The Life of Florence Nightingale Volume I Part 7

V

In the autumn of 1848 an opportunity occurred which promised the realization of the dearest wish of her heart, but once more she was doomed to disappointment. Her mother and sister had been advised to go to Carlsbad for the cure. M. and Madame Mohl were to be at Frankfurt, and they were all to meet in that city. Frankfurt is near to Kaiserswerth, and Florence was to be allowed to go there. But at the very moment disturbances broke out in Frankfurt, and the whole plan was abandoned. "I am not going to consign to paper for your benefit," she wrote to Madame Mohl (October 1848), "all the cursings and swearings which relieved my disappointed feelings; for oh! what a plan of plans I had made out for myself! All that I most wanted to do at Kaiserswerth, Brussels, and Co., lay for the first time within reach of my mouth, and the ripe plum has dropped." Florence accompanied her mother to the cure at Malvern instead, where, with many prayers for humility under the will of G.o.d, she lived for several weeks upon the dry and bitter fruit of disappointment. During the winter of 1848-49 Miss Nightingale saw something of M. Guizot and his family. The Minister had escaped to London after the fall of Louis Philippe, and was living in a modest house in Brompton. He found in Miss Nightingale "a brave and sympathetic soul, for whom great thoughts and great devotions had a serious attraction."[44]

[44] See the "Lettre de M. Guizot" prefixed to the French translation of _Notes on Nursing_ (1862).

During the next year she found some congenial work in London. She inspected hospitals. She worked in Ragged Schools. She spoke of her "little thieves at Westminster" as her "greatest joy in London." But these unconventional attractions of the London season set her all the more against the life of country houses. "Ought not one's externals,"

she wrote in her diary (July 2, 1849), "to be as nearly as possible an incarnation of what life really is? Life is _not_ a green pasture and a still water, as our homes make it. Life is to some a forty days'

fasting, moral or physical, in the wilderness; to some it is a fainting under the carrying of the crop; to some it is a crucifixion; to all, a struggle for truth, for safety. Life is seen in a much truer form in London than in the country. In an English country place everything that is painful is so carefully removed out of sight, behind those fine trees, to a village three miles off. In London, at all events if you open your eyes, you cannot help seeing in the next street that life is not as it has been made to you. You cannot get out of a carriage at a party without seeing what is in the faces making the lane on either side, and without feeling tempted to rush back and say, 'Those are my brothers and sisters.'" She longed to rush back, to be able to go out freely into the slums, to comfort some old woman who was dying unattended, or rescue some child who was going astray untaught. But the proprieties prevented. "It would never do," she was told, "for a young woman in her station in life to go out in London without a servant." In the autumn of 1849 the distraction of another foreign tour was offered.

Her parents and her sister hoped once more that Florence would return a different and a more comfortable woman. Those with whom we are cast into the nearest intimacy sometimes understand us least.

CHAPTER VI

FOREIGN TRAVEL: EGYPT AND GREECE

(1849-1850)

When o'er the world we range 'Tis but our climate, not our mind, we change.

HORACE.

In the autumn of 1849 Mr. and Mrs. Bracebridge, who were to spend some months in the East, again proposed that Miss Nightingale should travel with them, and again the offer was gladly accepted. Her sister was delighted. The expedition to Rome had not done what was hoped, but here was a second chance. The sister reported to her friends that "Flo had taken tea with the Bunsens to receive the _dernier mot_ on Egyptology,"

and that she was going out "laden with learned books." Perhaps Florence would become absorbed in such studies, and adopt a life of gracefully learned leisure. The literary temptation did, it is true, a.s.sail Florence, but she put it behind her.

The party started in October, bound for Egypt, where the winter was to be spent. Thence they were to proceed to Athens, where Mr. Bracebridge had property. The return journey in the summer of 1850 was to be made through Germany, and Kaiserswerth was to be visited. Florence, we may surmise, looked forward most to the last stage in the journey. On November 18 the travellers landed at Alexandria. On the 27th they reached Cairo. On December 4 they started in a dahabiah for the Nile voyage. The boat was christened in honour of Florence's sister. "My work," she wrote, "is making the pennant, blue bunting with swallow tail, a Latin red cross upon it, and [Greek: PARTHENOPe] in white tape.

