The Life of Florence Nightingale Volume I Part 9

around her. Looking forward to a New Year (1851) she could see nothing in front of her but the same unsatisfying routine. "The next three weeks," she said, in one of her written colloquies with herself, "you will have company; then a fortnight alone; then a few weeks of London, then Embley; then perhaps go abroad; then three months of company at Lea Hurst; next the same round of Embley company." And then, with a humorous transition not infrequent in her musings, she asks, "But why can't you get up in the morning? I have nothing I like so much as unconsciousness, but I will try." As the year advanced a more decided spirit of revolt begins to appear in her diaries. One of her perplexities. .h.i.therto had been a doubt whether the "mountains of difficulties" were to be taken as occasions for submission to G.o.d's will, or whether they were piled up in order to try her patience and her resolve, and were to be surmounted by some initiative of her own. She now began to interpret G.o.d's will in the latter sense. "I must _take_ some things," she wrote on Whitsunday (June 8, 1851), "as few as I can, to enable me to live. I must _take_ them, they will not be given me; take them in a true spirit of doing Thy will, not of s.n.a.t.c.hing them for my own will. I must do without some things, as many as I can, which I could not have without causing more suffering than I am obliged to cause any way." She would cease looking for the sympathy and understanding of her mother and sister. "I have been so long treated as a child and have so long allowed myself to be treated as a child." She would submit to such tutelage no longer.

Various plans had at different times found place in her dreams. She would collect funds for founding a sisterhood, an inst.i.tution, a hospital; but one thing she saw clearly and consistently. If she were ever to have an opportunity of doing good work in nursing or otherwise in service to the poor, she must first learn her business. There is a long letter of 1850 from her to her father in which she argues the point, not specifically with reference to herself, but as a general proposition. Something more than good intention is necessary in order to do good. Philanthropy is a matter of skill, and an apprentices.h.i.+p in it is necessary. An opportunity occurred sooner than she had dared to hope which enabled her to serve such an apprentices.h.i.+p. Her sister was still in bad health, and a visit to Carlsbad was again proposed. She insisted on being allowed to start with her mother and her sister, and to spend at Kaiserswerth the time that they would spend upon the cure and subsequent travels.

She reached Kaiserswerth early in July and stayed there as an inmate of the Inst.i.tution until October 8.

III

Kaiserswerth is an ancient town on the Rhine, on the right bank, six miles below Dusseldorf. In its Church of the twelfth century a reliquary is shown, in which are preserved the bones of St. Suitbertus, who came there from Ireland to preach the Gospel in 710. Eleven centuries later, a Protestant pastor of Kaiserswerth repaid the debt to the British Isles by founding the famous Inst.i.tution for Deaconesses which was now to give Florence Nightingale an important part of her training. The order of deaconesses, as she was careful to point out in her account of Kaiserswerth, was known in the Primitive Church; and long before St.

Vincent de Paul established the Sisters of Mercy in 1633, Protestant communities had in 1457 organized "Presbyterae," since "many women chose a single state, not because they expected thereby to reach a super-eminent degree of holiness, but that they might be better able to care for the sick and young." It was in 1823-24 that the young pastor of Kaiserswerth, Theodor Fliedner, set out on a journey to Holland and England to beg for funds to relieve his parish, which had been ruined by the failure of a silk-mill. In England, the little Princess Victoria headed his list of subscribers. In London he met Mrs. Elizabeth Fry and was greatly impressed with her work in Newgate. Shortly after his return he founded (1826) the Rhenish-Westphalian Prison a.s.sociation. Presently he met a kindred spirit in Friederike Munster, a woman in comparatively easy circ.u.mstances who was devoting herself to reformatory work. They married, and in 1833--in a tiny summer-house in the pastor's garden--a refuge was opened for the reception of a single discharged prisoner.

