SIDNEY HERBERT'S death finally put an end to Miss Nightingale's dream of
a reformed War Office. For a moment, indeed, in the first agony of her
disappointment, she had wildly clutched at a straw; she had written to
M. Gladstone to beg him to take up the burden of Sidney Herbert's work.
And Mr. Gladstone had replied with a sympathetic account of the funeral.
Succeeding Secretaries of State managed between them to undo a good deal
of what had been accomplished, but they could not undo it all; and for
ten years more (1862-72) Miss Nightingale remained a potent influence at
the War Office. After that, her direct connection with the Army came to
an end, and her energies began to turn more and more completely towards
more general objects. Her work upon hospital reform assumed enormous
proportions; she was able to improve the conditions in infirmaries and
workhouses; and one of her most remarkable papers forestalls the
recommendations of the Poor Law Commission of 1909. Her training, school
for nurses, with all that it involved in initiative, control,
responsibillity, and combat, would have been enough in itself to have
absorbed the whole efforts of at least two lives of ordinary vigour. And
at the same time her work in connection with India, which had begun with
the Sanitary Commission on the Indian Army, spread and ramified in a
multitude of directions. Her tentacles reached the India Office and
succeeded in establishing a hold even upon those slippery high places.
For many years it was de rigueur for the newly appointed Viceroy, before
he left England, to pay a visit to Miss Nightingale.
After much hesitation, she had settled down in a small house in South
Street, where she remained for the rest of her life. That life was a
very long one; the dying woman reached her ninety-first year. Her ill
health gradually diminished; the crises of extreme danger became less
frequent, and at last altogether ceased; she remained an invalid, but an
invalid of a curious character--an invalid who was too weak to walk
downstairs and who worked far harder than most Cabinet Ministers. Her
illness, whatever it may have been, was certainly not inconvenient. It
involved seclusion; and an extraordinary, an unparalleled seclusion was,
it might almost have been said, the mainspring of Miss Nightingale's
life. Lying on her sofa in the little upper room in South Street, she
combined the intense vitality of a dominating woman of the world with
the mysterious and romantic quality of a myth. She was a legend in her
lifetime, and she knew it. She tasted the joys of power, like those
Eastern Emperors whose autocratic rule was based upon invisibility, with
the mingled satisfactions of obscurity and fame.
And she found the machinery of illness hardly less effective as a
barrier against the eyes of men than the ceremonial of a palace. Great
statesmen and renowned generals were obliged to beg for audiences;
admiring princesses from foreign countries found that they must see her
at her own time, or not at all; and the ordinary mortal had no hope of
ever getting beyond the downstairs sitting-room and Dr. Sutherland. For
that indefatigable disciple did, indeed, never desert her. He might be
impatient, he might be restless, but he remained. His 'incurable
looseness of thought', for so she termed it, continued at her service to
the end. Once, it is true, he had actually ventured to take a holiday;
but he was recalled, and he did not repeat the experiment. He was wanted
downstairs. There he sat, transacting business answering correspondence,
interviewing callers, and exchanging innumerable notes with the unseen
power above. Sometimes word came down that Miss Nightingale was just
well enough to see one of her visitors. The fortunate man was led up,
was ushered, trembling, into the shaded chamber, and, of course, could
never afterwards forget the interview. Very rarely, indeed, once or
twice a year, perhaps, but nobody could be quite certain, in deadly
secrecy, Miss Nightingale went out for a drive in the Park.
Unrecognised, the living legend flitted for a moment before the common
gaze. And the precaution was necessary; for there were times when, at
some public function, the rumour of her presence was spread abroad; and
ladies, mistaken by the crowd for Miss Nightingale, were followed,
pressed upon, vehemently supplicated 'Let me touch your shawl'; 'Let me
stroke your arm'; such was the strange adoration in the hearts of the
people. That vast reserve of force lay there behind her; she could use
it, if she could. But she preferred never to use it. On occasions, she
might hint or threaten, she might balance the sword of Damocles over the
head of the Bison; she might, by a word, by a glance, remind some
refractory Minister, some unpersuadable Viceroy, sitting in audience
with her in the little upper room, that she was something more than a
mere sick woman, that she had only, so to speak, to go to the window and
wave her handkerchief, for ... dreadful things to follow. But that was
enough; they understood; the myth was there--obvious, portentous,
impalpable; and so it remained to the last.
