and for which she will always be loved and honoured, was about to
commence. The Crimean war broke out early in 1854, and within a very few
weeks of the commencement of actual fighting, every one at home was
horrified and ashamed to hear of the frightful disorganisation of the
supplies, and of the utter breakdown of the commissariat and medical
arrangements. The most hopeless hugger-mugger reigned triumphant. The
tinned meats sent out from England were little better than poison; ships
arrived with stores of boots which proved all to be for the left foot.
(Muddleheads do not all belong to one sex.) The medical arrangements for
the sick and wounded were on a par with the rest. Mr. Justin M’Carthy,
in his _History of Our Own Times_, speaks of the hospitals for the sick
and wounded at Scutari as being in an absolutely chaotic condition. “In
some instances,” he writes, “medical stores were left to decay at Varna,
or were found lying useless in the holds of vessels in Balaklava Bay,
which were needed for the wounded at Scutari. The medical officers were
able and zealous men; the stores were provided and paid for so far as
our Government was concerned; but the stores were not brought to the
medical men. These had their hands all but idle, their eyes and souls
tortured by the sight of sufferings which they were unable to relieve
for want of the commonest appliances of the hospital” (vol. ii. p. 316).
The result was that the most frightful mortality prevailed, not so much
from the inevitable risks of battle, but from the insanitary conditions
of the camp, the want of proper food, clothing, and fuel, and the
wretched hospital arrangements. Mr. Mackenzie, author of a _History of
the Nineteenth Century_, gives the following facts and figures with
regard to our total losses in the Crimea: “Out of a total loss of
20,656, only 2598 were slain in battle; 18,058 died in hospital.”
“Several regiments became literally extinct. One had but seven men left
fit for duty; another had thirty. When the sick were put on board
transports, to be conveyed to hospital, the mortality was shocking. In
some ships one man in every four died in a voyage of seven days. In some
of the hospitals recovery was the rare exception. At one time
four-fifths of the poor fellows who underwent amputation died of
hospital gangrene. During the first seven months of the siege the men
perished by disease at a rate which would have extinguished the entire
force in little more than a year and a half” (p. 171). When these facts
became known in England, the mingled grief, shame, and anger of the
whole nation were unbounded. It was then that Mr. Sidney Herbert, who
was Minister of War, appealed to Miss Nightingale to organise and take
out with her a band of trained nurses. It is needless to say that she
consented. She was armed with full authority to cut the swathes of red
tape that had proved shrouds to so many of our soldiers. On the 21st of
October 1854 Miss Nightingale, accompanied by forty-two other ladies,
all trained nurses, set sail for the Crimea. They arrived at
Constantinople on 4th November, the eve of Inkerman, which was fought on
5th November. Their first work, therefore, was to receive into the
wards, which were already filled by 2300 men, the wounded from what
proved the severest and fiercest engagement of the campaign. Miss
Nightingale and her band of nurses proved fully equal to the charge they
had undertaken. She, by a combination of inexorable firmness with
unvarying gentleness, evolved order out of chaos. After her arrival,
there were no more complaints of the inefficiency of the hospital
arrangements for the army. The extraordinary way in which she spent
herself and let herself be spent will never be forgotten. She has been
known to stand for twenty hours at a stretch, in order to see the
wounded provided with every means of easing their condition. Her
attention was directed not only to nursing the sick and wounded, but to
removing the causes which had made the camp and the hospitals so deadly
to their inmates. The extent of the work of mere nursing may be
estimated by the fact that a few months after her arrival ten thousand
sick men were under her care, and the rows of beds in one hospital
alone, the Barrack Hospital at Scutari, measured two miles and one-third
in length, with an average distance between each bed of two feet six
inches. Miss Nightingale’s personal influence and authority over the men
were immensely and deservedly strong. They knew she had left the
comforts and refinements of a wealthy home to be of service to them. Her
slight delicate form, her steady nerve, her kindly conciliating manner,
and her absolute self-devotion, awoke a passion of chivalrous feeling on
the part of the men she tended. Sometimes a soldier would refuse to
submit to a painful but necessary operation until a few calm sentences
of hers seemed at once to allay the storm, and the man would submit
willingly to the ordeal he had to undergo. One soldier said, “Before she
came here, there was such cursin’ and swearing, and after that it was as
holy as a church.” Another said to Mr. Sidney Herbert, “She would speak
to one and another, and nod and smile to many more; but she could not do
it to all, you know—we lay there in hundreds—but we could kiss her
shadow as it fell, and lay our heads on the pillow again, content.” This
incident, of the wounded soldier turning to kiss her shadow as it
passed, has been woven into a beautiful poem by Longfellow. It is called
“Santa Filomena.” The fact that she had been born in, and had been named
after, the city of Florence, may have suggested to the poet to turn her
name into the language of the country of her birth.