It has taken all my tape, and a vast amount of st.i.tches, but it will be the finest pennant on the river, and my petticoats will joyfully acknowledge the tribute to sisterly affection, for sisterly affection in tape in Lower Egypt, let me observe, is worth having." They went up the river as far as Ipsambul (Abu-Simbel), a little below Wady Halfy; on the return journey they spent several days at Thebes. The letters which Florence sent home show that Egypt appealed strongly to her imagination.

What struck her most was the solemnity of the country. "Nothing ever laughs or plays. Everything is grown up and grown old." The letters are full too of Egyptology; for she had made tables of dynasties, copied plans of temples, and a.n.a.lysed the leading ideas in Egyptian mythology as expounded by the best writers of the time:--

ABU-SIMBEL, _January_ 17 [1850].... I pa.s.sed through other halls, till at last I found myself in a chamber in the rock, where sat, in the silence of an eternal night, four figures against the further end. I could see nothing more; yet I did not feel afraid as I did at Karnak, though I was quite alone in these subterranean halls; for the sublime expression of that judge of the dead had looked down on me, the incarnation of the goodness of the deity, as Osiris is; and I thought how beautiful the idea which placed him in the foremost hall, and then led the wors.h.i.+pper gradually on to the more awful attributes of the deity; for here, as I could dimly see through the darkness, sat the creative power of the mind--Neph, "the intellect"; Amun, "the concealed G.o.d"; Phthah, "the creator of the visible world"; and Ra, "the sustainer," Ra, "the sun" to whom the temple is dedicated.... I turned to go out, and saw at the further end the golden sand glittering in the suns.h.i.+ne outside the top of the door; and the long sand-hill, sloping down from it to the feet of the innermost Osirides, which are left quite free, all but their pedestals, looked like the waves of time, gradually flowing in and covering up these imperishable genii, who have seen three thousand years pa.s.s over their heads and heed them not. In the holiest place, there where no sound ever reaches, it is as if you felt the sensible progress of time, not by the tick of a clock, as we measure time, but by some spiritual pulse which marks to you its onward march, not by its second, nor its minute, nor its hour-hand, but by its century hand. I thought of the wors.h.i.+ppers of three thousand years ago; how they by this time have reached the goal of spiritual ambition, have brought all their thoughts to serve G.o.d or the ideal of goodness; how we stand there with the same goal before us, only as distant as the star, which, a little later, I saw rising exactly over that same sand-hill in the centre of the top of the doorway, but as sure and fixed; how to them all other thoughts are now as nothing, and the ideal we all pursue of happiness is won; not because they have not probably sufferings, like ours, but because they no longer suggest any other thought but of doing G.o.d's will, which is happiness. I thought, too, three thousand years hence, we might perhaps have attained--and others would stand here, and still those old G.o.ds would be sitting in the eternal twilight....

THEBES, _February_ 10 [1850].... The Valley of the Kings seems, though within a mile of Thebes, as if one had arrived at the mountains of Kaf, beyond which are only "creatures unknown to any but G.o.d,"--so deep are the ravines, so high and blue the sky, so absolutely solitary and unearthly, so utterly uninhabitable the place. One look at that valley would give you more idea of the supernatural, the gate of Hades, than all the descriptions, sacred or profane. What a moment it is, the entering that valley, where in those rocky caverns, the vastness and the gloomy darkness of which are equally awful, the kings of the earth lie, each in his huge sarcophagus, with the bodies of his chiefs, each in their chamber, about him; and where, about this time, they are to return, to find their bodies and resume their abode on earth,--if purified by their three thousand years of probation, in a higher and better state; if degraded, in a lower. I thought I met them at every turn in those long subterraneous galleries,--saw their shades rising from their shattered sarcophagi, and advancing once more towards the light of day, which shone like a star, so distant and so faint, at the end of that opening; the dead were stirred up, the chief ones of the earth.... Well, these Pharaohs are perhaps now here, again in the body, their three thousand years having just elapsed to some of them,--that is, if they have philosophized sincerely, or, together with philosophy, have "loved beautiful forms." ... And if I were a Pharaoh now, I would choose the Arab form, and come back to help these poor people; and I am going to-morrow to a tomb of Rameses, B.C. 1150, to meet him and tell him so....

