The Life of Florence Nightingale Volume II Part 15

[135] Mystical writer; author of _The Pilgrim and the Shrine_.

IV

A few days after the appearance of Miss Nightingale's first Paper in _Fraser_, Mr. Mill died of a "local endemic disease" at his house near Avignon. She was profoundly moved:--

(_Miss Nightingale to Julius Mohl._) _May_ 20 [1873]. John Stuart Mill's death was a great shock to me. Mr. Grote used to say of him "Talk of Mill's Logic! why he is thrilling with emotion to the very finger-ends." That is just what he was. Now, speaker and subject are both gone. He said at Mr. Grote's funeral, with an agony of tears, "We might have kept him 10 years longer." And now we say of himself with tears "We might have kept him for 10 years longer." He was only 67. He was always urging me to publish. He used to say, with the pa.s.sion which he put into everything he did say: "I have no patience with people who will not publish because they think the world is not ripe enough for their ideas: that is only conceit or cowardice. If anybody has thought out any thing which he conceives to be truth, in Heaven's name, let him say it!" I did not answer that letter. I thought that this year (I have left much of the India and War Office work, and much of it has left me) I would resume with John Stuart Mill and do as he told me. I put the article in _Fraser's Magazine_ (which I now send you) to please him. And now he is dead, and will never know that I intended to do what he wished. He used to say, "Tell the world what you think--your experience. It will probably strike the world more than anything that could be told it." He quoted my "Stuff" in his book, which he ought not to have done.[136] I published my book on Socrates' mother[137] partly to please him. It was a very odd thing: it was a subject he had taken up: he was President of a Society for _that_. When he was in England (till a fortnight before his death) I could not find his address: I was so overwhelmed with business and illness. I did not know he was going away. And I did not send him this book. And now he is dead, and will never know.

But I scarcely regret his death. He was not a happy man. He was a man who was so sure to develop very much in a future life. He had queer religious notions: did not believe in a G.o.d or in a future life: but believed in a sort of conflict between two Powers of Good and Evil. I remember showing you one of his letters. And you said it was just like Zoroaster. But he was the most _truly_ "Liberal"

man I ever knew. If it were for the cause of Truth that he should be defeated, he would have _liked_ to have been defeated. And now he is dead. And we shall never see his like again.

[136] See Vol. I. p. 471, _n._

[137] _Notes on Lying-in Inst.i.tutions_; see above, p. 197.

It was characteristic of Miss Nightingale that she entered into correspondence with Mr. Chadwick on the sanitary state of Mr. Mill's house and the climatic conditions of Provence in May. Mr. Chadwick had to put himself right in her eyes by explaining that he had not been consulted by their friend on those subjects and had never been invited by him to Avignon.

V

Other literary work which occupied Miss Nightingale a good deal at this time was undertaken either to help Mr. Jowett or in accordance with his advice. He had urged her to work out her notion of Divine Perfection, and her theory of the Family in relation to "sisterhoods" and other forms of a.s.sociation. Miss Nightingale wrote Essays accordingly on "What is the Evidence that there is a Perfect G.o.d?" on "What is the Character of G.o.d?" and on "Christian Fellows.h.i.+p as a Means to Progress." The gist of the latter essay may be given in a letter of an earlier date:--

(_Miss Nightingale to Benjamin Jowett._) _July_ [1870].... I think that Faraday's idea of friends.h.i.+p is very high: "One who will serve his companion next to his G.o.d." And when one thinks that most, nay almost all people have no idea of friends.h.i.+p at all except pleasant juxtaposition, it strikes one with admiration. Yet is Faraday's idea not mine. My idea of a friend is one who will and can join you in work the sole purpose of which is to serve G.o.d. Two in one, and one in G.o.d. It almost exactly answers Jesus Christ's words. And so extraordinarily blessed have I been that I have had three such friends. I can truly say that, during the 5 years that I worked with Sidney Herbert every day and nearly all day, from the moment he came into the room no other idea came in but that of doing the work with the best of our powers in the service of G.o.d. (And this tho' he was a man of the most varied and brilliant conversational genius I have ever known--far beyond Macaulay whom I also knew.) This is Heaven; and this is what makes me say "I have had my heaven."