Miss Nightingale suffered from an attack of hospital fever in the spring
of 1855, but as soon as possible she returned to her laborious post, and
never quitted it till the war was over and the last of our soldiers was
on his way home. When she returned to England she received such a
welcome as probably has fallen to no other woman; all distinctions of
party and of rank were forgotten in the one wish to do her honour. She
was presented by the Queen with a jewel in commemoration of her work in
the Crimea, and a national testimonial was set on foot, to which a sum
of £50,000 was subscribed. It is unnecessary to say that Miss
Nightingale did not accept this testimonial for her own personal
benefit. The sum was devoted to the permanent endowment of schools for
the training of nurses in St. Thomas’s and King’s College Hospitals.
Since the Crimea no European war has taken place without calling forth
the service of trained bands of skilled nurses. Within ten years of
Florence Nightingale’s labours in the East, the nations of Europe agreed
at the Geneva Convention upon certain rules and regulations, with the
object of ameliorating the condition of the sick and wounded in war. By
this convention all ambulances and military hospitals were neutralised,
and their inmates and staff were henceforth to be regarded as
non-combatants. The distinguishing red cross of the Geneva Convention is
now universally recognised as the one civilised element in the savagery
of war.
During a great part of the years that have passed since Miss Nightingale
returned from the Crimea, she has suffered from extremely bad health;
but few people, even of the most robust frame, have done better and more
invaluable work. She has been the adviser of successive Governments on
the sanitary condition of the army in India; her experience in the
Crimea convinced her that the death-rate in the army, even in time of
peace, could be reduced by nearly one-half by proper sanitary
arrangements. She contributed valuable state papers on the subject to
the Government of the day, and her advice has had important effects, not
only on the condition of the army, but also on the sanitary reform of
many of the towns of India, and on the extension of irrigation in that
country. Besides this department of useful public work, she has written
many books on the subjects she has made particularly her own; among them
may be mentioned _Notes on Hospitals_ and _Notes on Nursing_; the latter
in particular is a book which no family ought to be without.
It will surprise no one to hear that she is very zealous for all that
can lift up and improve the lives of women, and give them a higher
conception of their duties and responsibilities. She supports the
extension of parliamentary representation to women, generally, however,
putting in a word in what she writes on the subject, to remind people
that representatives will never be better than the people they
represent. Therefore the most important thing for men, as well as for
women, is to improve the education and morality of the elector, and then
Parliament will improve itself. Every honest effort for the good of men
or women has her sympathy, and a large number her generous support. May
she long be spared to the country she has served so well, a living
example of strength, courage, and self-forgetfulness—
A noble type of good
Heroic womanhood.
SANTA FILOMENA.
BY H. W. LONGFELLOW.
WHENE’ER a noble deed is wrought,
Whene’er is spoken a noble thought,
Our hearts, in glad surprise,
To higher levels rise.
The tidal wave of deeper souls
Into our inmost being rolls,
And lifts us unawares
Out of all meaner cares.
Honour to those whose words or deeds
Thus help us in our daily needs,
And by their overflow
Raise us from what is low.