Three years later, they added, on an equally modest scale at first, an Infant School, and a Hospital in which to train volunteer-nurses as deaconesses. From these humble beginnings has grown a great congeries of inst.i.tutions, the fame of which has spread throughout the philanthropic world. There are thirty branch or daughter houses in various parts of Germany. They are to be found also at Jerusalem, Alexandria, Cairo, Beirut, Smyrna, and Bucharest. "Not only its own daughter houses, but all independent inst.i.tutions for deaconesses, owe their existence to Kaiserswerth, for all subsequent work wrought by deaconesses whether in France, Switzerland, or America, whether Lutheran, Methodist, or Episcopalian, has been the fruit of the Kaiserswerth tree."[55]

[55] _History of Nursing_, vol. ii. p. 4.

But the forest began as a tiny acorn. Pastor Fliedner started his work not with grandiose schemes or full-fledged programmes, but with individual cases and personal devotion. This was a point to which Miss Nightingale called particular attention in her account of the place. "It is impossible not to observe," she said, "how different was the beginning from the way in which inst.i.tutions are generally founded--a list of subscribers with some royal and n.o.ble names at the head--a double column of rules and regulations--a collection of great names begin (and end) most new enterprises. The regulations are made without experience. Honorary members abound, but where are the working ones? The scheme is excellent, but what are the results?" Miss Nightingale's intensely practical genius had ever a holy horror of prospectuses. In some notes written on June 15, 1848, I find this pa.s.sage:--

Eschew Prospectuses; they're the devil, and make one sick. It is like making out a bill of fare when you have not a single pound of meat. What do the cookery books say? First catch your hare. All the instances on the Continent have begun in one of two ways. At Kaiserswerth, a clergyman and his wife have begun, not with a Prospectus, but with a couple of hospital beds, and have offered, not an advertis.e.m.e.nt, but a home to young women willing to come. At Berne, a Mdlle. Wurstenberger, a woman of rank and education, goes to Kaiserswerth to learn, and her friend to Stra.s.sburg. They return and open a hospital with two rooms, increase their funds, others join them and are taught by them.... To publish first is as bad a practical bull as is the name of the _Prospective Review_.

A few years were to pa.s.s, and Florence Nightingale herself was to begin her work in the world not with a programme, but with a deed.

The inst.i.tutions of Kaiserswerth, when she was there in 1851, were still on a comparatively modest scale. They comprised, as she enumerates them, a Hospital (with 100 beds), an Infant School, a Penitentiary (with 12 inmates), an Orphan Asylum, and a Normal School for schoolmistresses.

There were in all 116 deaconesses, of whom 94 were "consecrated," the remainder being still on probation. The "consecration" consisted only of "a solemn blessing in the Church, without vows of any kind." Of the 116 deaconesses, 67 were on service in other parts of Germany, or abroad; the rest were engaged in working the various inst.i.tutions at Kaiserswerth itself. After six months' trial they received a modest salary, just enough to provide their clothes. There was no other reward, except that the Mother House stood open to receive those who might fall ill or become infirm in its service. Everything was clean and well ordered, but there was no luxury; the board was simple to the verge of roughness. The place was pervaded by two notes. It was a place of training, and a place of consecrated service. The training was both in practice and by precept. Every week the pastor gave a conversational lecture to the deaconesses, finding out from each the difficulties she might have experienced in her work, and suggesting how they could best be met. The education of the young, the ministration of the sick, the art of district visiting, the yet more difficult work of rescue and reformation, all were taught.