The two other friends with whom in former time she had been a fellow-worker were Arthur Clough and her Aunt, Mrs. Smith. Miss Nightingale's other Essays led to much correspondence with Mr. Jowett, but as they failed to come up to his standard they were laid aside. Many of her letters to him were themselves almost Essays. Extracts from one or two consecutive letters will show the kind of discussions into which Miss Nightingale loved to involve her Oxford friend, and upon which he was nothing loath to enter:--

(_Benjamin Jowett to Miss Nightingale._) TORQUAY, _Sept._ 29 [1871].... I must answer your letter by driblets. When you admit that a part of the witness of the character of G.o.d is to be sought for in nature, how do you distinguish between the true and false witness of nature? For we cannot deny that physical good is sometimes at variance with moral--_e.g._ in marriage the sole or chief principle ought to be health and strength in the parents whether with or without a marriage ceremony--in other words Plato's Republic: I mean on physical principles. Or again the laws of physical improvement would require that we should get rid of sickly and deformed infants. And if, as Huxley would say, you reconstruct the world on a physical basis, you have to go to war with received principles of morality. I suppose that the answer is you must take man as a whole, and make morality and the mind the limit of physical improvement. But it is not easy to see what this limit is, because men's conceptions of morality vary, and although we may form ideals we have to descend from them in practice. Therefore I do not agree with you in thinking that there are no difficulties, although the old difficulties, about origin of evil &c., are generally a hocus of Theologians.

(_Miss Nightingale to Benjamin Jowett._)[138] LEA HURST, _Oct._ 3 [1871]. I am quite scandalized at your materialism. (I shall shut up you and Plato for a hundred years in punishment in another world till you have both obtained clearer views.) Is it for an old maid like me to be preaching to you a Master in Israel that even "on physical principles" there are essential points in marriage (to turn out the best order of children), which, being absent, the perfection of "health and strength" in both parents is of no avail even for the physical part of the children? And might I just ask one small question: whether you consider man has a little soul? If he has ever such a little one, you can scarcely consider him as a simple body, an animal, or even as a twin, the soul being one twin and the body the other, but as all one, the soul and the body making one being (altho' only in this sense). If you _do_, at all events _G.o.d_ does not. And consequently He makes a great many more things enter into the "physical" const.i.tution even of the children than the mere "health and strength" of the parents. (My son, really Plato talked nonsense about this.) Take a much more material thing than the producing of a bad or degenerate family or race. Take a railway accident. What are the laws therein concerned? You have by no means only to consider the "physical" laws--the strength of iron, the speed of steam, the smoothness of rails, the friction &c., &c.--but you have to consider the state of mind of Directors, whether they care only for their dividends, so that the railway-servants are underpaid or overworked &c., &c. You quote Huxley. He is undoubtedly one of the prime educators of the age, but he makes a profound mistake when he says to Mankind: objects of sense are more worthy of your attention than your inferences and imaginations. On the contrary, the finest powers man is gifted with are those which enable him to infer from what he sees what he _can't_ see. They lift him into truth of far higher import than that which he learns from the senses alone. I believe that the laws of nature all tend to improve the _whole_ man, moral and physical, that it is absurd to consider man either as a body to be "improved," or as a soul to be "improved," separately.

As to the "laws of physical improvement requiring that we should get rid of sickly and deformed infants," they require that we should _prevent_ or improve, not that we should _kill_ them. _That_ would be to get rid of some of the finest intellectual and moral specimens of our human nature that have ever existed. And, even were this not the case, the heroism, the patience, the wisdom of our race have been more called forth by dealing with these and the like forms of evil than by almost anything else. The good of man in its highest sense cannot be attained by neglecting one set of laws or one aspect of man's nature and cultivating another.