Thus thought I, as by night I read
Of the great army of the dead,
The trenches cold and damp,
The starved and frozen camp.
The wounded from the battle plain
In dreary hospitals of pain,
The cheerless corridors,
The cold and stony floors.
Lo! in that house of misery
A lady with a lamp I see
Pass through the glimmering gloom,
And flit from room to room.
And slow, as in a dream of bliss,
The speechless sufferer turns to kiss
Her shadow, as it falls
Upon the darkening walls.
As if a door in heaven should be
Opened, and then closed suddenly,
The vision came and went,
The light shone and was spent.
On England’s annals, through the long
Hereafter of her speech and song,
That light its rays shall cast
From portals of the past.
A lady with a lamp shall stand
In the great history of the land,
A noble type of good
Heroic womanhood.
Nor even shall be wanting here
The palm, the lily, and the spear,
The symbols that of yore
Saint Filomena bore.
IX
MARY LAMB
THE name of Mary Lamb can never be mentioned without recalling that of
her brother Charles, and the devoted, self-sacrificing love that existed
between the two. It was one of Harriet Martineau’s sayings, that of all
relations that between brother and sister was apt to be the least
satisfactory. There have been some notable examples to the contrary, and
perhaps the most notable is that given by Charles and Mary Lamb. When a
brother and sister are linked together by an unusually strong bond of
affection and admiration, it is generally the sister who, by inclination
and natural selection, sacrifices all individual and personal objects
for the sake of the brother. For instance, she frequently remains
unmarried in order to be able to devote herself to his pursuits and
further his interests. There is no more devotedly unselfish love than
that of a sister and brother when it is at its best. The love of a wife
for a husband, or a parent for a child, has something in it more of the
element of self. In both these relationships, the husband and wife and
the parent and child are so closely and indissolubly identified with one
another that it is comparatively easy to merge the love between them
into self-love. But between a brother and sister this is not the case.
The bond that unites the two can be set aside by either of them at will.
It is partly voluntary in its character, and, as previously remarked, in
the give and take of this affection, it is, speaking generally, the
brother who takes and the sister who gives. The contrary, however, was
the case with Charles and Mary Lamb. Between these two, it was the
brother who laid down his life for his sister, sacrificing for her sake,
at the outset of his own career, his prospects of love and marriage, the
ease and comfort of his life, and his opportunities of devoting himself
exclusively to his darling studies.
The story of these two beautiful lives is worth more than even their
contributions to English literature, and makes us love Lamb and his
sister quite independently of the _Essays of Elia_, and the _Tales from
Shakespeare_. Mary Lamb was born in 1764, eleven years before her
brother Charles. Her childhood, till the birth of this precious brother,
seems to have had little brightness in it. There was a tendency to
insanity in the Lamb family, and this tendency was probably intensified
in Mary’s case by the harshness and want of sympathy with which it was
then the fashion to treat children. “Polly, what are those poor crazy,
moythered brains of yours thinking, always?” was a speech of her
grandmother’s that made a lasting impression on the sensitive child. The
love of her parents, her mother especially, seems to have been centred
on her brother John, older than herself by two years. “‘Dear little
selfish, craving John,’ he was in childhood, and dear big selfish John
he remained in manhood” (Mrs. Gilchrist’s _Life of Mary Lamb_, p. 4).
The first creature upon whom the wealth of affection in Mary’s nature
could be freely bestowed was, therefore, the baby brother. She spoke in
after years of the curative influence on her mind of the almost maternal
affection which she lavished on the boy who was, to a great extent,
committed to her care. Henceforward she was no longer lonely, but had
gained a companion and object in life. Her education consisted mainly in
having been “tumbled early, by accident or design, into a spacious
closet of good old English reading, without much selection or
prohibition, and she browsed at will upon that fair and wholesome
pasturage.” This was the library of Mr. Salt, a bencher of the Inner
Temple, to whom her father was clerk. In 1782, when Charles was seven
and Mary eighteen, he became a scholar of the Blue Coat School, where he
formed a lifelong friendship with the poet Coleridge. The circumstances
of the Lambs gradually narrowed. The father was superannuated, and his
income was consequently reduced. The elder brother, John, held a good
appointment in the South Sea House, but he was much more intent on
enjoying himself and surrounding himself with luxuries than upon
providing for the wants of his family. For eleven years, from the age of
twenty-one to thirty-two, Mary supported herself by her needle.