In such a place as this, Florence Nightingale found by actual experience, as already she had learnt to expect from reading the reports, the realization in some degree of her most earnest desires. The training in nursing was, it is true, not particularly good; it fell far short of the professional standard which the Nightingale School was afterwards to set up. She objected strongly in later years to current statements that her own training was confined to Kaiserswerth. "The nursing there," she wrote, "was _nil_. The hygiene horrible. The hospital was certainly the worst part of Kaiserswerth. I took all the training that was to be had--there was none to be had in England, but Kaiserswerth was far from having trained me." On the other hand "the tone was excellent, admirable. And Pastor Fliedner's addresses were the very best I ever heard. The penitentiary out-door work and vegetable gardening under a very capable Sister were excellently adapted to the case. And Pastor Fliedner's solemn and reverential teaching to us of the sad events of hospital life was what I have never heard in England."[56]

But here, at Kaiserswerth, Miss Nightingale found "a better life for women," a scope for the exercise of "morally active" powers. And here, though the field was limited, was provided in some sort the training which alone could fit women for larger responsibilities elsewhere. Here was "the service of man" organized as "the service of G.o.d"; here was opportunity for the Dedicated Life, as she had found it also in the Trinita de' Monti.

[56] Letter to Mrs. C. S. Roundell, August 4, 1896.

Her manner of life at Kaiserswerth and her joy in it were told in letters to her mother:--

On Sunday I took the sick boys a long walk along the Rhine; two Sisters were with me to help me to keep order. They were all in ecstasies with the beauty of the scenery, and really I thought it very fine too in its way--the broad ma.s.s of waters flowing ever on slowly and calmly to their destination, and all that unvarying horizon--so like the slow, calm, earnest, meditative German character.

The world here fills my life with interest, and strengthens me in body and mind. I succeeded directly to an office, and am now in another, so that until yesterday I never had time even to send my things to the wash. We have ten minutes for each of our meals, of which we have four. We get up at 5; breakfast 1/4 before 6. The patients dine at 11; the Sisters at 12. We drink tea (_i.e._ a drink made of ground rye) between 2 and 3, and sup at 7. We have two ryes and two broths--ryes at 6 and 3, broths at 12 and 7; bread at the two former, vegetables at 12. Several evenings in the week we collect in the Great Hall for a Bible lesson. The Pastor sent for me once to give me some of his unexampled instructions; the man's wisdom and knowledge of human nature is wonderful; he has an instinctive acquaintance with every character in his place. Except that once I have only seen him in his rounds.

The operation to which Mrs. Bracebridge alludes was an amputation at which I was present, but which I did not mention to----, knowing that she would see no more in my interest in it than the pleasure dirty boys have in playing in the puddles about a butcher's shop. I find the deepest interest in everything here, and am so well in body and mind. This is Life. Now I know what it is to live and to love life, and really I should be sorry now to leave life. I know you will be glad to hear this, dearest Mum. G.o.d has indeed made life rich in interests and blessings, and I wish for no other earth, no other world but this.

The room in which Miss Nightingale slept during her residence at Kaiserswerth was in the Orphan Asylum. She took her meals with the Deaconesses. The Spartan severity, but no less the beautiful spirit of the place, were clear in her recollection nearly half a century later.

In 1897 the authorities of the British Museum applied to her for a copy of the pamphlet on Kaiserswerth which she had printed in 1851. The pencilled note which she sent with a torn copy of the pamphlet, the only one she could find, is preserved in the Museum Library. "I was twice in training there myself," she wrote (September 24, 1897). "Of course since then, Hospital and District nursing have made giant strides.

Indeed District nursing has been invented. But never have I met with a higher tone, a purer devotion, than there. There was no neglect. It was the more remarkable because many of the Deaconesses had been only peasants--none were gentlewomen (when I was there). The food was poor.

No coffee but bean-coffee. No luxury; but cleanliness." Pastor Fliedner told a visitor to Kaiserswerth that "no person had ever pa.s.sed so distinguished an examination, or shown herself so thoroughly mistress of all she had to learn, as Miss Nightingale."[57]

[57] Mr. Sidney Herbert's speech at the Nightingale Fund Meeting, Nov.

29, 1855.

IV

Happy as Miss Nightingale was at Kaiserswerth, there was yet one thing lacking. She wished, it is true, for no other earth; she had found her pictured heaven; her life was full and rich. Yet with all her self-reliance, and even in the moment of first victory in her long struggle for self-expression, she yearned, woman-like, for sympathy.