I entirely therefore agree that "you must take man as a whole." But this seems at variance with a celebrated author's next sentence "and make morality and the mind the _limit_ of physical improvement." If I were writing, I should use a word signifying the exact reverse; not limit, but expansion, enlargement, multiplication, master or informing spirit. As Plato says: the mind informs the body, owns the body, the body is the servant of the mind. How can the owner and the master be the limit? We must really pray for your conversion....

(_Benjamin Jowett to Miss Nightingale._) TORQUAY, _Oct._ 4.... What have I said to deserve such an outburst? I have no wish to shake the foundation of Society. What I think about these matters is feebly expressed in a part of Essay at the end of the introduction to the _Republic_. But when I come to a second edition I will express it better.

[138] I have somewhat compressed the argument in this letter.

A comparison of the pa.s.sage in the first and second editions of Mr. Jowett's Introduction respectively[139] shows how largely he profited by the criticisms in the foregoing letter. His _Plato_ first appeared in 1871, and at once he began revising it. In this work Miss Nightingale gave him great help. Her Greek had now grown a little rusty,[140] but her interest in the substance of Plato was intense. She annotated Mr. Jowett's summaries and introductions very closely, and sent him voluminous suggestions for revision. "You are the best critic,"

he wrote, "whom I ever had." Several of Miss Nightingale's notes are preserved, in rough copy, amongst her Papers, and by means of them her hand may be traced in many a page of Mr. Jowett's revised work. In the first edition of the introduction to the _Republic_ he made some remarks on love as a motive in poetry which excited Miss Nightingale's strong disapproval. She agreed that "the illusion of the feelings commonly called love" was a motive of which too much had been made; but the poets, she thought, had as yet hardly touched the theme of true love--"two in one, and one in G.o.d"--as an incentive to heroic action.

"The philosopher may be excused," Mr. Jowett had written, "if he imagines an age when poetry and sentiment have disappeared, and truth has taken the place of imagination, and the feelings of love are understood and estimated at their proper value." "Take out that mean calumny, my son," wrote Miss Nightingale; "take it out this minute; blaspheme not against Love." The offending sentence was expunged in the second edition. Mr. Jowett had gone on to "blaspheme" a little against Art, citing the Mahommedans as a case of the state of the human mind in which "all artistic representations are regarded as a false and imperfect expression either of the religious or of the philosophical ideal." Miss Nightingale objected that the Mahommedans had renounced the use of pictures and images, but not of architecture: "Mosques are the highest kind of art: the one true representation of the One G.o.d: the Glory of G.o.d in the highest: the most high of the Most High: higher than any Christian art or architecture--as you would say if you had seen the mosques of Cairo." Mr. Jowett recast his pa.s.sage, and used Miss Nightingale's ill.u.s.tration, almost in her words.[141] "I am always stealing from you," he said. On his Introduction to the _Gorgias_, she made an interesting criticism:--

Is not Socrates more ineffably tiresome, and at the same time does he not speak higher truth, in the _Gorgias_ than anywhere else? Why call these higher truths "paradoxes"? Are not your sermons always a sort of apology for talking to them of G.o.d? And why should your Introductions be a sort of apology for recognizing that Socrates speaks the highest truth and no paradox? Have guarded statements, whether about G.o.d or any particular moral or truth, ever produced enthusiasm of religion or in morality? Is there any Dialogue, not even excepting the _Phaedo_ and _Crito_, where he is so much in earnest? He is so terribly in earnest that towards the end he even throws all his dialectic aside, and makes even Polus in earnest. To me, speaking as one of the stupid and ignorant, it seems that your Introduction dwells too much on the _form_ of the _Gorgias_ and does not bring out in sufficiently striking relief the great truths which Socrates labours so strenuously to enforce that he almost seems to lose himself in them. These great moral truths are (are they not?):--(1) _It is a greater evil to do than to suffer injustice._ If you call this a "paradox," why do you not call the 53rd Chapter of Isaiah a paradox? Is it not the highest of truths? (2) _It is a greater evil not to be punished than to be punished for wrong._ I have no idea why you call this a paradox. It follows from all the higher experience of the life of every one of us. In family life I see it every day. I see the "spoilt child" making himself, and oftener herself, and everyone else miserable, down to mature life or extreme old age. (Tho' the "punishments" of my life have been somewhat severe, yet I can bless G.o.d, even in this world, that never in all my life have I been allowed to "do as I liked.") ...

