It is strange to think that up to August of 1910, a woman was alive who
had won the highest fame many years before most people now living were
born. To remember her is like turning the pages of an illustrated
newspaper half-a-century old. Again we see the men with long and pointed
whiskers, the women with ballooning skirts, bag nets for the hair, and
little bonnets or porkpie hats, a feather raking fore and aft. Those
were the years when Gladstone was still a subordinate statesman, earning
credit for finance, Dickens was writing _Hard Times_, Carlyle was
beginning his _Frederick_, Ruskin was at work on _Modern Painters_,
Browning composing his _Men and Women_, Thackeray publishing _The
Newcomes_, George Eliot wondering whether she was capable of
imagination. It all seems very long ago since that October night when
that woman sailed for Boulogne with her thirty-eight chosen nurses on
the way to Scutari. I suppose that never in the world's history has the
change in thought and manners been so rapid and far-reaching as in the
two generations that have arisen in our country since that night. And it
is certain that Florence Nightingale, when she embarked without fuss in
the packet, was quite unconscious how much she was contributing to so
vast a transformation.
One memory almost alone still keeps a familiar air, suggesting
something that lies perhaps permanently at the basis of man's nature.
The present-day detractors of all things new, of every step in advance,
every breach in routine, every promise of emancipation, and every
departure from the commonplace, would feel themselves quite at home
among the evil tongues that spewed their venom upon a courageous and
noble-hearted woman. They would recognise as akin to themselves the
calumny, scandal, ridicule, and malignity with which their natural
predecessors pursued her from the moment that she took up her heroic
task to the time when her glory stilled their filthy breath. She went
under Government direction; the Queen mentioned her with interest in a
letter; even the _Times_ supported her, for in those days the _Times_
frequently stood as champion for some noble cause, and its own
correspondent, William Russell, had himself first made the suggestion
that led to her departure. But neither the Queen, the Government, nor
the _Times_ could silence the born backbiters of greatness. Cowards,
startled at the sight of courage, were alert with jealousy.
Pleasure-seekers, stung in the midst of comfort, sniffed with
depreciation. Culture, in pursuit of prettiness, passed by with artistic
indifference. The narrow mind attributed motives and designs. The snake
of disguised concupiscence sounded its rattle. That refined and
respectable women should go on such an errand--how could propriety
endure it? No lady could thus expose herself without the loss of
feminine bloom. If decent women took to this kind of service, where
would the charm of womanhood be fled? "They are impelled by vanity, and
seek the notoriety of scandal," said the envious. "None of them will
stand the mere labour of it for a month, if we know anything," said the
physiologists. "They will run at the first rat," said masculine wit.
"Let them stay at home and nurse babies," cried the suburbs. "These
Nightingales will in due time become ringdoves," sneered _Punch_.
With all that sort of thing we are familiar, and every age has known it.
The shifts to which the _Times_ was driven in defence show the nature of
the assaults:
"Young," it wrote of Florence Nightingale, "young (about
the age of our Queen), graceful, feminine, rich, popular, she holds
a singularly gentle and persuasive influence over all with whom
she comes in contact. Her friends and acquaintance are of all
classes and persuasions, but her happiest place is at home, in
the centre of a very large band of accomplished relatives, and
in simplest obedience to her admiring parents."
"About the age of our Queen," "rich," "feminine," "happiest at home,"
"with accomplished relatives," and "simply obedient to her parents," she
being then thirty-five--those were the points that the _Times_ knew
would weigh most in answer to her accusers. With all that sort of thing,
as I said, we are familiar still; but there was one additional line of
abuse that has at last become obsolete. For weeks after her arrival at
Scutari, the papers rang with controversy over her religious beliefs.
She had taken Romish Sisters with her; she had been partly trained in a
convent. She was a Papist in disguise, they cried; her purpose was to
clutch the dying soldier's spirit and send it to a non-existent
Purgatory, instead of to the Hell it probably deserved. She was the
incarnation of the Scarlet Woman; she was worse, she was a Puseyite, a
traitor in the camp of England's decent Church. "No," cried the others,
"she is worse even than a Puseyite. She is a Unitarian; it is doubtful
whether her father's belief in the Athanasian Creed is intelligent and
sincere." Finally, the climax in her iniquities of mind and conduct
reached its height and she was publicly denounced as a Supralapsarian. I
doubt whether, at the present day, the coward's horror at the sight of
courage, the politician's alarm at the sound of principle, or envy's
utmost malignity would go so far as to call a woman that.