It was no wonder that Miss Nightingale pitied the poor people; for the Egypt in which she travelled was as Mehemet Ali, the Lion of the Levant, had left it. She saw girls sold in the open slave market "at from 2 to 9 a head." She heard how justice was sold to the highest bidder; and "everybody," she noted, "seems to bastinado everybody else." "Every man," she noted further, "is a conscript for the army, and mothers put out their children's right eye to save them from conscription, till Mehemet Ali, who was too clever for them, had a one-eyed regiment, who carried the musket on the left shoulder." Miss Nightingale was fond of escaping from the dahabiah in order to wander about the desert, "poking my own nose," as she wrote home, "into all the villages," and seeing for herself how "these poor people" lived. "They call me 'the wild a.s.s of the wilderness, snuffing up the wind,' because I am so fond of getting away." Egyptian impressions stayed long in her memory, and they recurred to her thirty years later in connection with her Indian studies.[45] As on her earlier visit to Rome, so now in Egypt she utilized all such opportunities as came in her way for studying the work of religious Sisterhoods. At Alexandria she pa.s.sed her days, she wrote, "much to my satisfaction, as I had travelled with two Sisters of St. Vincent de Paul from Paris to Auxerre, who gave me an introduction to the Sisters here; and I have spent a great deal of time with them in their beautiful schools and _Misericorde_. There are only 19 of them, but they seem to do the work of 90."

[45] _E.g._ in an article in _Good Words_, August 1879: "Whoever in the glorious light of an Egyptian sunset--where all glows with colour, not like that of birds and flowers, but like transparent emeralds and sapphires and rubies and amethysts, the gold and jewels and precious stones of the Revelations--has seen the herds wending their way home on the plain of Thebes by the colossal pair of sitting statues, followed by the stately woman in her one draped garment, plying her distaff, a naked, lovely little brown child riding on her shoulder, and another on a buffalo, can conjure up something of the ideal of the ryot's family life in India."

II

In April 1850 Miss Nightingale went with her friends to Athens. Their house was in Eucharis Street, and Florence "slept in the library, which opens on to a terrace looking upon the back of the Acropolis." She had little taste for the topographical research and nice distinctions between different masters of sculpture which absorb the interest of many modern travellers and students. She was interested in broader speculations. The soul of a people, as expressed in their art, was the object to which she directed her observation, and around which she loved to let her imagination play. In her note-books and letters she discusses the spiritual conceptions embodied in the wors.h.i.+p of the several Greek G.o.ds; she traces the symbols of Greek mythology to their sources in Greek scenery; she pictures the genius of Aeschylus (her favourite tragedian, preferred by her even to Shakespeare) or of Sophocles developing in relation to local conditions and surroundings. Of the statues, the pensive beauty of the sepulchral bas-reliefs most arrested her attention; and in architecture, she loved most the Doric, for its severity, its simplicity, its perfection of proportion, its image of the ideal republic:--

Only a republican could have conceived it, and it is sin for any other government to imitate it. Look at each column--man, I mean--rearing its n.o.ble head; yet none has a separate base. Each man stands upon the common base of his country. Look at the simplicity of the fluting of the capital. No man thinks of his own adornment, but only of the glory of the whole. The fluting does not look like its ornament, but its drapery. I do love the old _Doric_ as if it was a person. Then comes the _Ionic_, light and elegant and airy, it is true, like the Attic wit, but somewhat luscious to the taste; it soon palls; the fluting is too laboured, too semicircular, like the people sitting in a semi-circle to hear the wit of Aristophanes; it does not look as if it _belonged_ to the column; and that ridge between the flutes, what is it doing there?