Nay, and not only woman-like. "Not till we can think," said Carlyle, "that here and there one is thinking of us, one is loving us, does this waste earth become a peopled garden." It was not enough to Florence that she should have had her way and that her parents should have acquiesced.

Her loving heart craved for their positive sympathy; her mind, half leaning for all its masterfulness, demanded that what she had decided should be accepted by those dear to her as their choice also. "I should be as happy here," she wrote to her mother (August 31), "as the day is long, if I could hope that I had your smile, your blessing, your sympathy upon it; without which I cannot be quite happy. My beloved people, I cannot bear to grieve you. Life and everything in it that charms you, you would sacrifice for me; but unknown to you is my thirst, unseen by you are waters which would save me. To save me, I know would be to bless yourselves, whose love for me pa.s.ses the love of women. Oh how shall I show you love and grat.i.tude in return, yet not so perish that you chiefly would mourn! Give me time, give me faith. Trust me, help me. I feel within me that I could gladden your loving hearts which now I wound. Say to me, 'Follow the dictates of that spirit within thee.' Oh my beloved people, that spirit shall never lead me to anything unworthy of one who is yours in love."[58] But her mother and her sister, though they loved and admired her, or perhaps from their point of view because they did so, were unable to give any such active sympathy as that for which she craved. Her sister hoped that the visit to Kaiserswerth would be only an episode. It was a good thing, she had written to her mother, for Florence to go there, "as we can get her back sooner to Lea Hurst." To Florence herself she wrote affectionately, but yet with gentle irony. She sent a lively letter describing in detail the birth of a friend's twins: "I tell you, as you are going to be a _sage femme_, I suppose." Mrs. Nightingale, for her part, had acquiesced in the visit to Kaiserswerth, but was already wondering what people would think of her daughter's escapade. "I have not mentioned to any one,"

wrote Florence (July 16), "where I am, and should also be very sorry that the old ladies should know. With regard, however, to your fear of what people will say, the people whose opinion you most care about, it has been their earnest wish for years that I should come here. The Bunsens (I know he wishes one of his own daughters would come), the Bracebridges, the Sam Smiths, Lady Inglis, the Sidney Herberts, the Plunketts, all wish it; and I know that others--Lady Byron, Caroline Bathurst, Mr. Tremenheere, Mr. Rich (whose opinions however I have not asked)--would think it a very desirable thing for everybody.... With regard to telling people the fact (afterwards) of my having been here, I can see no difficulty. The Herberts, as you know, even commissioned me to do something for them here. The fact itself will pain none of them."

Mr. and Mrs. Herbert, who were at Homburg, presently paid her a visit at Kaiserswerth.

[58] Much of this appeal was suggested to Florence, in almost identical words (as an extant letter shows), by her Aunt Mai.

Mrs. Nightingale and her elder daughter reached Cologne on their way home in October 1851, and there Florence rejoined them. "Our dear child Florence," wrote the mother to Madame Mohl (October 9), "came to us yesterday, and is gone this morning to visit certain Deaconesses and others. I long to be at home and among our people. Daily and hourly I congratulate myself that our home is where it is. Oh what a land of justice and freedom and all good things it is, compared to what we have seen, and how surprising that with all our advantages and our freedom won we should not be so much better than other people. Well, I hope Florence will be able to apply all the fine things she has been learning, to do a little to make us better. Parthe and I are much too idle to help and too apt to be satisfied with things as they are."

CHAPTER IX

AN INTERLUDE

(1852)

Who would be free, themselves must strike the blow.--BYRON.

The three months which Miss Nightingale spent at Kaiserswerth in 1851 were a turning-point in her career, but they were not immediately effectual in altering the tenor of her life. The battle for freedom was not yet completely won; but the "mountains of difficulty" in her way had been turned, and henceforth the resistance offered to her was but a rear-guard action.