The father’s mental faculties gradually gave way more and more. By the
time Charles was fifteen he left school, and the care and maintenance of
his family in a short time devolved mainly on him. He first obtained a
clerkship in the same establishment where his brother was employed, and
two years later he received a better paid appointment, with a salary of
£70 a year, in the India House. Domestic troubles, however, thickened
upon the family; the mother became a confirmed invalid, and in 1795
Charles was seized by an attack of the madness hereditary in the family.
This affliction must have weighed terribly upon Mary, who thus saw her
one prop and solace taken from her. She was left alone, with her father
in his second childhood, her mother an exacting and imperious invalid,
and an old Aunt Hetty, who was for ever poring over devotional books,
without apparently the capacity of sharing any of the household burdens.
No sooner was Charles restored to reason than a new trouble began. John
met with a serious accident, and, though in his days of prosperity his
family saw little or nothing of him, he now returned home to be nursed.
This seems to have been the last straw that broke poor Mary down. In
September 1796 the mania, with which she had been often threatened,
broke out; she seized a knife from the table and stabbed her mother to
the heart. The poor old father was almost unconscious of what had taken
place; Aunt Hetty fainted. It was Charles who seized the knife from his
sister’s grasp, but not before she had, in her frenzy, inflicted a
slight wound on her father. The horror of the whole scene can be with
difficulty pictured. Yet Charles, who had only lately been released from
an asylum, had the power to cope with it, to maintain his calmness and
courage, and above all to resolve that the terrible calamity which had
overtaken them should not be allowed to enshroud the whole of his dear
sister’s life in the gloom of a madhouse. He wrote to his friend
Coleridge five days after the tragedy, and his letter speaks nothing but
tender fortitude. “God has preserved to me my senses,” he writes. “I
eat, and drink, and sleep, and have my judgment, I believe, very sound.
My poor father was slightly wounded, and I am left to take care of him
and of my aunt.... With me ‘the former things are passed away,’ and I
have something more to do than to feel.”
Severe self-mastery is perceived in every word of this letter. Lamb was
evidently sensible that his own reason would totter if it were not
controlled by a strong effort of will. In another letter written a week
later to the same friend, the same spirit is shown; he had already
formed the determination not to allow his sister to remain in a
madhouse; he resolved to devote his life to her, and to give up all
thought of other happiness for himself than what was consistent with his
being her constant companion and guardian—“Your letter was an
inestimable treasure to me. It will be a comfort to you, I know, to know
that my prospects are somewhat brighter. My poor dear, dearest
sister—the unhappy and unconscious instrument of the Almighty’s
judgments on our house—is restored to her senses, to a dreadful sense
and recollection of what has past, awful to her mind, and impressive (as
it must be to the end of life), but tempered with religious resignation
and the reasonings of a sound judgment, which in this early stage knows
how to distinguish between a deed committed in a transient fit of frenzy
and the terrible guilt of a mother’s murder. I have seen her. I found
her this morning calm and serene, far, very far, from an indecent,
forgetful serenity; she has a most affectionate and tender concern for
what has happened. Indeed from the beginning, frightful and hopeless as
her disorder seemed, I had confidence enough in her strength of mind and
religious principle to look forward to a time when _even she_ might
recover tranquillity. God be praised, Coleridge, wonderful as it is to
tell, I have never once been otherwise than collected and calm; even on
the dreadful day, and in the midst of the terrible scene, I preserved a
tranquillity which bystanders may have construed into indifference—a
tranquillity not of despair. Is it folly or sin in me to say that it was
a religious principle that most supported me?... I felt I had something
else to do than to regret. On that first evening, my aunt was lying
insensible, to all appearance like one dying,—my father with his poor
forehead plastered over from a wound he had received from a daughter