It looks like the interval while the next interlocutor is thinking of a repartee. Then that rich beading round the base, like one of Euripides' choruses which have nothing to do with the piece. Give me the Ionic to amuse me, but the Doric to interest me. The _Corinthian_ is like the wors.h.i.+p of Dionysus, like the ill.u.s.tration of Nature by Art--a bad conjunction, I think, which in any other hands would become Art run mad, but modified by the exquisite artistic perceptions of the Greeks is exquisitely beautiful, but it is not architecture. The Doric, the Ionic, and the Corinthian are the ethical, the poetical, and the aesthetic views of life. But look at the workmans.h.i.+p of these things. How mathematically exact it is--the very poetry of number.

It was characteristic of the philosophical bent of her mind that she sought to refer the charm of the scenery to some general law:--

ATHENS, _June_ 8. I have been taking some lovely rides with Mr.

Hill on Hymettus, along the Daphne road, and to Kara. How lovely the scenery is, would be difficult to describe, and why it is so lovely. I begin to think that it is the proportion, and that there must be proportion in the things of Nature as of Art. I am talking nonsense, I believe, but n.o.body minds me, you know. In the valleys of Switzerland the height is too great for the width, and it looks like a bottle. In the valleys of Egypt the width is too great for the height, and it looks like a tray. For this reason clouds are provided in Switzerland and Scotland; the height would become intolerably out of proportion unless it were covered in at the top.

For this reason clear sky is in Egypt, or you would feel in a shelf. But here, where the clear sky is meant, they say, to be perpetual (tho' I cannot say I have seen much of it since I came), the proportion observed has been perfect, the exact curve is always there, the exact slope which you want; and if a line were to change its place, you feel the effect would be spoilt. You feel towards it as to an architectural building. I believe that in this lies the great peculiarity of the Athenian views. Otherwise, for colouring, I must declare I have seen nothing like the evenings of the Campagna.

Of the Parthenon by moonlight she wrote that it was "impossible that earth or heaven could produce anything more beautiful." In other letters she dwells on the beauty of the view from Lycabettus, and the glory of the sunset from Hymettus. One day upon the Acropolis she found some boys with a baby owl that had just fallen from its nest in the Parthenon. She bought it from them and kept it. It used to travel in her pocket, and lived at Embley.

III

Public affairs in Greece interested her also. She had arrived in Greek waters at the height of the "Pacifico crisis." There had been a rupture between England and Greece, which threatened also the relations between England and France, and which convulsed political parties at Westminster, over the claims of Mr. Finlay, the historian of modern Greece, and Don Pacifico, a native of Gibraltar. Lord Palmerston had ordered the Mediterranean Fleet to the Peiraeus to enforce the British claims, and Miss Nightingale was sitting beside Mr. Wyse, the British Minister at Athens, at dinner on board H.M.S. _Howe_, when the submission of the Greek Government was brought to him. Her home letters throw much light on the ins and outs of this affair, which, however, is now only remembered as the occasion of Lord Palmerston's vindication in the House of Commons with its famous peroration about _Civis Roma.n.u.s sum_. Miss Nightingale now, as earlier, was a strong Palmerstonian. "The friends of Broadlands," she wrote to her parents, "need never have been less uneasy for his reputation"; and if parliamentary success be a sufficient test, she was entirely right. She found herself again in the thick of political discussion on leaving Greek waters. Her party sailed from Athens on June 17, and went to Trieste by Corfu--"that fairy island," she wrote, "where every flower grows twice as big as it does anywhere else, and where no frost can touch the olive and the pomegranate." She and her parents were acquainted with Sir Henry Ward, then Lord High Commissioner of the Ionian Islands. Sir Henry, who had been an active Liberal at home, had felt himself obliged to adopt sternly repressive measures in the islands. Miss Nightingale was opposed to his policy, as also to the British occupation. He invited her and her friends to the Palace. She went to proffer excuses. "He came out, said that I had often called him 'Tyrant,' and took me in his arms like a father, and stood over me in the character of Tyrant (he said) till I had written a letter compelling them all to come, which he then sealed and I sent. So the whole _posse comitatus_ of us spent the day there, they sending the carriage for us, and I am really glad to have seen what is my idea of Eastern luxury." The tyrant placed his accuser next to him at dinner, deplored his "false position," and so forth, and they made some sort of peace; though not perhaps till Miss Nightingale had sought to bring him to a conviction of sin for his executions and arbitrary arrests, for she was armed, as her letters show, now as ever, with all the facts and figures marshalled in Blue-book precision.