A note of serenity, in marked contrast to the storm and distress of earlier years, now appears in some of her letters. She had firmly resolved on taking her life into her own hands; and at Kaiserswerth she had already served some apprentices.h.i.+p. She was resolved no less firmly to follow up the advantage; and, though there were still to be some difficulties ahead, she could afford to be patient for a while:--

(_To Miss H. Bonham Carter._) UMBERSLADE, _Jan. 8._ Brussels Sprouts is at it already, I mean at correspondence. I mention it to show how little women's occupations are respected, when people can think that a woman has time to spin out long theories with every young fool who visits at her house. This place is grand--Inigo Jones, and Papa is content.... I like Dr. Johnson; but I can always talk better to a medical man than to any one else. They have not that detestable nationality which makes it so difficult to talk with an Englishman. I suppose the habit of examining organisations gives them this.... Poor Ca.s.sandra has found an unexpected ally in a young surgeon of a London hospital, a son of Dr. Johnson who sits next Papa at the _table d'hote_. The account he gives of the nurses beats everything that even I know of. This young prophet says that they are all drunkards, without exception, Sisters and all, and that there are but two nurses whom the surgeon can trust to give the patients their medicines. I thought you would be pleased to hear how bad they are, so I tell you. Johnson is extraordinarily careful, but he does not strike me as having genius like Gully. The company is of a nature which would give Mama some hopes of me that I should learn "the value of good society" by the contrast....

(_To her Father._) _May_ 12 [1852]. On my 32nd birthday I think I must write a word of acknowledgment to you. I am glad to think that my youth is past, and rejoice that it never, never can return--that time of follies and bondage, of unfulfilled hopes and disappointed _in_experience, when a man possesses nothing, not even himself. I am glad to have lived; though it has been a life which, except as the necessary preparation for another, few would accept. I hope now that I have come into possession of myself. I hope that I have escaped from that bondage which knows not how to distinguish between "bad habits" and "duties"--terms often used synonymously by all the world. It is too soon to holloa before you are out of the wood; and like the Magdalen in Correggio's picture, I see the dark wood behind, the sharp stones in front only with too much clearness. Of clearness, however, there cannot be _too_ much. But, as in the picture, there is light. I hope that I may live; a thing which I have not often been able to say, because I think I have learnt something which it would be a pity to waste. And I am ever yours, dear father, in struggle as in peace, with thanks for all your kind care, F. N.

When I speak of the disappointed inexperience of youth, of course I accept that, not only as inevitable, but as the beautiful arrangement of Infinite Wisdom, which cannot create us G.o.ds, but which will not create us animals, and therefore wills mankind to create mankind by their own experience--a disposition of Perfect Goodness which no one can quarrel with. I shall be very ready to read you, when I come home, any of my "Works," in your own room before breakfast, if you have any desire to hear them.--Au revoir, dear Papa.

II

There were various reasons for the comparative serenity of Miss Nightingale's mind during this period of pause. One was the obvious call of filial duty for the moment. Her father was in poor health, and had been advised to take the water-cure under Dr. Johnson at Umberslade Park, in Worcesters.h.i.+re. Florence, being herself convalescent at the time from an attack of the measles, was the more ready to companion her father. She was at Umberslade with him for some weeks at the beginning, and again at the end, of the year. Her observation of some of the patients there, as in a former year at Malvern, was the origin of an epigrammatic definition which I find in one of her note-books: "The water-cure: a highly popular amus.e.m.e.nt within the last few years amongst athletic invalids who have felt the _tedium vitae_, and those indefinite diseases which a large income and unbounded leisure are so well calculated to produce." Then, again, towards the end of the year, her kinswoman, "Aunt Evans," was smitten down. She was the sister of her father's mother, and died at the age of ninety. Florence attended her in her last illness, and as emergency-man made all the arrangements for her funeral. George Eliot was, I believe, distantly connected with "Aunt Evans's" family; and it was in this year that she and Florence met. "I had a note from Miss Florence Nightingale yesterday," wrote George Eliot in July 1852; "I was much pleased with her. There is a loftiness of mind about her which is well expressed by her form and manner."[59] Florence also at this time called upon Mrs. Browning, who in a letter to a friend, three years later, said: "I remember her face and her graceful manner and the flowers she sent me afterwards. She is an earnest, n.o.ble woman."[60] In August 1852 Miss Nightingale visited Ireland, and inspected the Dublin hospitals, somewhat, it seems, to her disappointment. She went in September with her father to stay with Sir James Clark, Queen Victoria's physician, at Birk Hall, near Ballater.