dearly loved by him, who loved him no less dearly,—my mother, a dead and
murdered corpse in the next room,—yet was I wonderfully supported. I
closed not my eyes that night, but lay without terrors and without
despair. I have lost no sleep since. I had been long used not to rest in
things of sense, had endeavoured after a comprehension of mind
unsatisfied with the ignorant present time; and this kept me up. I had
the whole weight of the family thrown on me, for my brother, little
disposed (I speak not without tenderness for him) at any time to take
care of old age and infirmities, had now, with his bad leg, an exemption
from such duties; and I was now left alone.” He then speaks of the
kindness of various friends, and reckons up the resources of the family,
resolving to spare £50 or £60 a year to keep Mary at a private asylum at
Islington. “I know John will make speeches about it, but she shall not
go into an hospital.... If my father, and old maid-servant, and I, can’t
live, and live comfortably, on £130 or £120 a year, we ought to burn by
slow fires; and I almost would, that Mary might not go into an hospital.
Let me not leave an unfavourable impression on your mind respecting my
brother. Since this has happened, he has been very kind and brotherly,
but I fear for his mind. He has taken his ease in the world, and is not
fit to struggle with difficulties, nor has much accustomed himself to
throw himself into their way; and I know his language is already,
‘Charles, you must take care of yourself, you must not abridge yourself
of a single pleasure you have been used to,’ etc.; and in that style of
talking.” Charles goes on to explain that his sister would form one of
the family she had been placed with rather than a patient. “They, as the
saying is, take to her extraordinarily, if it is extraordinary that
people who see my sister should love her. Of all the people I ever saw
in the world, my poor sister was most thoroughly devoid of the quality
of selfishness. I will enlarge upon her qualities, dearest soul, in a
future letter for my own comfort, for I understand her thoroughly; and
if I mistake not, in the most trying situation that a human being can be
found in, she will be found ... uniformly great and amiable. God keep
her in her present mind, to whom be thanks and praise for all His
dispensations to mankind.”
The whole of the rest of Lamb’s life was a fulfilment of the loving
resolutions which had sustained him in the terrible hour of his mother’s
death. His love for the beautiful Alice W——n was relinquished as one of
the “tender fond records” for ever blotted out by a sterner, more
imperative claim of affection and duty. As soon as the old father died,
Mary and Charles were reunited in one home, and her brother’s
guardianship was accepted by the authorities as a sufficient guarantee
that any future return of her malady should not be accompanied by danger
to the lives of others. He was faithful to his self-imposed task. He
himself was never again attacked by the cruel malady, but his sister to
the end of her life was subject to recurring periods of insanity, which
latterly isolated her from her friends for months in every year. Through
their joint care and caution no fatal results again attended these
attacks of mania. There is something inexpressibly touching in the fact
that on their holiday excursions together, Mary invariably, with her own
hands, packed a strait-waistcoat for herself. She was able to foretell,
by premonitory symptoms, when she was likely to be attacked; and a
friend of the Lambs has related how he had met them walking together,
hand in hand, towards the asylum, both weeping bitterly.
Lamb’s strong feeling against allowing his sister to be placed in an
hospital for lunatics is more than justified by the accounts given, in
the _Life of Lord Shaftesbury_, of the frightfully barbarous treatment
to which insane people were subjected in the early part of the present
century. Their keepers always visited them whip in hand. They were
sometimes spun round on rotatory chairs at a tremendous speed; sometimes
they were chained in wells, in which the water was made to rise till it
reached their chins; sometimes they were left quite alone, chained to
their beds, from Saturday afternoon to Monday morning, unable to rise,
and with nothing but bread and water within their reach. No wonder that
Charles Lamb said he would burn by slow fires rather than let his sister
be treated like this.