With statesmen and governors at her beck and call, with her hands on a
hundred strings, with mighty provinces at her feet, with foreign
governments agog for her counsel, building hospitals, training
nurses--she still felt that she had not enough to do. She sighed for
more worlds to conquer--more, and yet more.
She looked about her--what was left? Of course! Philosophy! After the
world of action, the world of thought. Having set right the health of
the British Army, she would now do the same good service for the
religious convictions of mankind. She had long noticed--with regret--the
growing tendency towards free-thinking among artisans. With regret, but
not altogether with surprise, the current teaching of Christianity was
sadly to seek; nay, Christianity itself was not without its defects. She
would rectify these errors. She would correct the mistakes of the
Churches; she would point out just where Christianity was wrong; and she
would explain to the artisans what the facts of the case really were.
Before her departure for the Crimea, she had begun this work; and now,
in the intervals of her other labours, she completed it. Her
'Suggestions for Thought to the Searchers After Truth Among the Artisans
of England' (1860), unravels, in the course of three portly volumes, the
difficulties hitherto, curiously enough, unsolved--connected with such
matters as Belief in God, the Plan of Creation, the Origin of Evil, the
Future Life, Necessity and Free Will, Law, and the Nature of Morality.
The Origin of Evil, in particular, held no perplexities for Miss
Nightingale. 'We cannot conceive,' she remarks, 'that Omnipotent
Righteousness would find satisfaction in solitary existence.' This
being, so, the only question remaining to be asked is: 'What beings
should we then conceive that God would create?' Now, He cannot create
perfect beings, 'since, essentially, perfection is one'; if He did so,
He would only be adding to Himself. Thus the conclusion is obvious: He
must create imperfect ones. Omnipotent Righteousness, faced by the
intolerable impasse of a solitary existence, finds itself bound by the
very nature of the cause, to create the hospitals at Scutari. Whether
this argument would have satisfied the artisans was never discovered,
for only a very few copies of the book were printed for private
circulation. One copy was sent to Mr. Mill, who acknowledged it in an
extremely polite letter. He felt himself obliged, however, to confess
that he had not been altogether convinced by Miss Nightingale's proof of
the existence of God. Miss Nightingale was surprised and mortified; she
had thought better of Mr. Mill; for surely her proof of the existence of
God could hardly be improved upon. 'A law,' she had pointed out,
'implies a law-giver.' Now the Universe is full of laws--the law of
gravitation, the law of the excluded middle, and many others; hence it
follows that the Universe has a law-giver--and what would Mr. Mill be
satisfied with, if he was not satisfied with that?
Perhaps Mr. Mill might have asked why the argument had not been pushed
to its logical conclusion. Clearly, if we are to trust the analogy of
human institutions, we must remember that laws are, as a matter of fact,
not dispensed by lawgivers, but passed by Act of Parliament. Miss
Nightingale, however, with all her experience of public life, never
stopped to consider the question whether God might not be a Limited
Monarchy. 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 generalisation. 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 scaled 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 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,
agonised 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. 'Oh Father,' she
wrote, 'I submit, I resign myself, I accept with all my heart, this
stretching out of Thy hand to save me.... Oh 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 would bring everyone, 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 criticised
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, required all Mr. Jowett's suavity 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 realised.'
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 realised; 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, and she was
annoyed by his conversation. Her tongue, one day, could not refrain from
shooting out at him: 'He comes to me, and he talks to me,' she said, 'as
if I were someone else.'
V
AT one time she had almost decided to end her life in retirement as a
patient at 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, amoton memaniia--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 mood.
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 ever 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 this
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 recognised
that some compliment was being paid her. 'Too kind--too kind,' she
murmured; and she was not ironical.