed to consternation and alarm. Florence announced an
extreme desire to go to Salisbury Hospital for several months as a
nurse; and she confessed to some visionary plan of eventually setting up
in a house of her own in a neighbouring village, and there founding
'something like a Protestant Sisterhood, without vows, for women of
educated feelings'. The whole scheme was summarily brushed aside as
preposterous; and Mrs. Nightingale, after the first shock of terror, was
able to settle down again more or less comfortably to her embroidery.
But Florence, who was now twenty-five and felt that the dream of her
life had been shattered, came near to desperation.
And, indeed, the difficulties in her path were great. For not only was
it an almost unimaginable thing in those days for a woman of means to
make her own way in the world and to live in independence, but the
particular profession for which Florence was clearly marked out both by
her instincts and her capacities was at that time a peculiarly
disreputable one. A 'nurse' meant then a coarse old woman, always
ignorant, usually dirty, often brutal, a Mrs. Gamp, in bunched-up sordid
garments, tippling at the brandy bottle or indulging in worse
irregularities. The nurses in the hospitals were especially notorious
for immoral conduct; sobriety was almost unknown among them; and they
could hardly be trusted to carry out the simplest medical duties.
Certainly, things HAVE changed since those days; and that they have
changed is due, far more than to any other human being, to Miss
Nightingale herself. It is not to be wondered at that her parents should
have shuddered at the notion of their daughter devoting her life to such
an occupation. 'It was as if,' she herself said afterwards, 'I had
wanted to be a kitchen-maid.' Yet the want, absurd and impracticable as
it was, not only remained fixed immovably in her heart, but grew in
intensity day by day. Her wretchedness deepened into a morbid
melancholy. Everything about her was vile, and she herself, it was
clear, to have deserved such misery, was even viler than her
surroundings. Yes, she had sinned--'standing before God's judgment
seat'. 'No one,' she declared, 'has so grieved the Holy Spirit'; of that
she was quite certain. It was in vain that she prayed to be delivered
from vanity and hypocrisy, and she could not bear to smile or to be gay,
'because she hated God to hear her laugh, as if she had not repented of
her sin'.
A weaker spirit would have been overwhelmed by the load of such
distresses--would have yielded or snapped. But this extraordinary young
woman held firm, and fought her way to victory. With an amazing
persistency, during the eight years that followed her rebuff over
Salisbury Hospital, she struggled and worked and planned. While
superficially she was carrying on the life of a brilliant girl in high
society, while internally she was a prey to the tortures of regret and
of remorse, she yet possessed the energy to collect the knowledge and to
undergo the experience which alone could enable her to do what she had
determined she would do in the end. In secret she devoured the reports
of medical commissions, the pamphlets of sanitary authorities, the
histories of hospitals and homes. She spent the intervals of the London
season in ragged schools and workhouses. When she went abroad with her
family, she used her spare time so well that there was hardly a great
hospital in Europe with which she was not acquainted; hardly a great
city whose slums she had not passed through. She managed to spend some
days in a convent school in Rome, and some weeks as a 'Soeur de Charite'
in Paris. Then, while her mother and sister were taking the waters at
Carlsbad, she succeeded in slipping off to a nursing institution at
Kaiserswerth, where she remained for more than three months. This was
the critical event of her life. The experience which she gained as a
nurse at Kaiserswerth formed the foundation of all her future action and
finally fixed her in her career.
But one other trial awaited her. The allurements of the world she had
brushed aside with disdain and loathing; she had resisted the subtler
temptation which, in her weariness, had sometimes come upon her, of
devoting her baffled energies to art or literature; the last ordeal
appeared in the shape of a desirable young man. Hitherto, her lovers had
been nothing to her but an added burden and a mockery; but now--for a
moment--she wavered. A new feeling swept over her--a feeling which she
had never known before--which she was never to know again. The most
powerful and the profoundest of all the instincts of humanity laid claim
upon her. But it rose before her, that instinct, arrayed--how could it
be otherwise?--in the inevitable habiliments of a Victorian marriage;
and she had the strength to stamp it underfoot.
'I have an intellectual nature which requires satisfaction,' she noted,
'and that would find it in him. I have a passionate nature which
requires satisfaction, and that would find it in him. I have a moral, an
active nature which requires satisfaction, and that would not find it in
his life. Sometimes I think that I will satisfy my passionate nature at
all events....'
But no, she knew in her heart that it could not be. 'To be nailed to a
continuation and exaggeration of my present life ... to put it out of my
power ever to be able to seize the chance of forming for myself a true
and rich life'--that would be a suicide. She made her choice, and
refused what was at least a certain happiness for a visionary good which
might never come to her at all. And so she returned to her old life of
waiting and bitterness.
'The thoughts and feelings that I have now,' she wrote, 'I can remember
since I was six years old. A profession, a trade, a necessary
occupation, something to fill and employ all my faculties, I have always
felt essential to me, I have always longed for. The first thought I can
remember, and the last, was nursing work; and in the absence of this,
education work, but more the education of the bad than of the young ...
Everything has been tried--foreign travel, kind friends, everything. My
God! What is to become of me?'
A desirable young man? Dust and ashes! What was there desirable in such
a thing as that? 'In my thirty-first year,' she noted in her diary, 'I
see nothing desirable but death.'
Three more years passed, and then at last the pressure of time told; her
family seemed to realise that she was old enough and strong enough to
have her way; and she became the superintendent of a charitable nursing
home in Harley Street. She had gained her independence, though it was in
a meagre sphere enough; and her mother was still not quite resigned:
surely Florence might at least spend the summer in the country. At
times, indeed, among her intimates, Mrs. Nightingale almost wept. 'We
are ducks,' she said with tears in her eyes, 'who have hatched a wild
swan.' But the poor lady was wrong; it was not a swan that they had
hatched, it was an eagle.