The strong restorative of work done and duty fulfilled enabled Charles,
within little more than a year of the dreadful calamity which had
darkened his life, to make his first appearance as an author. These
first poems were dedicated to “the author’s best friend and sister.” He
wished to fence her round, as it were, by assurances of the high value
he set on her, and of the depth of his love. “I wish,” he wrote to
Coleridge, “to accumulate perpetuating tokens of my affection to poor
Mary.” When she was restored to his daily companionship, there was
nothing in her outward manner or appearance to indicate what a terrible
cloud rested on her past life. Her manners were tranquil and composed.
De Quincey speaks of her as that “Madonna-like lady.” There was no
appearance of settled melancholy in consequence of the fatal deed she
had been led to commit, but that it left a wound which was hidden rather
than healed is indicated by the words written long years after the
event: “My dear mother who, though you do not know it, is always in my
poor head and heart.” On another occasion, a child Mary loved asked her
why she never spoke of her mother. A cry of pain was the only response.
Her dependence on her brother was an ever-visible presence in both their
lives. Mrs. Cowden Clarke relates: “He once said, with his peculiar mode
of tenderness beneath blunt, abrupt speech, ‘You must die first, Mary.’
She nodded, with her little quiet nod and sweet smile, ‘Yes, I must die
first, Charles.’” The event was contrary to the wish and expectation
thus expressed. Charles preceded Mary to the grave by thirteen years;
but during the greater part of that time her intellect was so clouded as
to deprive her of the power of the acute suffering the loss of her
brother would otherwise have caused.
The literary fame of Mary Lamb rests chiefly on her _Tales from
Shakespeare_, and a collection of beautiful little stories for children,
called _Mrs. Leicester’s School_. The _Tales from Shakespeare_ were
written, as so much good work has been, under the stress of poverty. Six
of the great tragedies were undertaken by Charles, and fourteen other
plays by Mary. The scheme was to render each play into a prose story fit
for the comprehension and capacity of children; and the work was done
with inimitable felicity of diction, and critical insight into the
situations and characters of the world of men and women who live in
Shakespeare’s dramas. There is a letter of Mary’s describing herself and
Charles at work: “Charles has written _Macbeth_, _Othello_, _King Lear_,
and has begun _Hamlet_. You would like to see us, as we often sit
writing on one table (but not on one cushion sitting, like Hermia and
Helena in the _Midsummer Nights Dream_); or rather, like an old literary
Darby and Joan, I taking snuff, and he groaning all the while and saying
he can make nothing of it, which he always says till he has finished,
and then he finds out that he has made something of it” (Mrs.
Gilchrist’s _Life_, p. 119). The _Tales_ were written for William
Godwin, whose first wife was Mary Wollstonecraft. His second wife helped
him a great deal with his publishing business. She was a vulgar-minded
woman, and a pet aversion of the Lambs, especially of Charles, who said,
referring to her, “I will be buried with this inscription over me, ‘Here
lies C. L., the woman-hater’—I mean, that hated one woman; for the rest,
God bless ’em.” The success of the _Tales_ could not, however, be marred
by the unpopularity of the publisher and his wife. The book rapidly ran
through several editions, and even now a year seldom passes without the
_Tales from Shakespeare_ being presented to the public in some new form.
A portrait of Mary Lamb has been drawn by the master hand of her
brother. She is the Bridget of the _Essays of Elia_, as all lovers of
the essays well know. The humour and delicate insight into character for
which the writings of Charles Lamb are so distinguished, are also
characteristic of Mary, though the humour in her case is less
rollicking, and never breaks out in pure high spirits, as his often
does. Some of the most charming of Mary’s writings are her letters,
which have been published in Mrs. Gilchrist’s _Life_, especially those
to a young friend, named Sarah Stoddart.