IV

Her mind was interested in all these things, but her heart was elsewhere. "Wherever thou art," said a famous statesman, "it is with the poor that thou should'st live." It was so with Florence Nightingale's inmost thoughts. Her greatest pleasure in Athens was found in the society of the American missionaries, Mr. and Mrs. Hill, who conducted a school and orphanage. Of Mrs. Hill she wrote, "From heaven she comes, in heaven she lives." In charge of the mission school was a Greek refugee from Crete, Elizabeth Kontaxaki, and with her too Florence Nightingale formed a warm friends.h.i.+p. Elizabeth had lived an adventurous life before she found security at Athens. Her father had fallen by a Turkish bullet.

Her mother had made an heroic escape from a Turkish captor, and the first years of the child's life were spent in the fastnesses of Mount Ida. "Alas," wrote Miss Nightingale, "how worthless my life seems to me by the side of these women." A mood of great dejection appears in her diary of this time, to which an attack of low-fever no doubt contributed. She could not find satisfaction in the interests of foreign travel. She was tortured by unsatisfied longings which could find outlet only in a world of dreams. An entry in her diary for June 7 is in these words: "Grotto of the Eumenides. Will this Fury go on increasing till by degrees my mind is more and more taken off the outer world with all its claims, and I am no longer able to command my attention at all?"

Miss Nightingale and her friends landed at Trieste at the end of June, and thence made their way to Dresden and Berlin. The pictures which most impressed her were Raphael's "Sistine Madonna" and the "Reading Magdalen," then attributed to Correggio. A year later her mother and sister were at Dresden, and she enjoined them, above all things, to see "the Magdalen, the queen of pictures." "How I feel that picture now,"

she wrote to them (August 26, 1851), "dark wood behind, sharp stones in front, nothing to look back upon, nothing to look forward to, clinging to the present as she does to the book, which beams bright light upon me. Oh what a history that picture contains in its little canva.s.s; and how well it hangs near that glorious Sistine Virgin. All that woman _might_ be, all that she will be, near what she _is_; for it is not a Magdalen, in the common sense of the word, or rather it is in the common sense of what woman commonly is--not what we mean by a Magdalen." At Dresden Miss Nightingale was still in much dejection. "I have never felt so bad," she wrote (July 7); "the habit of living not in the present but in a future of dreams is gradually spreading over my whole existence. It is rapidly approaching the state of madness when dreams become realities." And now when the goal of Kaiserswerth was near, she felt almost unmanned; almost inclined to turn back and follow another path.

"It seemed to me now (July 10) as if quiet, with somebody to look for my coming back, was all I wanted." But this was only a moment of pa.s.sing weakness. At Berlin her spirits revived; for her vital interests were satisfied, and she spent some days in inspecting the hospitals and other benevolent inst.i.tutions. On July 31 she reached Kaiserswerth. "I could hardly believe I was there," she wrote in her diary. "With the feeling with which a pilgrim first looks on the Kedron, I saw the Rhine, dearer to me than the Nile." She stayed a fortnight with the Pastor and his wife and the Deaconesses, studying their inst.i.tutions. "Left Kaiserswerth," says the diary (August 13), "feeling so brave as if nothing could ever vex me again."[46] She rejoined her friends at Dusseldorf. "They stayed at Ghent actually for me to finish my MS."

(August 17). "Finished my MS. They read it. Mr. Bracebridge corrected it and sent it off" (August 19). Next day they returned to England. The ma.n.u.script was of the pamphlet describing "The Inst.i.tution of Kaiserswerth on the Rhine," which was issued anonymously soon after Miss Nightingale's return.[47] Some notice of the pamphlet will be found in a later chapter in connection with her longer sojourn at Kaiserswerth in 1851. It was printed by the inmates of the Ragged School at Westminster in which she was interested. She described in it the work of the Deaconesses, and ended with an appeal to Englishwomen to go and do likewise. The fire burnt within her, and she returned home more than ever resolved to consecrate her life to the service of the sick and sorrowful.