She always got on well, as we have just heard, with medical men, and the opportunity of discussing her plans and thoughts with so eminent a physician must have pleased her greatly.

[59] _George Eliot's Life as Related in her Letters and Journals_, edited by J. W. Cross, vol. i. p. 285.

[60] _Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning_, vol. i. p. 188.

III

The letter to her father, given above, refers to Miss Nightingale's "Works"; and herein is to be found a second explanation of this peaceful interlude in her life. She had, as I have said, renounced a literary career; but she drew a sharp distinction between what she called literature for its own sake, and writing as subservient to action. She was intensely anxious to find some theological sanction, less a.s.sailable than she deemed the popular creeds to be, for her religion of practical service. Again, as I have also said, she was determined to open up a new sphere of usefulness for women. These were the subjects of her "Works,"

which comprised "a Novel" and a book on "Religion." Of the novel, no ma.n.u.script has been found among her papers. But in one of three volumes of _Suggestions for Thought_, which she printed privately in 1860, there is a section ent.i.tled "Ca.s.sandra," dealing with the life at home of an ordinary English gentlewoman. It may be conjectured that the form of the novel was abandoned after 1852, and the theme treated instead in the pages of "Ca.s.sandra." The ma.n.u.script book on "Religion" was doubtless enlarged between 1852 and 1860 into the main portion of the _Suggestions for Thought_, of which the first volume was dedicated "To the Artizans of England."

Already in 1851, in a sheet of good resolutions, Miss Nightingale had planned to devote some portion of her life at home to giving "a new religion to the Tailors." The hero of _Alton Locke_, published in 1850, was, it will be remembered, a tailor. Miss Nightingale herself had some acquaintance with operatives in the North of England and in London, "among those of what are called 'Holyoake's party.'"[61] She met these latter through Mr. Edward Truelove, whom some readers of earlier generations may still remember as a publisher and vendor of radical and "free-thinking" literature. "The Literary and Scientific Inst.i.tution" in John Street, Fitzroy Square, was in the 'forties the headquarters of Owenite Socialists, the Secularists (whose chief prophet was George Jacob Holyoake) and other "advanced" persons. In 1846 Mr. Truelove had come up from "Harmony Hall," the Owenite community at Tytherley in Hamps.h.i.+re, to act as Secretary of the Inst.i.tution in John Street; and in a small house next door he set up his shop--afterwards removed, successively, to the Strand and High Holborn. A west-end lady, who did not at first give her name, used to pay occasional visits to the shop in John Street, and have long conversations with the wife of the proprietor. The lady was Miss Nightingale, and the acquaintance developed into a friends.h.i.+p with Mrs. Truelove, which extended over many years. Mr. Truelove was an unworldly man, conducting his affairs with entire disregard for "business principles," conventional opinions, and const.i.tuted authorities. His shop, as Mr. Holyoake said, was one of the "fortresses of prohibited thought, not garrisoned without daring"; and provisioned, it may be added, scantily enough. Miss Nightingale continued to see Mrs. Truelove from time to time in later years; wrote to her occasionally; sent her books and various presents regularly; and in times of her husband's difficulties and (literally) trials, never withheld sympathy.