I dwell on the opposition and abuse that beset Florence Nightingale's
undertaking, because they are pleasanter and more instructive than the
sentimentality into which her detractors converted their abuse when her
achievement was publicly glorified. It is significant that, in its
minute account of the Crimean War, the _Annual Register_ of the time
appears to have made no mention of her till the war was over and she had
received a jewel from the Queen. Then it uttered its little complaint
that "the gentler sex seems altogether excluded from public reward."
Well, it is matter for small regret that a great woman should not be
offered such titles as are bestowed upon the failures in Cabinets, the
contributors to party funds, and the party traitors whom it is hoped to
restrain from treachery. But whether a peerage would have honoured her
or not, there is no question of the disservice done to the truth of her
character by those whose sentimental titles of "Lady with the Lamp,"
"Leader of the Angel Band," "Queen of the Gracious Dynasty,"
"Ministering angel, thou!" and all the rest of it have created an ideal
as false as it is mawkish. Did the sentimentalists, at first so
horrified at her action, really suppose that the service which in the
end they were compelled to admire could ever have been accomplished by a
soft and maudlin being such as their imagination created, all brimming
eyes and heartfelt sighs, angelic draperies and white-winged shadows
that hairy soldiers turned to kiss?
To those who have read her books and the letters written to her by one
of the sanest and least ecstatic men of her day, or have conversed with
people who knew her well, it is evident that Florence Nightingale was at
no point like that. Her temptations led to love of mastery and
impatience with fools. Like all great organisers, quick and practical in
determination, she found extreme difficulty in suffering fools gladly.
To relieve her irritation at their folly, she used to write her private
opinions of their value on the blotting-paper while they chattered. It
was not for angelic sympathy or enthusiasm that Sidney Herbert chose her
in his famous invitation, but for "administrative capacity and
experience." Those were the real secrets of her great accomplishment,
and one remembers her own scorn of "the commonly received idea that it
requires nothing but a disappointment in love, or incapacity for other
things, to turn a woman into a good nurse." It was a practical and
organising power for getting things done that distinguished the
remarkable women of the last century, and perhaps of all ages, far more
than the soft and sugary qualities which sentimentality has delighted to
plaster on its ideal of womanhood, while it talks its pretty nonsense
about chivalry and the weakness of woman being her strength. As
instances, one could recall Elizabeth Fry, Sister Dora, Josephine
Butler, Mary Kingsley, Octavia Hill, Dr. Garrett Anderson, Mrs. F.G.
Hogg (whose labour secured the Employment of Children Act and the
Children's Courts), and a crowd more in education, medicine, natural
science, and political life. But, indeed, we need only point to Queen
Victoria herself, her strong but narrow nature torn by the false ideal
which made her protest that no good woman was fit to reign, while all
the time she was reigning with a persistent industry, a mastery of
detail, and a truthfulness of dealing rare among any rulers, and at
intervals illuminated by sudden glory.
"Woman is the practical sex," said George Meredith, almost with
over-emphasis, and certainly the saying was true of Florence
Nightingale. In far the best appreciation of her that has appeared--an
appreciation written by Harriet Martineau, who herself died about forty
years ago--that distinguished woman says: "She effected two great
things--a mighty reform in the cure of the sick, and an opening for her
sex into the region of serious business." The reform of hospital life
and sick nursing, whether military or civil, is near fulfilment now, and
it is hard to imagine such a scene as those Scutari wards where, in
William Russell's words, the sick were tended by the sick and the dying
by the dying, while rats fed upon the corpses and the filth could not be
described. But though her other and much greater service is, owing to
its very magnitude, still far from fulfilment, it is perhaps even harder
for us to imagine the network of custom, prejudice, and sentiment
through which she forced the opening of which Harriet Martineau speaks.