Eminent Victorians

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 shims 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.