[46] In the Alb.u.m of the Pastor's eldest daughter, Miss Nightingale left this inscription:--

"Vier Dinge, Gott, habe ich dir zu bieten, Die sich in all deinen Schatzkammern nicht finden: Meine Nichtigkeit, meine traurige Armut, Meine verderbliche Sunde, meine ernste Reue.

Nimm diese Gaben an und nimm den Geber hin.

Kaiserswerth, den 13 August 1850. Fl. N., die mit uberflieendem Herzen sich immer der Gute all ihrer Freunde in lieben Kaiserswerth erinnern wird. Ich bin ein Gast gewesen, und ihr habt mir beherbergt" (_Eine Heldin unter Helden_, 1912, p. 45).

[47] Bibliography A, No. 1.

V

Foreign travel, it will thus be seen, had worked no such cure, had created no such diversion, as her family desired. Their hope, even their expectation, was not unreasonable. Florence Nightingale was a woman of learning, and her foreign travels had stimulated her alike to research and to imaginative thought. At home, too, during all the years of restless and unsatisfied yearning for some other life, she had been a diligent reader and student. She had a real gift for literary expression, as her letters may already have indicated, and as her later writings were to prove more decisively. She had, moreover, the instinct for self-expression. She was a constant letter-writer and note-taker.

She communed with herself not only in speechless thought, but in written memoranda. Had another impulse not been stronger within her, she might easily have become a literary woman of some distinction. But though she was fond of writing for her own satisfaction, she had a profound distrust of it as a subst.i.tute for action. Like one of George Eliot's heroines, "she did not want to deck herself with knowledge--to wear it loose from the nerves and blood that fed her action." "You ask me," she had written to Miss Clarke in 1844, "why I do not write something. I think what is not of the first cla.s.s had better not exist at all; and besides I had so much rather live than write; writing is only a supplement for living. Would you have one go away and 'give utterance to one's feelings' in a poem to appear (price 2 guineas) in the _Belle a.s.semblee_? I think one's feelings waste themselves in words; they ought all to be distilled into actions, and into actions which bring results.

Do you think a babe would _ever_ learn to walk if it were to talk about its living in such 'strange times,' 'I _must_ learn to use my legs,' and so on? Or do you think anybody ever did anything, who did not go to it with a directness of purpose, which prevented him from frittering away his impressions in words?" She was of Ibsen's persuasion:--

What is Life? a fighting In heart and in brain with trolls.

Poetry? that means writing Doomsday-accounts of our souls.[48]

[48] _Lyrics and Poems from Ibsen_, translated by F. E. Garrett.

She held in great suspicion and dislike what she called the "artist-like way of looking upon life." It reduces all religions, she said, and most inward and spiritual feelings "into a sort of magic-lantern, with which to make play for the amus.e.m.e.nt of the company." Her mother used to praise her "beautiful letters," was proud of the "European reputation"

she had won among learned men, and wanted to know why she could not be happy in cultivating at home the gifts which G.o.d had given her. To Florence Nightingale these things were not gifts to be cultivated, but rather temptations to be subdued. She read with some attention in 1846 a book called _Pa.s.sages from the Life of a Daughter at Home_, a religious work containing counsels of submission for women dissatisfied with their home life. "Piling up miscellaneous instruction for oneself," she wrote in one place in the margin; "the most unsatisfactory of all pursuits!"

She strove to say to G.o.d, as she wrote in another place, "Behold the handmaid of the Lord! _not_ Behold the handmaid of correspondence, or of music, or of metaphysics!" "That power of always writing a good letter whenever one likes," she said in one of her pages of self-examination, "is a great temptation"--a temptation, if such it be, to which, it must be confessed, she continually succ.u.mbed. But she wished to win no repute from her fall. In 1854 her sister printed the "beautiful letters" from Egypt,[49] and issued a few copies for private circulation. Florence was not pleased, but acquiesced, and corrected the proofs.