[139] See _first_ edition, vol. ii. p. 145, and _second_ edition, vol. iii. pp. 161-162.

[140] On one occasion she forgot the Greek for "Limitless," and asked Mr. Jowett to tell her. He replied by quoting Homer: "[Greek: amoton memauia], raging insatiably or without limit"-- adding wickedly "Whom did this represent?"

[141] See _second_ edition, vol. iii. p. 145.

If the reader cares to take this pa.s.sage to a comparison of the second with the first edition of Mr. Jowett's Introduction,[142] he will discover again how largely, and closely, Miss Nightingale's criticisms were accepted. She dealt similarly--giving precise references for every statement--with the greater part of the Dialogues. "In the _Phaedrus_,"

said Mr. Jowett (July 22, 1873), "I have put in most of what you suggested and made some additions. You are quite right in thinking that I should get as much modern truth into the Introductions as possible. It is a great opportunity; which I have had in view, but not so clearly as since you wrote to me."

[142] The references are: _first_ edition, vol. iii. pp. 26 _seq._; _second_ edition, vol. ii. pp. 302 _seq._

Miss Nightingale continued, as in former years, to send Mr. Jowett suggestions for sermons. "I have written part of your sermon," he wrote, when she had sent him an outline of what she would like him to preach from the University pulpit. When he became Master of Balliol he projected a Special Form for daily service in the College Chapel, and Miss Nightingale suggested a selection of pa.s.sages from the Psalms under the heads of "G.o.d the Lord," "G.o.d the Judge," "G.o.d the Father," "G.o.d the Friend," "the Way of the Cross," and so forth. Mr. Jowett had, however, to abandon the project in deference to superior authority.[143] Another scheme was carried out. In 1873 an edition of the Bible appeared which has a history of some interest. _The School and Children's Bible_ it was called; the name of the Rev. William Rogers, of Bishopsgate, appears on the t.i.tle-page, but the selection was in fact made for the most part by Mr. Jowett, with the help of some of his friends.[144] That Mr. Swinburne was one of these friends, we know from the poet's own recollections; it is not generally known that the other princ.i.p.al collaborator with Mr. Jowett was Miss Nightingale. Mr. Swinburne's help was in one respect disappointing. "I wanted you," said Mr. Jowett to him with a smile, "to help me to make this book smaller, and you have persuaded me to make it much larger." The poet, who was complimented on his thorough familiarity with sundry parts of the sacred text, thought that Mr. Jowett had excluded too much of the prophetic and poetic elements, not taking into account "the delight that a child may take in things beyond the grasp of his perfect comprehension, though not beyond the touch of his apprehensive or prehensile faculty." Miss Nightingale, whose familiarity with the Bible was probably even closer and more extensive than Mr. Swinburne's and with whom Biblical criticism was a favourite study, also wanted a great deal put in which Mr. Jowett had left out, but her instinct for edification led her to suggest equivalent omissions. She took great pains with her suggestions, ill.u.s.trating them in letters to Mr. Jowett with many characteristic remarks by the way:--

It is impossible to keep up acquaintance with a man, however otherwise estimable, who separates the 26 last chapters of Isaiah from Isaiah merely by a shabby little note and asterisk. Surely those chapters belong to the end of the Babylonish Captivity and should be separated by a distinct division; while the shabby little note and asterisk might go to some isolated chapters (_e.g._ xiii., xiv.) among the first 39 which belong to the same time, the end of the Captivity--whereas the first 39 chapters (generally) appear to belong to the "Middle Ages" of Prophecy. But as it may be judged inconvenient to put Chaps. xl.-lxvi. of Isaiah in a different part of the Bible, I will concede that point and simply cla.s.sify them (I follow Ewald's order). But they _must_ be under a separate Heading with "End of Babylonian Captivity" (or words to that effect) printed distinctly _under the heading_ (not in a note).

[143] "The Bishop has disallowed our 'Versicles' and some other things on legal grounds--_i.e._ on the opinion of Sir Travers Twiss (poor man!). We will have them in a particular book of our own. He says 'they are admirably selected'" (_Letter from Mr. Jowett_, March 16, 1872).

[144] See Abbott and Campbell's _Life and Letters of Jowett_, vol. ii.

pp. 35-36, and "Recollections of Professor Jowett" in Swinburne's _Studies in Prose and Poetry_, p. 33. The full t.i.tle of the book was _The School and Children's Bible prepared under the Superintendence of the Rev. William Rogers_. London: Longmans, 1873.

More generally, she criticized the first selection sent to her as showing some want of proportion. There was no clear plan, she thought, as to the s.p.a.ce to be given, respectively, to:--

(_a_) Matters of _universal_ importance, moral and spiritual (_e.g._ the finest parts of Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and the New Testament); (_b_) matters of _historical_ importance (_e.g._ which embrace the history of great nations, Egypt, a.s.syria, Babylon. The petty wars of the petty tribes seem to take up a quite disproportionate s.p.a.ce); (_c_) matters of _local_ importance, which have acquired a _universal moral_ significance (_e.g._ Jonah is entirely left out: yet Jonah has a moral and spiritual meaning, while Samson, Balaam and Bathsheba have none); (_d_) matters of _merely local_ importance, with no significance but an _immoral_ one (_e.g._ the stories about Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, almost all Joshua and Judges, and very much of Samuel and Kings). The story of Achilles and his horses is far more fit for children than that of Balaam and his a.s.s, which is only fit to be told to a.s.ses. The stories of Samson and of Jephthah are only fit to be told to bull-dogs; and the story of Bathsheba, to be told to Bathshebas.

Yet we give all these stories to children as "Holy Writ." There are some things in Homer we might better call "Holy" Writ--many, many in Sophocles and Aeschylus. The stories about Andromache and Antigone are worth all the women in the Old Testament put together; nay, almost all the women in the Bible.

"I have just finished the Children's Bible," wrote Mr. Jowett (Feb. 10, 1872). "I blessed you every time I took the papers up, especially in the Prophets. I have adopted your selection almost entirely, with a slight abridgement, and it is further approved by Mr. Cheyne's authority."

These various literary enterprises, undertaken at Mr. Jowett's instance, occupied a great deal of Miss Nightingale's time--more time, as she sometimes said to herself, than could rightly be spared from primary duties; and the time was spent, she added in her self-reproaches, to little purpose. In some respects Mr. Jowett's suggestions to her were not very happy. One cannot elaborate in a consecutive form a Scheme of Theology or a Social Philosophy, even through the medium of essays, in odd hours as a bye-work. So Miss Nightingale soon found, and the failure weighed heavily on her spirits; but Mr. Jowett did not realize how great was the strain upon his friend's faculties involved in her nursing work, nor how much time, effort, and emotion she was devoting, though "out of office," to the complicated problems of Indian administration. We, who have access to her Papers, shall learn the full extent of these preoccupations in later chapters (III. and IV.). But something must first be said of another literary enterprise. To it Miss Nightingale's close study of the Bible and of Plato was entirely relevant. Such studies were, as we shall find in the next chapter, part of the food which sustained her inner life.

CHAPTER II

THE MYSTICAL WAY

Mysticism: to dwell on the unseen, to withdraw ourselves from the things of sense into communion with G.o.d--to endeavour to partake of the Divine nature; that is, of Holiness. When we ask ourselves only what is right, or what is the will of G.o.d (the same question), then we may truly be said to live in His light.--FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.

It has been mentioned incidentally in an earlier chapter that Miss Nightingale was fond of reading the books of Catholic devotion which the Reverend Mother of the Bermondsey Convent used to send her. Long before, she had studied carefully the writings of the Port Royalists; and at the Trinita de' Monti she had seen the ideal of Catholic devotion in real life. She used to pa.s.s on some of her devotional works to Mr. Jowett. He began with St. Teresa, and, at first repelled, he gradually became interested. Miss Nightingale was in the habit of copying out pa.s.sages for her own edification, sometimes in the original, sometimes translating them. The idea of making a selection for publication occurred to her, and Mr. Jowett encouraged it. "Do not give up your idea," he said, "of making a selection of the better mind of the Middle Ages and the Mystics." "You will do a good work," he wrote again (Oct.

3, 1872), "if you point out the kind of mysticism which is needed in the present day--not mysticism at all, but as intense a feeling, as the mystics had, of the power of truth and reason and of the will of G.o.d that they should take effect in the world. The pa.s.sion of the reason, the fusion of faith and reason, the reason in religion and the religion in reason--if you can only describe these, you will teach people a new lesson. The new has something still to learn from the old; and I am not certain whether we ought not to retire into mysticism (I thought I should not use the word) when the antagonism with existing opinions becomes too great." Miss Nightingale's close study of Plato and of the Bible, described in the last chapter, increased her interest in Christian mysticism. The Fourth Gospel was the work of a mystic. And there were curious a.n.a.logies, which she pointed out to Mr. Jowett,[145]

between Plato and the mediaeval mystics. The famous myth of the purified soul, for instance, recalled a pa.s.sage in the _Fioretti_ of St. Francis, except that there the purgatorial stage, before the "wings grow," lasts 150 years, instead of 10,000. Miss Nightingale said of the closing prayer in the _Phaedrus_--"Give me beauty in the inward soul, and may the outward and inward man be at one"--a prayer unequalled, she thought, by any Collect in the service-book--that it "put in seventeen words the whole, or at least half, of the doctrine of St. John of the Cross."

Plato made her the more interested in the Christian Mystics; the Christian Mystics, the more interested in Plato. Concurrently with her work for Mr. Jowett's revised _Plato_ she gave much time during 1873 and 1874 (with additions in later years) to transcribing or translating and arranging pa.s.sages from devotional writers of the Middle Ages. She had sent some of her book in various stages to Mr. Jowett, who, with other suggestions, said (April 18, 1873) that she ought to add "a Preface showing the use of such books. They are apt to appear unreal, and yet Thomas a Kempis has been one of the most influential books in the world.

The subject of the Preface should be the use of the ideal and especially the spiritual ideal. I do not say what may be the case with great Saints themselves, but for us I think it is clear that this mystic state ought to be an occasional and not a permanent feeling--a taste of heaven in daily life. Do you think it would be possible to write a mystical book which would also be the essence of Common Sense?"

[145] He made use of her suggestion in a postscript (in the _second_ edition) to his Introduction to the _Phaedrus_.

II

I construct the Preface from various notes and rough drafts in Miss Nightingale's hand:--

It may seem a strange thing to begin a book with:--this Book is not for any one who has time to read it--but the meaning of it is: this reading is good only as a preparation for work. If it is not to inspire life and work, it is bad. Just as the end of food is to enable us to live and work, and not to live and eat, so the end of--most reading perhaps, but certainly of--mystical reading is not to read but to work.

For what is Mysticism? Is it not the attempt to draw near to G.o.d, not by rites or ceremonies, but by inward disposition? Is it not merely a hard word for "The Kingdom of Heaven is within"? Heaven is neither a place nor a time. There might be a Heaven not only _here_ but _now_. It is true that sometimes we must sacrifice not only health of body, but health of mind (or, peace) in the interest of G.o.d; that is, we must sacrifice Heaven. But "thou shalt be like G.o.d for thou shalt see Him as He is": this may be _here_ and _now_, as well as _there_ and _then_. And it may be for a time--then lost--then recovered--both _here_ and _there_, both _now_ and _then_.